My opinion:
Historically the bar for listowner intervention in a thread has been set very high, and I think we want to keep it there. Ideally we're supposed to be a self-moderating list. In the current case, I think that anyone accustomed to being in arguments with either John or Jeroen knows that both individuals are capable of giving quite as good as they get. The thought that Jeroen would find it necessary to ask for help from another listowner because of something John says strikes me as silly, as would the reverse. In other words, no one batted an eye at the intensity of their debate because their debates are always intense and have been for years. Nothing new there, so why get worked up over it? John's all-caps shouting might have been a little tacky, but hardly an offense calling for threats of excommunication. 95% of the time, self-moderation works just fine, and we know from experience that the other 5% of the time the trouble will eventually blow over, or we'll have a little list-conscience crisis just like now, and then the trouble will blow over. It's not that we don't care about the list's tone, but I think that experience may have made many of us more mellow about the need to police one another: I know it's had that effect on me, and after all we can just ignore threads that annoy us. I think there's an implicit "no harm, no foul" rule in effect, and we instinctively judge harm based on what we know of the combatants. If we know that the combatants are historically some tenacious and feisty people like Jeroen and John, we're not likely to feel any need to interfere in the fray, simply because we know they can handle themselves. On Wed, 30 Jan 2002, Julia Thompson wrote: > Well, the thing is, Brin himself wanted an unmoderated list. > > I think the idea is self-moderation -- you censor your own posts before > sending them off. This worked fine for a couple of years. The > etiquette guidelines were set up in response to a crisis where someone's > posting behavior went way beyond anything I've seen since. (Among other > things, someone thought it would be fun to spam the list with > obscenities one Saturday morning, and had made a habit of insulting > various listmembers leading up to that.) If someone does the list > equivalent of yelling "fire" in a crowded theater, then something ought > to be done. Beyond that, reminders from other people ought to be enough > to bring the wayward back into line. So why didn't anyone call anybody > on the "nazi" issue when those posts appeared? Were we all expecting Jo > Anne to come in with her Wand of Dinging? Or did each of us know that > we were guilty of something and didn't want to be scolded in retaliation > and have a flame war ensue? Or didn't we care enough about the tone of > the list to speak up? Or were we just sick of the thread and leaving > those posts unread, until there was no one outside the debate to gently > point out to the offenders that their posts were offensive? > > Julia > Marvin Long Austin, Texas
