I was once in an online forum, and a lady in there once said something similar to this: „You person X, are young. You have certainties, you know for sure. You’ll see, as you’ll grow older, that things tend to balance, that there are grey areas, that options come in multiple ways, that sometimes thinking A is a good option, while in other circumstances thinking non-A, the opposite of A, is a good option, also. You’ll find out that options are flexible, and there are multiple solutions on the table, not just one”.
I liked that, thus I remembered it all these years, but at first I didn’t agree with this.
Let me tell you a story, first, and then come up with some conclusions.
So, I’m part of some Yahoo! Groups, and tend to post on them for quite a while, now.
But, at the end of last year, Yahoo! announced that there will be some changes, the most notable being the loss of archives, and, yet another one!, no option for receiving messages in a batch, as a Daily Digest, but, rather, only an option to receive the messages individually.
The trouble is, I was part of some Yahoo! Groups for a while, and I used to send messages to groups that had thousands of members.
All of a sudden, they started receiving instant emails from me, as opposed to daily digests.
I thought of some solution, and the only one which came to me was to invite members of the current Yahoo! Groups to join my own Google Group.
But this seemed, at first, a poor solution – how many of these people would actually do so?
So, I postponed the decision for quite a while.
A few months later, I created a Google Group dedicated to receiving daily digests.
And then it hit me – what if I choose to receive daily digests myself, and then forward these messages to the Yahoo! Groups, instead of sending instant messages?
I created some polls, asking people how they would prefer receiving messages from me, and, in general, people preferred daily digests.
So, I started doing daily digests, forwarding them to the Yahoo! Groups.
Time passed, and, now, I have only a dilemma left – why haven’t I gone ahead with this earlier?
The answer comes from the idea at the beginning of this article – I used to think in the „Yes”/”No, or the „Black”/”White” paradigm, but it would have been better had I analyzed different scenarios, and just try out things.
Also, I don’t like it all that much that CHiP Romania forum doesn’t exist anymore, nor the decision taken by Yahoo!
PS: A picture in grey shades:
