Re: [Sci.nanotech] Re: Carbon Games



John Novak <john.novak@xxxxxxxxx> writes:
I believe I stuck pretty strictly to the facts. You may not like the
facts, but that does not make the posting a "flame".

You're a smart guy, Perry, so please don't insult *my* intelligence by
pretending that there's a non-insulting interpretation to the little
post-script you attached to your initial response.

It was not intended to be insulting. The postscript was there as an
honest request that the moderators exert more editorial discretion.

I myself moderate a couple of mailing lists, including a very large
and very active one on cryptography and security. I've found that
simply blocking the inevitable "fringe" messages works just fine and
hasn't been an excessive load on me. I don't think one is obligated to
be "fair" to the fringe posters. Borderline cases certainly exist, but
that's quite different. The people who are truly over the edge I just
block and that's that.

I also stand behind Jim in his approval of Mike's initial message in
this discussion thread, for all the reasons he listed. I moderate
mostly based on topicality, not the correctness of the post; as Jim
notes, that approach did not work either.

My experience on my own lists (and I have the opportunity to see
subscribership statistics so I have pretty good information on this)
is that in the past, when I've allowed through messages that are
topical but quite clearly "incorrect", I've gotten significant
declines in readership. With hindsight, there's a good reason for that
-- people are busy and don't want to do public "peer review", they
want to read interesting information. When they see too much stuff
that is clearly a waste of their time, they quit reading a forum.

I have gotten direct feedback from readers on this, by the way -- it
is frequently of the form "if you let through any more of that junk,
I'm going -- I don't have time to read it." Generally speaking, I
listen when people say things like that, since my goal is to provide a
high quality communications channel for people who are interested in
the topic, and not to be "fair" or to allow "public peer review".

I remember this forum's early days, including a large number highly
speculative posts which you would not care for.

They weren't such a large percentage of what was going through. I just
reviewed the last six months of posts, and there wasn't anything in it
that I noticed that I would have felt bad about missing. Things were
not like that years ago.

Here is a suggestion, Perry: If the present level of posts does not
meet your standards, you are perfectly welcome to submit your own
posts which do.

I don't know that it is worthwhile. I don't think there are terribly
many people left reading. There is also the question of what I would
say -- and I don't have anything particularly worthwhile to bring
up. I'm not that interested in posting for the sake of posting.


--
Perry E. Metzger perry@xxxxxxxxxxxx

.

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