[Foundation-l] Use of moderation

[Henning Schlottmann]

Austin Hair wrote:
> A mailing list, however, is different.  A mailing list is a
> conversation.  Everyone's been in a conversation where a single person
> dominated, and no matter how smart or charismatic or entertaining he
> may be, dominating a conversation minimizes the chance for other
> people to contribute and makes it less useful.

Then filter this guy. Or filter the threads where his contributions are
leading to nothing and read only the others. Or if you read your mailing
list as a (pseudo) newsgroup with a comfortable news client, score down
him and immediate replies, and read only the other parts of the thread
without him and those who fall for every of his statements. If he says
something really noteworthy, it will be discussed and quoted over two
levels or reply so you will find it.

> I've personally met some of the most prolific posters to Foundation-l,
> and not one I can think of is the type to dominate a conversation in
> person.  On the contrary, most of them are fairly quiet in real life,
> and take the time to consider their points and formulate their
> responses.  The difference is that, because of the nature of a mailing
> list, those who can afford a few hours per day can compose those
> well-thought-out responses to *every single thread on the list*.
> Others don't have that, or aren't willing to commit that, and the
> unfortunate end result is the same as the loudmouth you hate at dinner
> parties.

Pardon? Why would anyone want to read and even answer every thread and
every post in every thread? And who needs "a few hours" to look over the
 new entries of this list?  If there is someone, who floods the list,
score him down. Use a scoring threshold so his posts won't be visible in
a ordinary thread but where you will read him in a thread that you have
marked as interesting. Or kill the uninteresting threads as a whole.

Do you really, really think, that you would be able to find the
interesting posts in a web board? Web boards have none of the
comfortable features of a mailing list processed as a (pseudo)
newsgroup. They are huge heaps of words, with rudimentary threading.

But they run in a browser, so the point and click generation thinks they
can use it. You can't. If we move this list to a web board it won't take
a month until you (and/or others) will complain because the board is
getting confusing and you never found the really interesting postings.

This whole issue is one of information processing. Everyone has to learn
how to deal with information in large amounts and on different media.
But there have been a few generations of experience we can plug in,
there are best practices and web boards are not among them.

Ciao Henning