Slightly Off KIlter

I recently left a mailing list I had only very recently subscribed to. It’s a very new list (also very “young”). I was personally invited to join. The topic seemed like fun when presented. But I didn’t like the way the owners were controlling the list — not because they are too harsh, but because, to all intents and purposes, there’s no control at all.

Anarchy isn’t all it’s cracked up to be.

In the 5 days since its inception, this had become a fairly popular list. With only 24 members, it was nevertheless generating quite a bit of traffic. As of today, the list is 7 days old and has generated over 1000 messages. (It’s also down to 21 members.) Most of the messages have been short, many only one or two lines. Quite a few are of the most simple, degenrerative, form — “Thanks”, “Good night”, “Wow”, “I like that”, “Talk to you tomorrow”.

That wasn’t the problem.

In responding to an existing thread (and most responses were of this type), members have not been not trimming out material that isn’t directly pertinent to their response. This being a Yahoo list, there’s already an excess of Yahoo-supplied extraneous material at the end of every message. In a very short response, the Yahoo-supplied material vastly outweighs actual pertinent content. In the ever-lengthening threads, most members were “quoting” everything prior to their reply, ad infinitum (and ad naseum). Individual messages were quickly reaching 2K – 4K in size (most of that composed of quoted and re-quoted Yahoo-provided material).

This simply makes individual messages larger. It makes digests almost impossible to read.

One of the members gently suggested that other members “trim the tails of their threads”. This isn’t an atypical mailing list request… although I’ve never seen it come on the 5th day of a list’s existence.

That wasn’t the problem, either.

The problem was that the list owners publicly refused to understand exactly what was being asked; when the request was finally made clear to them, they rejected it out of hand. One of the owners belittled the request and refused to comply by saying she was “not going to go through a post I’m going to reply to and delete
everything BUT the beginning, NOR will I ask anyone else do so”. Another list owner insisted that she and her friends didn’t want rules on this list. She’d been on a list where she didn’t like the rules and it wasn’t fun. All three co-owners insisted they had started this list to have “fun”. Rules would ruin the fun.

That’s the problem. Anarchy isn’t much fun, either.

There are times that the Net seems like one big happy playground. You can join (almost) any mailing list or group. You can come and go as you please. You can change your “handle” and your persona at a whim. Rules are no “fun”.

But, what most people don’t realize (especially relative newcomers to this Cyberworld we have created) is that there are rules. As in all communities, we’ll all get along better and have fewer problems if we understand and follow those rules.

The rules of the Net are called Netiquette. The one that applies most directly to the case in point is Rule 4: Respect other people’s time and bandwidth.

If you already know about Netiquette, by this point you’re probably shaking your head in sympathy. If you don’t already know about Netiquette, I suggest you read and learn about it. Soon.

The rest of us will appreciate your efforts to become an enlightened member of the Community.