Listowner wrote:
...
> You are responsible. It was *your* decision to start spamming this list.
>
> Anyway, as spamming will not be tolerated here, immediately after this
> message is sent you will be unsubscribed.
>
> Have a nice day.
>
> Jeroen van Baardwijk, Listowner
I do find it ironic that it took a much smaller amount of
obnoxiousness to get Erik Reuter unsubscribed from this list than
it took to get Jeroen unsubscribed from the old Brin List. But
fair is fair. Jeroen made the rules clear at the start. So if
one joins this list, one is agreeing that he can be "dictator"
to enforce the rules. Sort of a social contract.
The old Brin List (now [EMAIL PROTECTED]) had the
problem that it did not actually HAVE any rules. There were
"etiquette guidelines", but it was never articulated what would
happen if they were flouted. Many members wanted to be "tolerant
at any cost", and for the most part it worked. If you didn't
want to read someone's posts, you ignored them. Or in extreme
cases one could always killfile them. Email does allow a lot
of freedom of association in this way.
But there was a tradeoff between tolerance and peace. To
an outsider who did not know who to killfile, the list did not
look peaceful at all. Or there were those who preferred to read
the list in digest mode, they had no choice but to wade through
all the posts, obnoxious or not. The old List lost a number of
members, driven away by the "breaches of the peace" allowed by its
tolerance. Finally, the listowners stepped in as "dictators"
to restore some peace, and the experiment in near absolute
tolerance was a failure.
So this is my question: Must there always be a tradeoff
between tolerance and peace? In the real world, it seems clear
that this is so because there is only a limited amount of space
which must be shared. But how about a virtual society, such as
a mailing list? Could things be set up so that there were no
rules, giving perfect tolerance, yet peace and civilization
were assured?
---David
(Not sure that Slashdot does this...)
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