[p2p-research] Again on mailing lists, was: Post-Depression first: Americans get more money from government than they give back | csmonitor.com

[M. Fioretti]

On Fri, Nov 27, 2009 05:10:12 AM +0700, Michel Bauwens wrote:

> are we doing so badly as Marco suggests ...?

define badly. Me, I confirm that this list sucks big time if the
criterion is "how to make it easy for as many people as possible,
whatever email software they use, to follow and participate in
discussions". As a read-only Rss feed, or a channel to ask for
information hard to find somewhere else, instead, this is a great
place.

> I'm myself on quite a few mailing lists ... and this is one of the
> best I'm on in terms of consistently interesting information and
> debate on issues that I care about ...

"Consistently interesting", I can agree, otherwise I would have simply
and *silently* unsubscribed to never return. Debate... please. This
place has become a private chatroom of you, Ryan, Sam and a very few
others who together make >90% of the traffic. Now, this happens
everywhere, of course, regardless of the technology. What I said is
that, *here*, one big reason for this is the stubborn, deliberate
refusal of that group to acknowledge that:

- as a technology, mailing lists *have* developed years ago rules that
  are *objectively* better than others to keep discussions light and
  easy to follow for the *highest* possible number of posters and are
  "embedded" so to speak, in the intrinsic limits of that technology

- if you hate or find unbearably irritating that technology, don't use
  it, or don't be surprised if almost nobody else follows you.
 
> People who want to improve should give the example and add actions
> to their words

I find this offensive. I ALWAYS give the example, that is take the time
(a few seconds per message) to post with decent formatting. 

And I am also starting to find offensive, at this point, to see grown
up people who spend their days using everything Google to play dumb
whenever one says "please stop with this attitude, netiquette is just
a search away, don't play deaf or tell me I should reinvent some
wheel just for you"

> The onus is on those who complain and want to change, not on those
> who are happy with the present situation

Precisely my point. I dared step in again ONLY because I opened by
MISTAKE a message where Ryan said something like "it seems as only I
and Paul want to talk of these things". And I also remember seeing
(before I stopped opening almost all messages from this list just
because their formatting sucks) many requests from YOU along the lines
of "would someone please comment about this on the blog, I really have
no time?".

So right now I'm just saying that is very likely that if YOU guys feel
like this, one of the reasons is that almost no subscriber (outside
the circle mentioned above, of course) ever OPENS your list messages
anymore.

Michel, you have much more to lose than me if you systematically make
your messages to this list (again, private email is another matter)
unnecessarily hard to read for many people. So it's you and Ryan that
should stop complaining about how hard it is to fill the blog, or how
lonely you feel because *participation* (not traffic...) is low, and
act. NOT ME.

ME, at this point, I *am* happy to use this list ONLY as an Rss feed
(that is, I open ONLY the messages which are NEW, not replies, and
ONLY when they have a clear, short, descriptive subject) or to ask
some specific information every now and then.

Marco