[ExI] META: Nice mailing list ideas

Emlyn emlynoregan at gmail.com
Wed Mar 17 22:01:43 UTC 2010


http://tieguy.org/blog/2010/03/17/lists-parties/

---
Mailing lists are parties. Or they should be.
by Louis Villa

I can’t go to bed because Mairin is right on the internet and so I
want to (1) say she’s awesome and (2) add two cents on mailing lists
and using the power of a web interface to make them better. Bear with
me; maybe this is completely off-base (probably I should just stick to
law), but it has been bouncing around in my head for years and maybe
me writing it down will help the lightbulb go off for someone who can
actually implement it :)

Here is the thing: I think mailing lists are almost like parties in a
lot of ways, and so we can steal ideas from parties to help write
better mailing list software. I know this sounds silly, but bear with
me.

First, the similarities. At most parties, like most mailing lists,
most people want to have interesting conversations, and they
understand the shared social standards and interests of the other
people at the party. And at most parties and most mailing lists there
are a handful of people are boors who probably don’t want to spoil the
party, but who violate those shared norms- some in very mild ways
(boring, talking too loud, posting too much), or maybe some less mild
(the guy who doesn’t think he’s a racist, but really is.)1 If you’ve
got similar mixes of people, why then do parties usually handle boors
well, while mailing lists often fail and flame out?

At a party, one thing that helps keep conversations functional is that
people who lack social graces or are uninteresting get social cues
which encourage behavioral change. Sometimes these cues are very
explicit- someone saying out loud ‘you’re not interesting, I’m
leaving.’ But those direct cues are a pain to send- they are usually
considered ‘rude,’ they require a lot of emotional energy, and they
often mean more interaction with the boor- which is the last thing
anyone wants. And blatant signals are often counter-productive too,
since they make well-intentioned people defensive instead of giving
them a face-saving way to learn they have a problem. Since direct
signals are a pain, at parties we’ve evolved a range of more subtle
cues to use- people cough and shuffle their feet, or quietly move to
another part of the room, or say ‘how about the weather?’ And this
actually works pretty well- worst case, people walk away from the boor
and have good conversations elsewhere; best case the boor gets the
message, changes their behavior, and becomes more fun to be around.

Mailing lists have no low-cost equivalents to coughing and walking
away. There is only silence, or confrontation. Mairin’s mockup excites
me since, if implemented, it could provide those more subtle, less
confrontational cues by allowing ‘-1′ digg-style votes on posts. You
could imagine making the cues even more subtle and non-confrontational
than she suggests, perhaps by sending positive cues to everyone but
negative cues anonymously and only directly/privately to the boor.

Another way that parties and mailing lists aren’t enough alike: in a
party, if you are part of a boring conversation, you just walk away.
Besides giving the social cues already discussed, this also has the
awesome effect of allowing you not to hear that conversation anymore.
In contrast, a mailing list is like a party where you can’t walk away
from a conversation. You hear every single conversation whether you
like it or not. Some of the best email software allows killing entire
threads, but that doesn’t give the social cue to the boor. They think
everyone is paying attention and so they keep talking. And for people
with less good email clients (most of us), the options are to just
tolerate the boors or leave the list altogether. Imagine if you had to
leave every party that had even a single boring conversation. You
wouldn’t go to many parties. That is what most mailing lists are like,
though.

We can fix that. You can easily imagine mailing list software that
allows you to tell the server ‘don’t send me this thread anymore.’ As
a side-effect, if enough people ignored a thread, you could tell
people posting in the thread that ‘X people have walked away from this
conversation- maybe you should take this off-list?’ These would
probably both require a fair bit of hacking, but it seems like the
upside is a more party-like list.

On the more positive side (Mairin said she liked to focus on the
positive!), at a party it is easy to find the good conversations. Just
wander around the room at any decent-sized party; you’ll see a tight
knot of people and hear they are talking excitedly. Can’t do that with
a mailing list; you’ve got to at least start reading every thread.
Once you know which threads people like (maybe via a ‘like’ link in
the footer?) you can offer a party-like ’subscribe only to threads
that already have a crowd.’ Twitter/identica sort of do this through
the idea of retweets/repeats; you don’t have to follow everyone on
earth- some people will just pass the cool stuff along- and that seems
like it could be pretty useful for mailing lists.

Note that virtually none of these behaviors require browsing the email
through a web interface or a specialized mail interface. All of them
could be implemented by ‘click here to mod up/click here to mod down’
links in the footer of each email, so people who live in their mail
clients could still participate and benefit, which I think is a must.

Bottom line: Software can’t save a mailing list full of people who
actively dislike each other. Maybe I’m crazy, though, but it seems
like software that helped mailing lists function more like parties
could really help mailing lists cope better with anti-social people.

(1 - There are only a small number who are actively malign and I’ll
ignore them for the purposes of this post- if you have too many of
them on a list, you have problems software can’t solve. That said, the
analogy may have some use in dealing with trolls too.)

---

-
Emlyn

http://point7.wordpress.com - My blog
Find me on Facebook and Buzz




More information about the extropy-chat mailing list