From: natashavita@earthlink.net
Date: Wed Jul 16 2003 - 15:40:15 MDT
Brendan,
Thank you for your post showing your concern about the quality of the
list. In your opinion, what specific posts are causes of the bickering?
Natasha
Original Message:
-----------------
From: Brendan Coffey bmc@section9.net
Date: Wed, 16 Jul 2003 10:57:21 -0700
To: extropians@extropy.org
Subject: flame wars
The perspective of an infrequent poster:
My reading of extropians has definitely fallen off seriously in the past
six months. The bickering and sniping represents a large percentage of
the volume of the list. It becomes tedious to have to slog through it to
figure out which discussions have content, and where that content is.
I've gotten a very good sense of which list members lie where on
the content-generation distribution, and I've killfiled a half-dozen
people--I've found that it's made the list much more readable. But I
do consider unsubscribing pretty frequently.
It's a shame--the list is so full of bright, ambitious people with
interesting and compelling visions of humanity's future, both near
and far. But, as with every other online discussion forum I've ever
participated in, the more intelligent and ambitious we get, the more
childish, self-important and myopic we become when we feel our hard-won
and excruciatingly-thought-out paradigms being queried or challenged.
One thing that frequently strikes me about the list is the degree of
arrogant certainty with which the list members state predictions of
the future. Frankly, if anyone here could predict the future (or, hell,
even the present) with any degree of precision, they wouldn't have time
to sit around posting to this list, because they'd be spending every
waking moment _heavily_ involved in some other, extremely important works.
So, yeah, it's a serious problem, and I think you'd see a lot less
attrition if it weren't.
-bmc
On Wed, Jul 16, 2003 at 07:26:37AM -0400, Harvey Newstrom wrote:
> Spike wrote,
> > In June we had the quietest time I recall having
> > seen on extropians in over 6 years. (Did anyone
> > count the messages?) Could it be that the
> > spam filters were killing a lot of the posts?
> > Perhaps I need to look over the archives. spike
>
> Heh. You have a strange sense of humor.
>
> Seriously, I don't think the list has yet recovered from the latest
> flame-war and series of personal attacks that caused ExI to start
> moderating again. I would love to blame low list activity on spammers,
> but we did it to ourselves. It seems that this problem gets worse every
> round. I would not be surprised if we were losing members faster than
> we were gaining them at this point. Sigh....
>
> --
> Harvey Newstrom, CISM, CISSP, IAM, IBMCP, GSEC
> Certified InfoSec Manager, Certified IS Security Pro, NSA-certified
> InfoSec Assessor, IBM-certified Security Consultant, SANS-cert GSEC
> <HarveyNewstrom.com> <Newstaff.com>
>
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