[email protected] said: > one more thing, people need to learn to hit the "delete" key if they don't > like a particular email. get over it.
I don't think that's a reasonable approach. Yes, of course, we should all be more tolerant. But that's only half the story. There is an interesting problem with technical discussion lists, bboards, usenet groups, web forums, whatevers. In some sense, success is related to the number of people signed up. On the other hand, once you get enough people, the signal to noise ratio often falls off a cliff. A (strong) hint of the problem is bursts of noise like the recent events here. The problem with saying just-hit-delete is that many of the people with technical skills/opinions/ideas that I want to hear from are not very tolerant of low signal/noise. So they leave the group rather than pound on their delete key. I think there is a fundamental truth for this area. It may be a physical constant. It's at least a good PhD topic. For any large list there will be some amount of traffic (like this message) that is grumbling about the "bad" traffic on the list. At best, it's the list operator/moderator occasionally (preemptively?) reminding people to stay on topic. It's something like 1/e for the max throughput of an Aloha network. If you beat up on the noisy people so they are less noisy, the list will grow to include enough new people to fill in the spots that were previously quiet. It would be interesting to study the timing of the noise bursts and/or the relation to people signing up or leaving a list. I've seen similar problems in standards groups. Initially, the group is full of smart geeks with good ideas. They are cooperating to try to solve an interesting problem. Then some not-so-sharp guy gets sent to make sure his company's products are blessed. As the group turns to politics, the smart guys leave, their company sends a lawyer to replace them, and things spiral downhill. ---------- One thing that might help is if everybody would get in the habit of scanning all their mail before responding to anything. The idea is that if a discussion explodes while you are sleeping (or away from your mail for whatever reason), you will learn that a topic has exploded before you contribute your wise-ass or me-too comment. Even if your answer is technical and valuable, you might notice that somebody has already said exactly what you were about to say. -- These are my opinions, not necessarily my employer's. I hate spam. _______________________________________________ time-nuts mailing list -- [email protected] To unsubscribe, go to https://www.febo.com/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/time-nuts and follow the instructions there.
