Brian Atkins <brian@posthuman.com> writes:
> Familiarity breeds contempt ? It might be interesting to mod
> the list software to completely strip all identifying marks
> from posts so that you couldn't tell who wrote them.
Still, people react to views strongly too, so even if I don't know who anon4711 is I can still flame him/her/it.
> Seriously, it seems the only solution is to keep the size
> down... if it gets big enough, break it up into multiple
> lists.
Yes, this would likely work. But it has many drawbacks, since the activity on a list is self-supporting: if there is a lull for some time, it tends to persist since people are not cued by postings to post themselves. Having a large, active and fairly stable list is something relatively rare; a set of smaller extropians1, extropians2, ... extropians n lists would likely lead to less production of exformation even if the number of flamewars would be much lower.
Anders Sandberg Towards Ascension! asa@nada.kth.se http://www.nada.kth.se/~asa/GCS/M/S/O d++ -p+ c++++ !l u+ e++ m++ s+/+ n--- h+/* f+ g+ w++ t+ r+ !y