From: Jkr438@aol.com
Date: Mon Sep 02 2002 - 03:53:05 MDT
In our combative heydeys, I was blistering off fifty replies to Aggasi, just
as Hermit was doing to EEA. And many of them were addendums to
100+ KB strings. What has been going on recently pales by
comparison.
[Jake] I agree. I think collective measures taken re: Aggasi and EEA were
more extreme as well, and well called for. Also the BBS did not exist at
that time. I think that if we choose to moderate Joe, we are choosing to
alter the way things are done on the EMail list in general. I don't think we
want a repeat of Aggasi and EEA, and to whatever extent we didn't act sooner
when we should have, we probably sent them the wrong message initially, which
no doubt exacerbated the problems. Also if we consider moderating Joe, we
will have to consider moderating other people as well, since to a large
extent Joe simply does what other people continue to do on this list, only
perhaps more so lately him than others. "Tommorrow" it could easily be
someone else with an entirely different PoV from Joe. Incidentally, choosing
to do nothing is also a choice to do things differently, because we now have
a BBS as well, and that changes things. If we ever wish to become a larger
community with a larger commons, or a greater variety of commons, we will
have to moderate on some level or another. And such moderation should remain
as content neutral as possible.
I don't know that 13 posts is a magic number, but I would tend to think that
if someone is posting that many a day habitually, there is a high probability
that there is communication problem going on. E-Mail lists for all of their
niceties do tend to have a limited bandwidth, beyond which the tendency of
participants is to simply unsubscribe as fewer and fewer people tend to hurl
more and more volume at each other, until participation has dropped to a
handful. This is an easy goal to achieve with no moderation whatsoever. We
have seen this happen several times over the course of CoV's existence, and
the consistent consensus is that this isn't a good situation each time it
happens. What is more challenging is maintaining diverse conversations with
many different people, and to do that requires some level moderation, though
preferable as unintrusive as possible.
Love,
-Jake
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