On Sun, 2003-12-07 at 16:11, J.A. Terranson wrote:
On Sun, 7 Dec 2003, Tim May wrote:
I have several theories/conjectures about what is happening to mailing lists.
First, a lot of the younger folks--who used to be some of the fresh blood for lists like ours--are not users of mailing lists. I expect some of them don't even know such things exist. For them, IM is the norm. (And IM is mostly an interpersonal, chat format.)
Not true. I personally run several mailing lists with heavy political bents. One in particular, "antisocial" (the name is a play on a post someone made a long time ago) is vibrant and continually growing. But they need to be nurtured - this is the failing of this list. We no longer take care to bring in new blood. We have failed utterly to encourage new ideas. And any new blood which may test the waters with a posting that doesn't follow median doctrine is likely to find themselves and their deviant ideas under heavy attack, rather than discussion.
People won't post ideas that conflict with the mainstream (which obviously is different in each unique forum) if these ideas are either dismissed out of hand or attacked ad hominem.
Clay Shirky has some good thoughts on this in his essay 'The Group Is Its Own Worst Enemy', found at http://shirky.com/writings/group_enemy.html [big snip] I've been on and off the list for years, mostly as a lurker, occasionally as a poster. Up until last month (or so) I thought the list had died. I remember that the S/N radio went way down and toad.com was going to drop the list a few years back. Some of the list 'goals' have been achieved, we now have good solid crypt that we can use. We have operating remailers (although they really need to be more user friendly). For me personally the biggest obstacle is time. As I've gotten older I don't seem to have the time to focus on following discussions in 10 different lists, or work on dozens of projects. Brian ---[Office 72.2F]--[Fridge 34.4F]---[Fozzy 90.3F]--[Coaster 63.4F]--- Linux Software Developer http://www.brianlane.com [demime 0.97c removed an attachment of type application/pgp-signature which had a name of signature.asc]