[Foundation-l] The state of Foundation-l (again) was: Recent firing?

[phoebe ayers]

On Sat, Nov 7, 2009 at 10:27 PM,  <WJhonson at aol.com> wrote:
> In a message dated 11/7/2009 9:13:01 PM Pacific Standard Time,
> thomas.dalton at gmail.com writes:

Dudes. This thread. Case in point. (As I suppose it was fated to be, sigh).

Yes, I am reading it, because I care about this issue. I posted a few
months ago when it came up, I edited the meta page on the subject, and
I posted (I admit, with some frustration), in response to Birgitte's
initial post in this thread.

In the three days since then, there's been 33 messages; 16 of them are
from Thomas Dalton and Will Johnson. Many of these emails have a bit
of a hostile tone (my original post included, mea culpa), and include
sentences like "Anyone that says otherwise is wrong", "That statement
is false" and "Get over it."

Despite the fact that such language is upsetting -- each time I read
such a message I get a little defensive, and feel a little hostile
myself, and then a little upset at having such a reaction -- I have
read (or at least skimmed past) all these messages, because I care
about this thread, and this issue, and I can't easily ignore
individual emails with Gmail's threading feature. And I'm quite happy
that people are participating in discussion on a topic I care about;
that's great.

But I have to wonder -- what point did you have to make about the
future of the mailing list that needed eight emails to make instead
of, say, one or two?

As far as I can tell everyone still has the same opinion they came to
the discussion with, which is the same opinion that everyone who
participated had a few weeks ago, and so this back and forth isn't
really getting us anywhere. Which means that some of you posting out
there must enjoy arguing for the sake of arguing.

So I think the main issue here is that some people enjoy back and
forth chatter more than others; some participants find it perfectly
tolerable and others find it migraine-inducing. So maybe we need one
foundation list with posting limits and another for free-form
discussion? The former could be like the announcements list previously
suggested but with a bit more (but not much more) leeway for
discussion. Or perhaps as has been suggested in the past (because this
issue has been coming up at least since 2004, according to the
archives) a Wikimedia-social list that could absorb people's desire
for conversation and argument?

And yes, in the meantime, I will keep reading -- even though at least
one of you is no doubt poised and ready to tell me to grow a thicker
skin, or to shut up myself, or how it's your given right to respond as
much as you want to every one-line half-hearted argument that gets
made on Foundation-l and I must hate personal freedom to even think
about any alternative mode of dialog, or to give me advice on how to
read email (I've been using it for 15 years), or to tell me to set up
email filters already (I don't, because of LSS) -- despite this, I
will keep reading, because as I said originally this is the main place
to discuss the Foundation and the projects, and that's something I
care about.

regards,
-- phoebe