On 2/10/01 8:19 PM, "J C Lawrence" <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote:
> I suspect the base reason is simple:
>
> Email cones to you without ulterior action or participation
> required. It just appears, silently and without any effort of
> activity required on your part.
I don't really agree. I think the base problem is that email is inherently
an invasive technology, and while if you're interested in a topic you want
that invasiveness (because it's a passive state to have it pushed to you,
which is less energy expended), that only works until the level of
invasiveness crosses whatever limit you put on tolerance -- and which point
it becomes a pain in the ass and you start complaining about it.
That's why the first thing that happens when a mail list gets on an
interesting topic and message volume peaks is people start screaming to make
everyone shut up. Because the volume peaks over their tolerance level. And
that's sad, because it seems that we'd WANT interesting conversations to be
encouraged, not discouraged, but that isn't what seems to happen. So when a
list "goes off" and starts digging into something, the tendency is to try to
throttle it, which discourages trying to get involved in fun topics. It's a
bad negative feedback cycle, and I know of no real way to avoid it or get
around it.
These days, I try to manage it through a sliding scale -- the busier a list
is, the less tolerant I am of drift. The quieter it is, the more I let a
list wander and ponder. But that means I'm ultimately managing to message
volume, not messsage quality, relevance or interest levels. And I think
that's self-defeating. But to me, the community is built through the
side-channel discussions -- the areas of topic drift around the core subject
where people let their hair down and get to know each other. But you have to
manage around that to deal with the "just the facts, mam" subscriber who
want strict topic enforcement, and the "will you shut up with all this
trivia crap!" people who go off when the message volume gets too high. Lotsa
fun -- because, basically, both of those camps are ALSO right.
List management is a job where, basically, no matter what decision you make,
including no decision, someone will end up pissed off. So management comes
down to deciding which groups to encourage, which to piss off, and how to
nudge the list in directions you want to take and away from ones you don't,
all while not pissing off the wrong people at the wrong time, or the same
people too often...
> Conversely web logs and BBS'es are only participated in by those
> who go out of their way to participate and thereby, for each
> participation and participation opportunity, have already
> implicitly said to themselves,
And that's not bad, either, but it's one reason I'm so interested in the
web/email hybrids, so there are continuing remiinders of what's going on to
encourge folks to visit, but not so much volume that you go over that "too
much noise" line and turn your site into an active canker sore by being too
noisy and interruptive.... And the key to THAT is granularity and
flexibility to allow the user to define their acceptable levels of invasion
into their mailbox, and allowing them to set up the mix of push and pull
information they prefer.
> Were
> membership to pass 10K I'm sure the current operation methods would
> no longer scale (hand moderated list).
I've had to reinvent my systems (and myself) numerous times, as the lists
scale up and down, and as the populations morph (and as I grow up and
hopefully learn from my mistakes, also). I find a given system seems to work
for about 18 months, and then needs to be looked at really hard --
documentation tends to grow and bloat over time, to name just once problem.
But audiences change, and you find that assumptions you make about what they
know now may or may not be true later -- it wasn't that long ago that the
assumption was you new majordomo and didn't have a browser. Now, you assume
they have a browser, but that mail list server commands will confuse the
hell out of them. A year from now? Who knows? I don't...
> The human factors and dynamics are downright scary.
The tech stuff is easy. The people issues aren't -- but they're a fun
challenge. And there are no single right answers (and a multitude of wrong
ones...)
--
Chuq Von Rospach, Internet Gnome <http://www.chuqui.com>
[<[EMAIL PROTECTED]> = <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> = <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>]
Yes, yes, I've finally finished my home page. Lucky you.
I tried to get a life once, but they were out of stock.
