This kind of a list invites that kind of behavior. You should see the discdog lists on Yahoo. They're brutal!
It's the main reason that I created k9disc.com. It's a real community and we don't have any of this crap. The thing is that these distribution lists, pretending to be groups, are flashes in the pan - there's no permanence. So I can write something nasty and it's gone - poof - it's the definition of FLash in the pan. On a discussion forum that doesn't happen. Things are permanent. It's up there forever. The other reason that these lists are problematic, is that they are a pushed message - most of us get these in our inboxes and that means that we must address them. Forums are a pulled message, which means that we actively go in search of the information - we select it. I think that push v pull is just as important in defining the dialogue on these lists as the lack of permanence. I would really like to see this list be ported to a discussion forum, myself. There are some nice programs that allow for pulling posts from Yahoo lists and indexing them into a forum. I think that would be awesome! I started to do it with the discdog lists, but there's some powerful personalities in charge of them, and I did not want to let them set their sights on me for 'taking' their stuff, so it never went anywhere. We had a team of 5 cover 2000 posts each in about 1 week. All was ready to go, but I balked because I didn't want to make any waves. We could do something like this here, for sure, and I'd be happy to be a part of that. Cheers, Ron Watson http://k9disc.blip.tv http://k9disc.com http://pawsitivevybe.com/vlog http://pawsitivevybe.com On Nov 13, 2007, at 1:42 PM, Rupert Howe wrote: > Yeah, Jay, discussions are one thing, but I'm bored of watching > interesting discussions turn into personal slanging matches. > > It poisons threads and kills discussion. > > I know some of us seem to like it, and some of us just can't stop > watching. There's a familiar discussion on Twitter - people asking > themselves why they still subscribe to this list - "it's like a car > wreck". That saddens me. > > We all get heated about issues - fine - but if people have got > something negative to say about another person, about their > motivations or anything that's likely to lead to a personal slanging > match, perhaps they could show us the courtesy of having their open > and frank discussion on a blog and linking to it here. > > Maybe that will make this list more 'boring' - but personally, I'm > much more bored of watching people going to the toilet on each other > when I want to talk about videoblogging. > > Yours rather po-facedly, > > Rupert > http://twittervlog.tv/ > http://feeds.feedburner.com/twittervlog/ > > > [Non-text portions of this message have been removed]
