Thread:Talk:Flow Portal/Talkpagespace using administrative processes/reply (3)

First of all (please don't take that personal):

I want to re-iterate that phase one of Flow is only concerned with "User talk" and user-to-user communication. &mdash; Stop that silly sentence! Everybody knows that there is no point in maintaining different concepts of talk pages for user-to-user discussion in contrast to article discussion or project pages, etc. If you're talking about implementing Flow in user-talk pages, we're talking about Flow being implemented on all talk pages eventually. It doesn't matter in which time frames this will happen, it will happen at some point (unless Flow ends in a disaster and is abolished).

To prevent the disaster from happening we have to discuss usability of Flow for general discussion, independently of the user-talk pages example that you try to keep in mind. And we have to discuss general usability now, before starting with any "phase" at all. The whole "phase" partitioning is eyewash that is detrimental for the goal of a working future discussion system.

Regarding your Workflow concept:

It sounds interesting, but at the same time it sounds as if it was an unnecessary specialization. You're always assuming that we're currently doing things with the old system the way we do them because "there were no better ways to do it". Actually we're able to do all these things because our current system is not specialized at all! When introducing any form of specialization, even if it is thought through very well as you're suggesting, you're removing certain degrees of freedom from the system, since that's the definition of specialization after all. It might simplify certain workflows, but I'm almost sure we'll find certain workflows that will be limited by the new system. Therefore we'll need to develop new workarounds to meet our needs again or adapt the system further. A vicious circle...