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

Re: Reminds me...

[tangerinpenguin.livejournal.com]

And then they'll hear convincing stories about virii or people getting their kidneys stolen and they'll just have to warn all their friends. :-)

This segues nicely into one my fonder dreams about the Web. Once upon a time, the high cost of decent graphics design and publishing acted as a barrier to entry that screened out a lot of mass-media communication by the confused, deceitful, and lunatic. You usually had to convince at least some substantial group you and your ideas had some legitimacy just to play. As a result, people could (and by and large did) adopt the heuristic that "the more slickly produced, the more legitimate."

The Web, far more so than desktop publishing or local-access cable, is pretty well shattering any validity that meme might have had. The sublime as well as the ridiculous all share approximately the same distribution of hasty, ugly, thrown-together sites versus slick, persuasive high quality packages. You truly cannot judge a book by its cover anymore.

So, this leads to my naive idealism: having shattered the promise of quality production being your sign of quality information or argument (if necessary, the hard way, repeatedly) we will as a culture have to get better at critically assessing content despite presentation just to keep up.

A skill particularly useful given that, as folks have no doubt been poised to reply, the heuristic I described has been pretty seriously flawed for some time, with resulting benefit for the well-connected confused, deceitful, and lunatic...

Re: Reminds me...

[alienor.livejournal.com]

So, this leads to my naive idealism: having shattered the promise of quality production being your sign of quality information or argument (if necessary, the hard way, repeatedly) we will as a culture have to get better at critically assessing content despite presentation just to keep up.

Hmm, never really thought about it this way before. I was in late middle school/early high school as the net was getting big, and I remember that when you were taught to write papers, almost anything you could find in print was fair game to use: books, newspapers, journals, etc, because it had (presumably) been reviewed to some extent before being printed.

Now, all of a sudden, we had access to lots more printed stuff, but had to actually assess the validity of it ourselves. Who wrote this? Someone who knows what they are talking about or not? Has it been reviewed by anyone else? Is that person trustworthy?

My teachers were all very leary of the internet because it was so new and there was no guarantee that anything was worth the time it took to download it, and I've picked up that trait. But in the college english classes I've had to take I've seen less and less of that caution being taught, and I'm not exactly sure why. It's not good.