On 7/13/2010 7:43 PM, Xah Lee wrote:
I use comp.lang.lisp, comp.emacs since about 1999. Have been using them pretty much on a weekly basis in the past 10 years. Starting about 2007, the traffic has been increasingly filled with spam, and the posters are always just the 20 or 30 known faces. I think perhaps maybe no more than 100 different posters a year. Since this year or last year, they are some 95% spam. comp.emacs is pretty much just me. gnu.emacs.help is not much better. It's pretty much the same developers and the same few elisp coders, with perhaps 1 new face with once-per-lifetime post every few days. gnu.emacs.help is doing a bit better because it is connected to fsf's mailing list.
Doing "better" means having more posts? I don't believe that having a lot of posts is necessarily a measure of goodness.
In my opinion, discussion forums do well when they encourage people to think carefully and communicate clearly. In this respect, I think mailing lists do worse, newsgroups better, and web-based forums the best.
Mailing lists seem to turn into talking shops where people get to know each other over time and their "public" nature gets lost. Those who write a lot end up dominating them, independent of whether they write any sense or not. The other people get tired and stop reading. So, you can generate a lot of traffic, but its value is dubious.
Newsgroups are much better because they are public and, visibly so. If somebody says something stupid, a lot of people will jump on them. And, so, over time, they develop some quality. (There is no guarantee, of course. I have also seen a lot of newsgroups, especially in politics, really degenerate with opposing factions fighting and dominating everything else.)
Web-based forums, especially those where people have to register, work the best in my experience. They are very visibly public, discouraging people to write nonsense. The difficulty of writing on the web instead of your favorite editor hopefully provides some resistance to write. So, people tend to think more than they write.
I used a forum called silentpcforum last year to help me build myself a new computer. There was a lot of high quality information dating back to years, which was easy to find and easy to use.
So, if newsgroups die and get replaced by web forums, that would be a move for the better. If they get replaced by mailing lists, that would be a move for the worse.
Cheers, Uday -- http://mail.python.org/mailman/listinfo/python-list
