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Comment by dmitryminkovsky | Hacker News Reader

When does weird become too weird? I’m building a non-instant messenger, for example.

I don't know! That sounds like a worthwhile project to me; I'm on one email mailing list which only comes out in a nightly digest in order to remove the incentive for instant responses and promote thoughtful response instead. Harvard's Rotisserie system (http://h2oproject.law.harvard.edu/) was another effort in that direction. And I was also on Slashdot starting around 1997, and I observed the incentive structure of its commenting system pushing discussions in the opposite direction — with commenters racing to make the first comment in a new comment thread, even if it was just "First post", before the voting system was introduced.

The biggest difficulty I've had with such things is a sort of Gresham's Law of attention: because Twatter and Fecebutt (and IRC) offer the possibility of instant reactions, I have a strong temptation to spend time on them instead of in more thoughtful, slower forms of interaction. The wild success of Fecebutt and, even more so, Zynga, suggests I'm not the only one.

I hadn't heard about Gresham's Law. Thanks a lot for that. And I definitely hadn't heard about Rotisserie:

> The Rotisserie implements an innovative approach to online discussion that encourages measured, thoughtful discourse in a way that traditional threaded messaging systems cannot. In contrast to the completely asynchronous, broadcast-to-broadcast mode of existing threaded messaging systems, the Rotisserie adds structure to both the timing and the flow of the discussion.

Thanks for that too. That's exactly the communication platform I made/am making. For me there's also the "human" element as described in Time, Work-Discipline, and Industrial Capitalism [0]. Like how "human time" is not "modern life time," but we're still humans so wouldn't it be nice to have a space where we communicate in human time. But yes Gresham's Law... hmmm...

[0] https://www.sv.uio.no/sai/english/research/projects/anthropo...

Email is a cesspool, this is a genius idea.

Thank you. I’m not happy with some aspects of it but will share it on here soon.

E-mail?

Rolled it out a bit as “email” actually but that proved confusing for people: “email” carries a lot of baggage, social and technical. Why do you say email? It’s instant.

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