Yahoo considered harmful?

[cellio]

I sometimes wonder if the ability of anybody with a web browser to create mailing lists is a negative factor for the net today. It's not that there's a quota on the number of mailing lists in the world, but that the easier it is for people to create 'em, the more clutter you get and the more redundant lists you get. And then there's the increase in the email announcing such lists (and people discussing such lists on other lists).

One of the Jewish lists I'm on is run by someone who is clearly fairly new to the net and Just Does Not Get It. He frequently creates new lists (most of which probably fail) on very specialized topics, and broadcasts announcements to every list he knows that might be vaguely related. I can't think of any actual topics off hand, but if I said (purely hypothetically) "single men under 30 who are studying Tractate Pesachim", I wouldn't be far off. This isn't specialized as in "advanced"; it's specialized as in "weird and unnecessary".

I just received mail, on an SCA list, announcing a list for SCA people who have adopted children from China. I can imagine no topic that touches this overlap. It's not as if being in the SCA poses problems for adopting children from China or being Chinese impedes one's participateion in the SCA. It's just weird, like creating a list for left-handed computer scientists who prefer Pepsi to Coke.

A concurrent trend (I'm not saying anything about causality) is that many people now seem to see mailing lists as "communities" more than "discussions". (Yahoo is partially responsible for that.) The number of way-off-topic posts to mailing lists I'm on has increased in the last few years. You always had the occasional virus warning or appeal for a good cause or the like, but they're more frequent now. (I don't know if they are more frequent per capita, though.) And way too many of them, if asked privately to not post virus warnings to Info-Something, respond that if you don't like it you should use your delete key.

One of the reasons Usenet ultimately failed (I mean since the September that Never Ended, in 1996 IIRC) is that people stopped respecting the topic boundaries of the various newgroups and treated it as one big chit-chat session or flaming ground or spam outlet. Automation took care of most of the spam, but the other problems remained. (Remain, near as I can tell. I read very little Usenet any more, and most of what I read is moderated.)

So after Usenet a lot of us returned to mailing lists, which were lower-key and more likely to stay on topic. But now, any yahoo can create mailing lists, which is fine if they don't interfere with other lists, but people learn bad habits on those lists and then migrate to other ones. So now, I can't count on posts to tech_writers to be about tech writing, or posts to sca-something to be about the SCA, and so on, and thus it's harder to manage the flow of email.

I'm not even going to start on naming conventions. :-)

Comments

[tangerinpenguin.livejournal.com]

Well, yes. Mailing lists really are ALT groups without the pretense of institutional legitimacy.

You hit the nail on the head with your observation about communities versus discussions - that's clearly what's at work with the SCA Parents of Adopted Chinese Children - but I disagree that it's especially new. Newsgroups always developed a sense of community for as long as I can remember; key "net-personalities" adopted social roles like any other community pillar, people would arrange "real world" get-togethers based on no other connection that newsgroup participation, and the (occasional) off-topic post about the community ("netbob@farkle.edu was in a bad accident; get well wishes can be sent to...") was considered legit, especially during crises ("Netbob's house survived Hurricane Waldo intact, but we're still waiting to hear from Geekster and Mondo")

The difference today is that this has gotten that much more pronounced, which I submit is inevitable once the population with access goes over a certain threshold. It doesn't take many from the net-accessible population as a whole who think of a list exclusively in terms of a community to drown out the (similarly) small and focused community that's using it on-topic.

[browngirl.livejournal.com]

I was with you till the quotation.

A.
who met her fiance online.°

[tangerinpenguin.livejournal.com]

It is one of his more provacative quotes, true. It was easier to make the statement with a straight(er) face when Internet-based communication was less routine for the larger population, although I suspect it was always at least halfway intended as a slap upside the head to fanboys who wouldn't stop praising the Net in cliches based on his science fiction.

He's made some more balanced statements; his Short History of the Internet (1993) (http://www.forthnet.gr/forthnet/isoc/short.history.of.internet) is a decent pre-web primer with a mild but recognizable editorial edge, and there's a more recent Q&A with him at Slashdot (http://slashdot.org/interviews/99/10/08/1147217.shtml) where he gets substantially more blue-sky.

[browngirl.livejournal.com]

*nod* Thanks for the articles. :)

A.
(who does agree with the rest of what you said)

[geekosaur]

Mailing lists really are ALT groups without the pretense of institutional legitimacy.

Man, I'm getting old; I read that and thought "since when do alt.* groups have any institutional legitimacy?!" Of course, they've gained some since I last cared....

[cellio]

Good points. I suspect there is a second factor at work beyond just the sheer number of people on the net, and that is the sheer number of mailing lists. It used to be that (to use the SCA example) someone would post the "Nebob's house survived hurricane Waldo" message to rec.org.sca, and that would pretty much do it. (It would also get posted to Netbob's home kingdom's mailing list, if he's a participant there.) These days, it'll show up on rec.org.sca, half the kingdom mailing lists, the cooks list, two bardic lists, the dance list, and maybe even the parents-of-adopted-Chinese-children list. So not only do we see more of these because there are more people in the community, but we see them multiple times. (And people forward and reply indiscriminantly. During the last big virus hoax I was deleting 40-50 messages a day from the queue for the moderated AEthelmearc list; all of that noise was happening openly on the unmoderated list.)

On reflection, maybe the bigger part of the problem isn't the message itself but the dozens of posted replies to it per list.

[alienor.livejournal.com]

On reflection, maybe the bigger part of the problem isn't the message itself but the dozens of posted replies to it per list.

Erg. There's a duke in our kingdom who forwards 'important' stuff to about 30 different lists at a time with the message, "sorry if you get this more than once". If you were really sorry you wouldn't be doing it! Especially since it's a flyer for the event that you are autocratting that is available in the kingdom newsletter and the web page, and it's the second time you've sent it out this week!

And that's my pet peeve on this issue, sending out 'weekly reminder' event flyers that are no different from the flyers available elsewhere. I'm autocratting an event this weekend. When the flyer was first written, I sent out the text to the baronial list. I webbed the flyer and some additional information (classes being taught and stuff), and posted the web addresses to the kingdom list and the nearby baronies. A couple of reminders before registration deadline (registration is due for this event, more information is available at web address). Is any more than that needed? I don't think so.

For any event, if I have not already made arrangements to get ahold of the flyer by Friday afternoon, chances are I'm not planning to attend the event, and you won't be able to badger me into it.