X-Message-Number: 3466
From: whscad1!kqb (Kevin Q Brown +1 201 386 7344)
Subject: CRYONICS Administrivia: Flame-Retardant Mailing List?
The message following this one is an update on the progress toward
moving CryoNet to another site. Before doing that, though, I would
like to offer some thoughts and questions on how CryoNet should best
respond to flame wars and other unwanted artifacts of this method of
communication. This seems especially timely not only because of the
recent events but also because we have a chance to start anew at the
new site.
First, this is a difficult problem to "solve". The various USENET
news groups have tried, without any definitive success, for decades.
My office-mate calls it "The Stupid Theory":
A calm and soundly reasoned message rarely elicits much response
because everyone who reads it simply accepts it and has nothing
more to say. A "stupid" posting, on the other hand, with
provocative content or grievous errors, elicits an immediate
response from several people, some of which themselves have
provocative content or grievous errors, thereby eliciting
immediate responses in turn, and the process cascades into
what we call a flame war. That is why so many USENET postings
are "stupid"; they reproduce much better than the good ones.
One nice thing about this theory is that its name is accurate
whether or not the theory itself is true. :-) (i.e., The adjective
"stupid" can apply to either the USENET messages or the theory itself!)
Nevertheless, one obvious weakness of the mailing list is that it is
unstable; anybody can set it off on a flame war with just a single posting.
(Maybe _this_ posting will start another one!)
In message #3456 Mike Darwin points out that market mechanisms for
ensuring that readers see the kind of messages they want to see are
fairly weak on CryoNet. (The same holds true for any unmoderated
list or news group.) We can plead with people to be nice. We can
send private nasty-grams to the culpable posters. We also have an
alternate mailing list:
CRYONICS (Regular CryoNet) - principles
CRYONICS.POLITICS - personalities
Several times that has worked well. Obviously political discussion
about cryonicists or cryonics organizations continued on the "politics
thread" without interfering with the discussions on the regular list.
For at least the last two flame wars, though, this mechanism has failed.
The triggering "stupid message" was posted to the main cryonics list
and the followup messages naturally (!) had to continue there.
On the unmoderated USENET sci.cryonics news group, another mechanism
has been used. It's a bit more subtle. Some may call it "The Boring
Theory" but I prefer to describe it as "The Good Drives Out The Bad".
Almost all the messages on sci.cryonics are the scientific/technical
messages forwarded from the CryoNet mailing list and, except for the
first month or two of its existence, it has had few flame wars.
(Someone please correct me if my memory is fooling me.) Nevertheless,
Arbitron ratings show over 20,000 estimated readers of sci.cryonics.
That's an extremely high lurker/poster ratio. How did that happen?
My guess is that once sci.cryonics readers see a lot of informative
and interesting messages there, yet also realize that they lack the
background to post messages like that, they just read but do not post.
The "vibe" of the list is set by those scientific/technical messages.
In this context a screaming rant would look too obviously childish,
so people don't do that often. One exception is when no messages have
appeared for awhile and the "vibe" of the news group is again up for grabs.
(Hmmm. That sounds kind of like CryoNet recently.)
Now it's time for questions. What should be done at cryonet.org,
the new site for CryoNet? I've set up a mailing list there that
mirrors this CryoNet, accepts new postings of its own, and even
retrieves archives via email. I haven't (yet) created another
CRYONICS.POLITICS mailing list at cryonet.org, though. Should I?
Or would something else serve our interests better?
Some of the recent commentary about people not receiving the kind
of messages they want leads me to think again of enabling personalized
message filters like those available on the Extropians list. In case
you are not familiar with that, on the Extropians list you can tell
the list software something like:
"Exclude from my digests any messages from people AAA or BBB
or on topic ZZZ."
(It has a lot more nifty options, too.) The owner of c2.org (the
host site for cryonet.org) was concerned that the Extropians list
software would use too many CPU cycles, so I didn't pursue it further.
Should I? (He may charge more money to run the mailing list that way.)
Alternatively, since my Perl scripts work around much of Majordomo
anyway, taking over the subscribe/unsubscribe and mailblast functions
might not be much more additional work. (I would rather not have to
do that, though.)
Furthermore, what if most of the people on the list want to exclude
messages from some disruptive person AAA? In that case, since it likely
costs more money to create personalized digests than a one-size-fits-all
digest, one cost-saving measure I might be tempted to implement would
be to make the exclusion of AAA's messages the _default_ for the list.
People who want to see AAA's messages then would need to issue requests
for personalized digests that _include_ them. (Hopefully, this proposal
isn't so disruptive that it will make most people exclude _my_ posts!)
Another possibility is to have both a default CryoNet mailing list
and an enhanced CryoNet mailing list. Only the enhanced mailing list
will have the filtering features (and better privacy from the Majordomo
"who" command, which I'll describe in the next message). Subscriptions
to the default CryoNet will be free but subscriptions to the enhanced
CryoNet probably shouldn't be. (We can discuss what makes the most sense.)
Comments? Although I can't promise that I'll be able to follow up
on all your good ideas, I would like to hear them. Thanks.
Kevin Q. Brown
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