On Wed, 21 Feb 2001 00:48:56 -0600 (CST) nolan <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote: >> From: J C Lawrence <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> >> >> I find myself retroactively interested in this thread. The tone >> of one of my lists has begun to suffer becoming somewhat caustic >> and aggressive, far from the professional slightly chummy yet >> formal attitude it had (and I took so long building). > Based on your description, it sounds like both you and the other > person both have some degree of conflict of interest with the list > itself. Actually, no. I'm the founder of the list, having started it ~15 years ago. I'm also the founder of the non-profit which is, fairly simply an extention of an annual dinner for list members that I started (very popular) which then grew out of that into a call for something more structured/pusposive. The non-profit serves almost exactly the same purpose as the list, just canted towards research and academia rather than education/discussion. > Is your community commenting on (and objecting to) the change in > tone or is it just you? Yes, the list is commenting, in private (remember it is a hand moderated and edited list). > And if the latter, are you sure it isn't because of your other > venture? Yes. > No offense intended, but without more details or lurking on the > list, it might be difficult to offer a more precise evaluation. Surely. > On one of my own lists, we have had an evolution over time. Some > of our better (and more technically competent) posters have gotten > tired of having their expertise questioned and moved on to other > venues for the subject. And in many cases, it wasn't intended to > be criticism, it was just a free-flowing discussion in which > assumptions were not always the same. To use a simplified > example, if every time a poster writes 'The car is blue', someone > questions whether their definition of blue is the same as someone > else's, after a while the first poster gets tired of it. Yup. I'm aware of that evolutionary process (the non-profit is intended as a partial release value for such). -- J C Lawrence [EMAIL PROTECTED] ---------(*) http://www.kanga.nu/~claw/ --=| A man is as sane as he is dangerous to his environment |=--
