What happens on email lists is performative on the level of the structure;
with people leaving, the list can disappear. So you must have moderation.
There's another list I know of, for example, that deals with suicidal
people (the moderator actually killed himself - I'm not sure it's still
running); my co-founder of Cybermind was on it (who also died, young, of
more or less natural causes, a long story - his death set the tenor of the
list for a long time), and told me that it was tightly controlled; it had
to be. One of the greatest tragedies of the commons was what happened on
the newsgroups - most of which were unmoderated; after AOL released about
two million subscribers onto the Internet proper, and after the net was
(more or less) privatized, they were hit with so much unstoppable spam,
that they stopped functioning altogether as communities.
- Alan
On Thu, 11 Oct 2012, l...@theorbiolchem.org wrote:
If I'm not mistaken, this circle here is kept up by philosophers and intented
to be read by philosophers. In philosophy there is no such term as "hate
speach", but in philosphy there is much reasoning (even if indirect) for free
speach. Without free speach philosphy is dead.
And let's not forget: everybody has the right to be stupid, and the
non-stupid ones have the responsibility to show how stupid the stupis is.
Laszlo G Meszaros
Quoting Alan Sondheim <sondh...@panix.com>:
The situation is an aporia; there are no short-cuts but decisions have to
be made. When there was hate speech or trolling, the list became unweildy
and furious; while I as co-moderator might side with subscribers who wanted
completely freedom, the fact was that - out of pain and anger - we'd
usually lose about a third of subscriber within the first few weeks, and
other postings would go down. In a sense, the list was held captive.
On a practical level, there were two ways we dealt with this behind the
scenes - first, I never made decisions alone; they were always made by the
co-moderators together; and second, I would also try to nip things in the
bud (an odd metaphor, ah well) - if someone joined the list and immediately
posted something defamatory about the 'Hebrews' (which happened), I'd
immediately unsub that person and ban him or her.
There's no solution right for everyone; as you know, this list as well is
moderated, and its the moderation that hopefully keeps the discussions
alive.
- Alan
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