From: Hal Finney (hal@finney.org)
Date: Tue May 28 2002 - 13:34:32 MDT
Lee Corbin writes:
> I agree that we should take your advice and before the
> initiation of every discussion ask ourselves, "Is this
> really a suitable topic for Extropians?".
>
> But on the other hand, it seems to me that this decision
> should rest with each individual contributor. So your
> term "consensus" bothers me a little, perhaps only because
> of its ambiguity. Consensus could mean that if enough
> people vote against the discussion of an issue, the posters
> become obligated to stop. I'd rather not see that.
>
> To make the case concrete, consider an example. Somebody
> starts some stupid thread about how one can best use a
> motorcycle to run down and kill people, and it even gets
> gory. What to do?
It's off topic for this list, that's all, just like sewing curtains
or training dogs would be. It's not a grand moral issue, it's just a
matter of practicality. There are a million discussion forums in the
world, and they exist to help people find topics of interest. If people
ignore the forum topic and just post anything, then you have chaos and
you can't have interesting discussions.
Imagine if there were only one group on usenet and all postings went
there. Or if there were only one mailing list and all postings to all
lists went to everyone. Such a system would be unusable. The first
thing people would do is build a layer on top of it to re-create what
we have today.
Don't you agree that it makes sense to organize discussion forums
by topic? And that it follows that some things are off topic?
Hal
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