--On Monday, August 17, 2020 22:19 +0200 Carsten Bormann
<cabo@xxxxxxx> wrote:
> On 2020-08-17, at 20:19, John C Klensin <john-ietf@xxxxxxx>
> wrote:
>>
>> Perhaps if the mailing list system returned messages above,
>> say, the fifth in an hour on a given thread or the tenth on a
>> given list in 24 hours
>
> Unfortunately, the software cannot determine whether progress
> is being made (when I would get quite angry at mailing list
> software that is trying to slow things down) or whether people
> are bloviating. If there were a simple way for a reader to
> report bloviation to the mailing list system, then it could
> perform better actions ("1799 readers appear to believe your
> last three messages did not contribute to progress, do you
> maybe want to slow down a bit?"…). (And here we enter the
> whole area of proper CSCW vs. mailing lists… I hope not.)
I probably should have been more clear that I didn't think was I
was suggesting would be particularly practical or effective...
and it almost certainly would have side-effects that would not
be worth the trouble. But I wasn't commenting about progress,
quality of content, or other topics and suggesting that any
algorithm would help with them. I was suggesting that I've seen
a lot of threads in which people who are arguing back and forth
with no evidence of careful reflection on each other's comments
(or those of others) in between and that such threads just tend
to get worse and worse.
So, with the understanding that this reflects my biases and
ability to cope as well as being consistent with some of the
reasons people have given for unsubscribing, I think it would be
worthwhile to do some rate-limiting and/or reminding people that
they are behaving in a way that might get out of hand or
encourage others to do so. I think that encouraging less
frequently but more thoughtful and detailed messages rather than
short, repeated, assertions would help us move forward and find
consensus in cases where that is not happening now. I agree
with John Levine's observation about the people who most need to
self-moderate, but it takes (at least) two to get a positive
feedback reciprocal rant going. How we get there is another
question but I think recent trends suggest that what we are
doing now isn't the way to do it and that temporary suspension
of posting privileges (or the threat thereof) of a few people
aren't going to do it... especially when those people are quite
obviously not the worst offenders.
john
p.s. Curiously, this is an advantage of f2f meetings that we
have not learned to apply to mailing lists. We would never, or
almost never, permit one (or two or tree) people to control a
microphone line by essentially repeating the same things at each
other over and over again, getting louder as they go.
