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...

[nickjong.livejournal.com]

Ah, I was trying to figure out to what September cataclysm you were referring. I kinda remember people complaining back then about all the newbies. One reason I only delurked about five times in two or three years of fairly heavy newsgroup reading.

Then of course I came to CMU and lost access to a decent NNTP server. Probably for the best, I didn't need to spend three hours a day reading rec.arts.sf.written and others.

Re: Reminds me...

[cellio]

Then of course I came to CMU and lost access to a decent NNTP server.

Oh yeah, I forgot about that. When I was a student undergrads didn't have access to what was then the ARPAnet. Employees of the CS department did, though, so when I got a CS work-study job I got access to mailing lists. (SF-Lovers was my entry into the wider community.) CMU got Usenet around the time I gradudated, again only in the CS department, and because I retained an account on a CS machine I had access. (I didn't have access to the news application, though; I read news right out of the spool directory. Eventually I wrote my own reader, once I decided that Usenet was a keeper.) Anyway, I had thought that Andrew had opened up Usenet to the entire campus, but maybe I am mis-remembering. I wasn't an Andrew user back then. But I wouldn't be surprised if the feed was sluggish and the expiration times were short.

Re: Reminds me...

[nickjong.livejournal.com]

Anyway, I had thought that Andrew had opened up Usenet to the entire campus, but maybe I am mis-remembering.

No, technically I can read much of Usenet via Cyrus using Pine or Mulberry. However, I grew up using Forte Free Agent, so I just couldn't go back to using a mail client for news. I am told that the CMU Computer Club recently upgraded their NNTP server so that it no longer sucks, but I cannot verify.

Re: Reminds me...

[tangerinpenguin.livejournal.com]

Once upon a time (c. 1986, 1987) Andrew provided access to all known newsgroups (including the alt.* feeds, when they emerged) along with a number of other mailing lists and local groups set up to look like they were all part of the same mechanism. For a while, it was a major part of the September Effect: lots of new undergrads with @andrew.cmu.edu addresses who hadn't been socialized into Usenet and couldn't differentiate between local, CMU managed groups to which they had some "entitlement" and the global groups.

(Prior to that, the TOPS-20 systems had their own internal bboard system instead of newsgroups and Internet access was more tightly controlled; in fact, the first couple of years of popular Andrew use, Internet posting/email access was an added level of access that you had to apply for, but that opened up pretty quickly.)

IIRC, the email and newsgroup interfaces were initially different but were quickly unified such that your mailboxes looked like newsgroups only you could access. I graduated over ten years ago, of course, so I would expect things to have changed since then. I was astonished to see news that AMS was retired only recently.