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Comment by CJefferson | Hacker News Reader

For me, the biggest problem with mailing lists is that most are extremely unwilling to ban people — I understand this as a principle, but there are several lists I was on where a significant proportion of the posts were one person, arguing with everyone. Slowly people left, and the list died.

I’d love to see an option in mailing list confits that would, at least, make it easy to enforce people can’t be more than say 5% of posts — this could obviously be overriden by admins, but would give a base where no one can swamp the list.

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Public groups are a good place to get to know someone's online personality.

But the real work seems to get done on private invite-only groups, which might be on the same, or different, media.

For example I'm involved in a community that uses skype groups as a channel. There are public groups, and there are private groups that only bring in people who have proved to be well behaved, and useful (and willing).

This mimics real life. We have layers - the get-stuff-done folk have back-channels to keep things moving even if the public space is functioning poorly.

I want peer reviewed lists-- your post will in theory burn the time of 1000 people or whatever. Yet the first person who reads it might see holes in it that make it a waste of time to read. So instead, have it go to a couple people first.

Better posters could do this themselves (at least for new threads), but its the people who don't care much about the quality of their posts that need it the most.

I think the challenge is that it'll only work if there is a high enough density of sophisticated participants that can understand that a reviewers role isn't to agree or not, but to help make the time spend reading it by all the other readers as well spent as it can be. But where it could work, it could be a big improvement. -- think of all the posts that the author would skip when someone just points them to where it was discussed before.

> understand that a reviewers role isn't to agree or not

Humans are universally terrible at doing this.

IMHO the only hope is to give them two voting axes, so they can placate their lizard-brain's "downvote to disagree" impulse but still apply a separate but positive expository-quality rating. If you only collect the latter kind of rating it won't work.

TL;DR: in addition to thumbs-up/thumbs-down, give people poop-emoji/gold-star. I would hand out a lot of poopy-thumbs-up votes.

The fact multi-axis voting has not taken off really has made the internet a worse place.

+2 Insightful!

Slashdot's system came close, but it only did half of what's necessary.

IIRC there were no options where the +number and label disagreed -- they didn't have "+1 Spammy" or "-1 Insightful".

> Yet the first person who reads it might see holes in it that make it a waste of time to read. So instead, have it go to a couple people first.

Sounds like upvote/downvote in a subreddit...?

That's more of a popularity contest than peer review. A reviewer could give you feedback like "I can't figure out what you're talking about could you add citations for FIZBUZZ and FOOBAR?" or "What you're suggesting appears to be the same as this 2013 proposal. If what you're proposing is different or if you think the idea will work this time could you explain?"

The end result is a post which is higher quality rather than just a competition for the hottest hottakes.

It's amazing that the popular mailing list manager Mailman doesn't seem to have the feature of user-defined filtering. You should be able to send a command to the list robot not to send you messages that match certain criteria.

If you embroil yourself in some debate you don't want, you will still see the subsequent posts, as you continue to be Cc:'d on the debate. CC's reach you directly, bypassing the robot.

But the filter would at least not show you newly started discussions which match some pattern.

Furthermore, it should be easy to move or synchronize such rules between mailing lists (even on different servers, run by different orgs).

Of course, you can always filter locally in your MUA or possibly MTA.

This is one of my most disliked parts of the email model. I generally have an MTA running and IMAP server where I set rules such as blocking mailing list threads and use my MUAs as dumb clients to fetch from the IMAP server. Setting the rules on the MTA is a bit of a pain but it works and keeps my setup portable.

> If you embroil yourself in some debate you don't want, you will still see the subsequent posts, as you continue to be Cc:'d on the debate. CC's reach you directly, bypassing the robot.

This is where client side filtering comes in. Mail and News clients come with sophisticated filtering capabilities. For example, if you keep getting CC'd in a flame war type thread, you could filter replies based on the From header, the Subject header, and/or even checking for certain terms in the message body.

> Of course, you can always filter locally in your MUA

Well, the user's agent is the correct place to put the user's filters.

From purely and efficiency point of view, filter which removes events should be as high up the chain as possible. As close to the source as possible.

Say that the mailing list robot is processing an email from somebody and it turns out that every single mailing list subscriber is blocking that email for one reason or another. The mailing list robot can drop it in the bitbucket. No mail servers need to be contacted.

In this situation, it would be possible for the mailing list to do something interesting: it could prevent that message from making into the list archive, like it never happened. That is not possible with user filtering. If nobody receives the message due to downstream user filtering, the robot has no way of knowing that.

Effectively the list-side user defined filters could act as a vote of whether a message is actually accepted by the mailing list and made available in its web archive. If the current subscribers don't accept a post, then the list of such doesn't accept the post.

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