[asterisk-biz] Mexico Proper and Mobile

Tue Aug 30 19:48:19 CDT 2011

Yes your comic responses are half my reason for sticking around ;)

I think the biz list is a good idea and most moderated lists suffer in speed of delivery and contribution

Sent from my iPhone

On Aug 30, 2011, at 8:43 PM, Alex Balashov <abalashov at evaristesys.com> wrote:

> On 08/30/2011 04:20 PM, Bryan M. Johns wrote:
> 
>> I would be interested to know if any of you think that Digium should
>> moderate the biz list as a means of preventing abuse?  Thoughts?
>> Feelings?
> 
> For what my opinion is worth, I would resoundingly say "no".  It has always seemed to me that Digium's hands-off approach to the mailing lists has resulted in more orderly--and at the same time, interesting--forums than ones characterised by a high degree of policing.   The lack of interventionist moderation is not responsible for a decline in the activity of this list.
> 
> Yes, there have been some spectacular flamewars here, and at times, spectacularly juvenile ones.  (It goes without saying that I have not been above the fray.)  But they play out rather quickly for two reasons, as far as I can see:
> 
>   1. People have the existential realisation that nobody is here to
>      restore order or define boundaries themselves, which makes them
>      feel exposed, rather like the feeling of digging one's hole
>      deeper and deeper.
> 
>      When there is a default background assumption of "adult
>      supervision", participants have less compulsion to introspect
>      about their own behaviour.  Instead, they default to the
>      moderator.  If the moderator has not intervened, it means
>      what you're doing is okay by default.
> 
>      It's the same with any system of rules, really.  If you give
>      people a non-trivial body of statutory law or a powerful
>      arbitration body to settle all disputes subjectively, they
>      disengage from philosophical consideration of morality
>      and justice situationally, in an applied, detailed sense.
>      Instead, they just content themselves with worrying about
>      whether X is against the law or not.
> 
>      Most list participants are pretty intelligent.  If you don't
>      grant them a reprieve from having to think about what they're
>      doing by providing an avenue to which to defer, they come to
>      their senses quite quickly.
> 
>      It's the same principle that provided for relatively stable
>      social order in the frontier settlements of the American West.
>      It turns out people, given a certain level of intelligence and
>      what might be generally called "culturedness", can cooperate
>      and police themselves fairly well.
> 
>   2. Moderation adds latency to the process of winding down bad
>      behaviour by creating opportunities at every point to have a
>      referendum on whether the moderator's actions are appropriate,
>      and generally talk about a lot of meta.
> 
>      When there is no moderation, there's not much there except the
>      content itself, which removes much of the cloud of political
>      valence that policing can otherwise have.
> 
> It is very advantageous to have bad spikes of behaviour burn themselves out quickly, in the kind of way in which networks not substantially firewalled at the edge tend to weather [D]DoS attacks better than ones which are.  If there are just routers efficiently forwarding packets, they tend to make it into the network without taking any of the core infrastructure down.  Firewalls, on the other hand, require a lot of statekeeping and incremental resource commitment to maintain connection-oriented or other flow awareness.
> 
> Centralised moderation is generally an unwinnable game, anyway:
> 
> - Too loose?  "I can't believe Digium besmirches the soul of this list by allowing this twaddle to be posted!  Where are the moderators when you need them?"
> 
> - Too conservative?  "Digium's lists are tyrannically censored!"
> 
> - Too slow?  Nearly real-time communication is a productive virtue on mailing lists, and having to wait two hours for every post to be approved (if that were the moderation strategy, for instance) is frustrating.
> 
> - Too fast?  "The moderators really jumped the gun on this one!"
> 
> - In general, any decision the moderator makes is an opportunity to hold a big meta-referendum on whether the moderator did the right thing, if the moderator is a positive or negative force in the universe generally, if Digium's insidious commercial agenda shines through in its editorial decisions, etc.
> 
> All this to say:
> 
> 1. Nature has a way of breaking that which does not bend.  We'll get a lot further embracing this fact than resisting it.
> 
> 2. Mailing lists are indebted to the very democratic, humanity-affirming spirit of the early Internet.  Let's fight for the heart of this one without losing its soul.
> 
> Cheers,
> 
> -- Alex
> 
> -- 
> Alex Balashov - Principal
> Evariste Systems LLC
> 260 Peachtree Street NW
> Suite 2200
> Atlanta, GA 30303
> Tel: +1-678-954-0670
> Fax: +1-404-961-1892
> Web: http://www.evaristesys.com/
> 
> --
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