Alex Bond wrote:
"maybe there's a few cultural differences too which don't help,
or am I being naive?"
Maybe some outside perspectives are in order. There are undoubtedly
some people on this list whose job might be something like Sys Admin,
or Systems Programmer (<*raises hand*>). They get e-mails - LOTS of
e-mails. I get hundreds of e-mails a day (none of it SPAM - bless
you, Spam Assassin), for example.
For those kinds of people, any extra "noise" mail is just an
extra aggravation. "Just press delete if you can't be bothered"
is the usual rejoinder, but that gets to be a lot harder when
there are lots of them, or if you're on the Digest - there's no
command to say "Please delete these 5 messages in the middle of
the Digest". "The list was too quiet" isn't an excuse - I can
deal with no 313 postings; sooner or later, a new Digest will come.
Trust me :-)
Also, there are those of us who abhor "chatty"/"social" mailing
lists ... in my own case, the original Southern California Raves
mailing list (started about 10 years ago) got taken over by a
mid-40's woman who'd lost her son to suicide and decided to turn
it into her little social list, where she could play Den Mother
to all the Kiddie Ravers that started signing up on it after AOL
got Internet access. It went from being a good list with useful
event information mostly populated by smart 20-somethings into
complete dross - to the point where not a single post in a Digest
would have [EMAIL PROTECTED] to do with raving. Combine that with the
tendency for most "social" mailing lists to spawn Drama, and I
swore I'd never be on another one again ...
One of the things I've *always* loved about 313 is that it's
*not* "chatty"/"social" - there is of course a social element to
it (I've made some lifelong friends here!) but that's evolved
naturally out of our common bond of the love of the music and
the information that's shared here, not from the list turning
"social" in nature with posts about people's private lives or
opinions on issues of the day outside of 313-related topics
(which was a major problem on SoCal-Raves).
I do think there's a place for that kind of communication; I
just don't think it's here on 313 - it's much better suited
to, say, a Web site bulletin board, because there it's
many-to-one - only one site has to host all the text/etc.
Whereas mailing lists are many-to-many, and fight with other
e-mails for eyeball and brain-time.
That said, I've been on the list for 6 1/2 years now and don't
see myself leaving any time soon - but any reduction in noise
that might potentially lose us valuable contributors is worth it,
IMHO. (A lot of people say "Stop moaning and contribute" - but
the problem is, it's the noise that makes people unsub, not
the contributors/contributions - or even the lack thereof.)
Just my 2 bits,
- Greg
Ob313: Luomo tonight in LA, up against the RePHLeX all-stars tour!
Auggh!
