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

[dvarin.livejournal.com]

Start a LJ community to discuss mailing lists, usenet groups, and LJ communities. :)

[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.

Reminds me...

[alienor.livejournal.com]

Reminds me of something that I think about every time I watch Richard on the computer. Used to be that you needed some small amount of computer experience to use the internet and email and associated communication options, or at least you picked it up as you went, but not anymore.

He's had constant acess to a computer now for probably a year or two (if not more), and yet he only knows how to read and respond to email click on links that people email to him, and play civ (and now he's on livejournal). He still refers to mailing lists as web pages - 'the canton web page' 'web page?' 'you know, the list' 'oh.' He received a MOL report via email and had to copy the names of the fighters over for the marshal's report. Instead of copy and paste he printed the page and retyped the names. Next time I walked him through a copy and paste. The next time he printed it out and went through the same process again.

Users like him are becoming more and more common. Every time my sister sends a virus warning, I send a link to one of the debunking pages, but that doesn't keep her from sending the next one. They don't have to learn, so they don't. And that goes for netiquette as well. My head almost blew off when someone sent an html message complete with fancy font and background and the next message I opened was someone asking how they had added all that fancy stuff. ARG!

Is there a solution? I don't know. I've noticed that the livejournal communities (or at least the ones I'm on) seem to stay on topic better. Perhaps because people can post random stuff in their own journals?

Sorry about ranting on your page.

[figmo.livejournal.com]

I can actually think of two couples I know who are SCAdians with adopted Chinese children. Go figure.

OTOH, I see your point. Some folks get carried away with a new toy.