On 08/30/2011 04:20 PM, Bryan M. Johns wrote:
I would be interested to know if any of you think that Digium should
moderate the biz list as a means of preventing abuse? Thoughts?
Feelings?
For what my opinion is worth, I would resoundingly say "no". It has
always seemed to me that Digium's hands-off approach to the mailing
lists has resulted in more orderly--and at the same time,
interesting--forums than ones characterised by a high degree of
policing. The lack of interventionist moderation is not responsible
for a decline in the activity of this list.
Yes, there have been some spectacular flamewars here, and at times,
spectacularly juvenile ones. (It goes without saying that I have not
been above the fray.) But they play out rather quickly for two reasons,
as far as I can see:
1. People have the existential realisation that nobody is here to
restore order or define boundaries themselves, which makes them
feel exposed, rather like the feeling of digging one's hole
deeper and deeper.
When there is a default background assumption of "adult
supervision", participants have less compulsion to introspect
about their own behaviour. Instead, they default to the
moderator. If the moderator has not intervened, it means
what you're doing is okay by default.
It's the same with any system of rules, really. If you give
people a non-trivial body of statutory law or a powerful
arbitration body to settle all disputes subjectively, they
disengage from philosophical consideration of morality
and justice situationally, in an applied, detailed sense.
Instead, they just content themselves with worrying about
whether X is against the law or not.
Most list participants are pretty intelligent. If you don't
grant them a reprieve from having to think about what they're
doing by providing an avenue to which to defer, they come to
their senses quite quickly.
It's the same principle that provided for relatively stable
social order in the frontier settlements of the American West.
It turns out people, given a certain level of intelligence and
what might be generally called "culturedness", can cooperate
and police themselves fairly well.
2. Moderation adds latency to the process of winding down bad
behaviour by creating opportunities at every point to have a
referendum on whether the moderator's actions are appropriate,
and generally talk about a lot of meta.
When there is no moderation, there's not much there except the
content itself, which removes much of the cloud of political
valence that policing can otherwise have.
It is very advantageous to have bad spikes of behaviour burn themselves
out quickly, in the kind of way in which networks not substantially
firewalled at the edge tend to weather [D]DoS attacks better than ones
which are. If there are just routers efficiently forwarding packets,
they tend to make it into the network without taking any of the core
infrastructure down. Firewalls, on the other hand, require a lot of
statekeeping and incremental resource commitment to maintain
connection-oriented or other flow awareness.
Centralised moderation is generally an unwinnable game, anyway:
- Too loose? "I can't believe Digium besmirches the soul of this list
by allowing this twaddle to be posted! Where are the moderators when
you need them?"
- Too conservative? "Digium's lists are tyrannically censored!"
- Too slow? Nearly real-time communication is a productive virtue on
mailing lists, and having to wait two hours for every post to be
approved (if that were the moderation strategy, for instance) is
frustrating.
- Too fast? "The moderators really jumped the gun on this one!"
- In general, any decision the moderator makes is an opportunity to hold
a big meta-referendum on whether the moderator did the right thing, if
the moderator is a positive or negative force in the universe generally,
if Digium's insidious commercial agenda shines through in its editorial
decisions, etc.
All this to say:
1. Nature has a way of breaking that which does not bend. We'll get a
lot further embracing this fact than resisting it.
2. Mailing lists are indebted to the very democratic, humanity-affirming
spirit of the early Internet. Let's fight for the heart of this one
without losing its soul.
Cheers,
-- Alex
--
Alex Balashov - Principal
Evariste Systems LLC
260 Peachtree Street NW
Suite 2200
Atlanta, GA 30303
Tel: +1-678-954-0670
Fax: +1-404-961-1892
Web: http://www.evaristesys.com/
--
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