Oxygenating the flame in threads was Re: [extropy-chat] a futurist prediction

[Eugen Leitl]

On Thu, Aug 25, 2005 at 11:04:47AM +1000, Brett Paatsch wrote:

> Shunning was a very effective form of feedback in tribal villages
> as I understand. Violence and censorship wasn't necessary, the
> simple withdrawal of attention was enough. 

Shunning is an active process in meatspace: the target is immediately
notified, via nonverbal communication channels.

There's no way for you to sense in how many killfiles you're in. You
can still send, and see your messages broadcast through the list. 
Consider this a protocol deficit, but it's locked in now. Can't change it.

Crap is poisonous. It causes a slippery slope: everybody's standards slide. 
The best contributors soon leave, because they have the least tolerance
for crap. The trolls take over. Eventually, not even idiots can
tolerate idiots, volume goes down, and the list dies. Consider this
a caricature of a common pattern, a pattern I've seen very often. 

This is why shunning doesn't work online. You need moderators,
temporarily or permanently removing your ability to post as soon
as you're over crap quota. This needs to happen in realtime (less than
a day), or the control loop is too loose.

This is different from meatspace, and this is what most list operators
don't understand.

Cryonet now apparently has a crude voting mechanism (gosh, in 2005, who'd thunk),
but it is only available in digest format, and the users are not using it
enough, apparently.

-- 
Eugen* Leitl <a href="http://leitl.org">leitl</a>
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ICBM: 48.07100, 11.36820            http://www.leitl.org
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