[extropy-chat] Re: Oxygenating the flame in threads

[Brett Paatsch]

Harvey Newstrom wrote:

> On Aug 26, 2005, at 4:14 AM, Brett Paatsch wrote:
> 
>> Someone else I though it
>> was Hal or Harvey years ago posted that they
>> were keeping stats and folders of individuals posters
>> valuable posts and that someone or other had earned a haircut.
> 
> It wasn't me.  I have never done this or heard about it.

Hal was my first and best guess, you've strengthened my
suspicion now. If it wasn't Hal I'd be at a loss as to who
it was without fishing through archives. Which bores me. 
 
> I have discussed a system that would let readers vote on whether 
> a post was good, bad, spam, off-topic, offensive, or whatever. 
> Then these ratings would be available to others reading the list
> so they can skip posts with poor ratings.

To try and do double juty and answer some of the questions 
Samantha askes as well.

I'm not, as just another individual poster, opposed to any
consideration, or implementation of that sort of thing, I'd adapt
to it. But I'm not supporting it either because, for me, it wouldn't
constitute an improvement on what I can do without it and I'd
probably not use it if I could step around it.  

Keeping a personal database is some extra work over not doing
it, but because its personal its work I have no responsibility to do
and I can customise it to how I want to the extent that I want to. 
 
I think there is a tendency sometimes for people to try to build
technological systems for others as well when they could just
build them for themselves as personal systems.

I've been a mainframe systems programmer. I don't think there
is any such thing as a software system for users that doesn't
require maintenance because under the word maintenance I
include not just the refitting of potentially low bug software
to other software and the various versions of it that change,
but also the end users strong desire to post the maintainer
and ask "hey hows this work?" or "why did this happen
to me?" rather than RTFM.  

As a systems programmer (Fujitsu mainframes) I would get 
multiple requests daily to reset passwords for people that 
forgot them. 

And as a systems programmer I was also likely to want to
avoid reading the manual if I could ask another systems
programmer the question and get an answer quicker and
easier than RTFMing myself.

So to anyone wanting to just put together a nice little
technical something to help solve a perceived problem I
say, "I don't mind, good luck Jim, but I don't want to 
maintain it and as a friendly word of warning to the wise
are you sure that you do?"  

Brett Paatsch