[p2p-research] a short message on our list culture and authority arguments

Mon Nov 9 12:01:44 CET 2009

the problem is that the kind of netiquette you propose, seems like a high
treshold affair, and for busy people, it is discouraging ...

but I think that what you are doing is entirely appropriate, i.e. ignoring
messages based on their formal characteristics and confusion,

I do it all the time for other  lists, only this list do I feel obligated to
go through everything <g>

we'll see what others think,

but if it is the way to go, then I think the moderators should gradually
institute some simple rules, so that collective learning can take place, and
we can improve gradually

On Mon, Nov 9, 2009 at 5:44 PM, M. Fioretti <mfioretti at nexaima.net> wrote:

> On Mon, Nov 09, 2009 16:24:50 PM +0700, Michel Bauwens wrote:
>
> I agree that 300 is too much, I didn't count them myself, but
> realized this weekend that it was a huge effort to get through my
> backlog,
>
> If you split the list everybody'll waste even more time than now
> wondering on which list they should post, telling those who posted on
> the wrong list that they should have posted on the other one and so
> on. I've seen this happen many times.
>
> Two bits of general advice, feel free to ignore them completely, no
> answer necessary:
>
> 1) I've had no problem at all to handle the burst of traffic on this
>   mailing list in the last week: I deleted everything tenths of
>   message at a time without ever opening them. There is NO obligation
>   to read all messages from a mailing list. If something from any
>   mailing list has any combination of:
>
>           - empty or unclear subject ("Look at this", "Feedback
>                Welcome...")
>           - clear subject, but I am not really interested in it
>           - subject hidden, that is pushed outside of the email
>             client window because people use bad email clients adding
>             non-standard prefixes every time: Re: Ri: Aw: Re:...  and
>             don't bother to remove them manually after they get to
>             50+characters
>
>   I immediately delete it without opening it. Also because of #2
>   below. Of course, I can do this because I'm not the founder,
>   spiritual lead, coordinator or anything else of this particualr
>   list, Michel can't afford such a behavior, but see again #2.
>
> 2) Sorry Michel, I know that I look very boring about this, but I only
>   repost these suggestions because YOU are the one who said he was
>   overwhelmed by the amount of traffic. Please understand that this
>   is meant to help keeping the list usable and effective. You need to
>   change your email habits (ONLY as far as mailing lists are
>   concerned) and ask others to do the same.
>
>   Maybe some day there will be something completely new that
>   EVERYBODY will accept to use, but here and now we're all stuck with
>   mailing lists for public discussions, because Internet forums,
>   blogs replies and anything else browser based are a no-no for most
>   people. It may be wrong but it's a fact.
>
>   So, you need to come to terms with the fact that email based public
>   discussion through a mailing list is VERY different from private
>   email. In the first case you have to accept the fact the poster
>   must spend time every time he or she posts, to make each message
>   readable in order to keep the whole list usable and useful. I know
>   you and other active posters here can't bear this idea because
>   practicing it with the specific email clients you chose means that
>   you should do some manual work every time. But 5/10 seconds
>   "wasted" to format each message sent to a list mean minutes gained
>   from every single recipient of that message. Since on mailing lists
>   every subscriber receives many more messages than he or she
>   sends...
>
>   Your own words prove this:
>
>   it was as if it came in more rapidly than I could even process in
>   real time ...
>
>  The explanation is very simple. This happens because of the
>  systematic refusal of netiquette that is practiced here. THE reason
>  why you can't handle the load is because, unless traffic comes very
>  slowly and all subscribers have nothing else to think about and
>  remember, you and everybody else:
>
>  - MUST read all the messages of a thread that arrived after your
>    last reading, IN THE ORDER IN WHICH THEY WERE POSTED AND EACH
>    MESSAGE FROM BEGINNING TO END, if you want to figure out what the
>    discussion is about, who is replying to who and so on.
>
>  because the only alternative, that is taking the last message and
>  reading it from bottom to top, would take much more time.
>
>  Trim as much as possible before replying, use only plain text with
>  universally recognized "quoted text" markers, reply BELOW the quoted
>  text, always reply or post ONLY to the list to decrease the number
>  of messages, cross-replies and so on... and above all ENFORCE these
>  rules. Then downloading all the messages and making sense out of
>  them will take much less time. Using email formatting rules that
>  have proven their effectiveness in decades makes it possible, when
>  you open the inbox and find a 50-message thread inside it, to ONLY
>  OPEN THE LAST ONE and immediately get an idea of what's happening.
>
> Again, I like you guys a lot and private email is a whole different,
> much more forgiving beast. This is all well meaning advice, I don't
> mean to start a flame war.
>
> If you want to give up the mailing list, OK. If you want to use it
> without wasting time, SPEND some little time formatting your messages
> properly and demand the same from all other subscribers. The result
> will be that everybody will be encouraged to join discussions more
> often and above all everybody will spend much less time following the
> list. Unless you do as I do, of course, that is (for the very reason
> explained above) systematically cancel without ever opening them 90%
> of the messages from this list which are replies to other messages.
>
> Marco
>
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