"Eeep -- we're being hit by a wave of spam!"

[jducoeur]

Well, that was my first reaction when I saw 300 messages slamming into our mailbox. My second reaction was, "Wait -- where is it all going?" My third reaction was, "Oh: it's all being filtered into sca-east".

And that (plus a quick skim of said wave of messages) is a pretty good summary of why I find myself unable to pay any attention to that mailing list any more. No offense to elizabear, but there's a posting brewing for The Art of Conversation, to be titled something like "Laissez-faire and the Tragedy of the Commons in the Market of Words"...

Comments

[aishabintjamil.livejournal.com]

The sad thing is that most of the train of conversation is 1 person taking and blindly defending an emotional position, and seven or eight people who are absolutely sure that if they just present a sufficiently good, logical argument she, being a reasonable person, will see the Error of Her Ways (tm) and be persuaded. Meanwhile she's bought into her position with a level of emotional fury and irrationality that make debating with a rabid ice weasel more productive. Unfortunately her debating opponents seem to be largely unable to see that fact.

[siderea]

And the question that necessarily follows is what, if anything, can be done about this situation. I have no great ideas; the problem you describe seems nigh intractable to me; I'm not even sure how a moderator can reasonably intervene. (Elaborate slashdot-like systems may be better able to cope with that, but require enormous populations to work.)

I just had lunch with a friend who is very, very involved in local civics, and is a web developer. We had a discussion about town/neighborhood discussion forums online, and how differently the various ones around around here worked out. We got to discussing the fact that none of the neighborhoods in our city have public discussion forums. He was shocked when I said that I wasn't so sure I wanted to participate, with my actual name and address, in a discussion forum with some of my neighbors. I pointed out that at town-hall-style meetings that the police had held to keep us informed of crime investigations in our neighborhood, I'd seen people behave, well, pretty much in the pattern you describe here happening on SCA-East. Only, you know, face to face. At a public meeting. Ranting at high volume at the police officers trying to tell us what was going on.

(So much for the Greater Internet @#$%%$^ Theory.)

[liamstliam.livejournal.com]

I think it's very simple, you ban her and people who have abused her "Mr. "Did you forget your medicine."

I think she has every right to defend herself after the unfair attack she suffered a couple of weeks ago, but I think she was over the op on this one and cannot see that she needs to step back.

I also think Yeliz has the strength of being a moderator who rarely intervenes, so when she says "Shut up!" people do.

[cellio]

That's really hard to deal with. I see it on other lists too (dropped off sca-east some years back, so curious only in that look-at-the-messy-car-wreck sort of way about this). You can filter the problem poster, but that doesn't help with the replies to that person, which is where most of the traffic comes from. Occasionally it gets bad enough that a list owner is willing to burn the karma points by kicking someone off, but that's rare. So everyone gets to suffer, sigh, and wait for it to end. :-(

[shalmestere.livejournal.com]

Three of the most egregious posters in the latest SCA-EAST debacle are already in my killfile, but thanks to topposters who don't trim their posts, the hysteria ends up in my In Box anyway :-/

Along those lines, there's a Speshul Snowflake whose bursts of psychodrama have caused our local listserv to shrivel into an announcement board. The listowner did eventually give her a "One More Strike and You're Out" warning; the level of drama has gone down--but the traffic hasn't come back :-(

[siderea]

there's a posting brewing for The Art of Conversation, to be titled something like "Laissez-faire and the Tragedy of the Commons in the Market of Words"

Oh, hell yes.