The reasons I have are the following two:
- Network economics...
A thing that is worse than a noisy maillist is twenty empty maillists.
As I'm shure everybody on this list is aware of, the value of a network
grows with the number of members squared. A maillist is a network. When
splitting up a maillist into nodes or interrestgroups the value of these
nodes combined will be smaller than the value of one big node.
Naturally the noise level of the big node will probably be bigger than
in the many seperate nodes. Therefore a node will only increase in value
until a certain point. I am pretty shure that the Exi list is so far
from this point that it will be a bad idea to split it up.
I spend my working time building comunities in intranets and the
Internet. My experience is that a LOT of people has to use something
like a maillist for it to be of any interrest. If not... interrest
simply fades away. This could easily happen for Exi.
- The succes of the Internet... The ability to reach out.
The main reason for the succes of the net, I think, is that it gives
everybody the ability to reach out and touch anybody they want to. The
Exi list gives us the abillity to discuss with the "leaders" in
transhumanism and extropy, and by participating long enough, to maybe
become one of the leaders ourselves.
If the level of acces becomes to high Exi will loose what I find is the
main oportunity to "recruit" new brains. Even though some of these
brains initially will need som guidance in order keep the noise level
down.
Splitting up the Exi list and closing of some areas works against a
proven good formula. The net itself.
I do think though that there is a good way to make everybody happy. It
is very easy these days to make a private news server. This way nobody
has to download to much mail, it's easy to kill a boring thread, and you
can just choose not to read messages from people you find are noisy. It
also makes automatic archives. Besides it is pretty easy for somebody
with a little technical savy to combine it with a maillist.
Well just my $0.02 worth
MAX M
New Media Director & Multimedia Artist
Private biz: mailto:maxm@maxmcorp.dk
http://www.maxmcorp.dk
The graphic 3D novel:
http://www.maxmcorp.dk/graphicnovel/index.htm
Work: mailto:maxm@normik.dk
http://www.normik.dk/