Zed Shaw: Librelist to take on Google, Yahoo mailing lists
zedshaw.com
zedshaw.com
This strikes me as hitting the nail on the head!
The implication of the parent is that since Google (by analogy TV companies) make money from advertising, they have less incentive to take care of users.
Ratings determine how much a network can charge the advertisers for commercial time. Ratings are a measure of viewer satisfaction. This isn't coincidental.
But, even if something gets very small amounts of attention, it is still incredibly cheap to serve ads (because that's all automated) and, as a result, make money. The user experience only has to be good enough to keep enough people using it that you break even on the infrastructure.
The world of online advertising has not been rewarding to those that provide not very popular services cheaply. This has certainly never been the case for Google. The only services doing well from advertising on a large scaleare the very popular ones
This thread is awful. Every comment is completely on its own. No context. I say 'Google has the equivalent of online space and of course I have to prove that to be true in every possible context.
It is the earlier post by zedshaw that made a general claim that when the provider gets paid by an advertiser, a user cannot count on being looked after (more then in direct payments). I gave an example of industry that for decades has been proving this statement wrong. I get pounced, red herrings swinging.
If you are continuing the argument of the GGparent comment as you seem to be, you are arguing that TV is completely different from web because TV shows need to meet a certain threshold to stay on air. This is why TV people care about ratings/customer satisfaction.
In the eyes of many, myself included, the example of TV proves your point wrong. TV content producers seem to be motivated and geared to produce mindless dreck for the LCD viewer. Hits happen occasionally and unpredictably, so that's not actually what they try to do. Excellent reviews from critics doesn't mean you can charge advertisers more. Mediocrity is the rule of the day.
The advertising based system on television is part of the reason why shows must have broad appeal, and often cater to a lowest common denominator. Shows which may require more effort from the viewer may get a smaller audience, but that audience may be much more satisfied. Unfortunately, since television's model is based only on total viewing audience, it doesn't matter how satisfied the viewer really is, just as long as they keep watching.
Gross viewer satisfaction by some definition of 'viewer' & 'satisfactions.' Very similar metric to box office sales where consumers pay directly. Better?
None of this is relevant to the point being discussed. The point is that just because company A gets paid by Advertiser B that wants to reach Customer C does not mean that company A does not have the incentive to serve customer C properly.
Gross viewer satisfaction by some definition of 'viewer' & satisfactions.
I don't think that's a nitpick. I'll sometimes watch a TV show, but still not be wholly satisfied with it. He's pointing out a problem with the metric. With the current economics, companies that produce TV would be most pleased if a whole ton of somewhat dissatisfied people watch a show, versus a few that love a show. The economics encourage mediocrity.
Networks cancel shows not because nobody watches them, but because nobody will advertise on them, and they sure as hell don't care if the viewers who do watch it want to keep watching.
Just ask Joss Whedon. :-)
Overall it looks nice. The most interesting/controversial bit to me is the following (taken from librelist.com):
Nobody Can Be Taken Off
The “libre” in the name means freedom for everyone to discuss their opinions, so nobody will have the right to boot you off or enforce arbitrary “list Nazi” rules simply because you disagree with them.
That of course doesn’t mean you should act like a jerk, but the librelist.com philosophy is that healthy communities can survive and need “trolls”.
Can anyone provide a defense (from Zed or anyone) for the idea that a healthy community needs trolls? I can understand the need for dissent and argument, but it seems to me that trolling is categorically different from those.
Trolls are the predators of internet communities. They prey on the sick, the weak, and the perennially outraged (mostly this last group) and, if they are successful, drive them away from the community. A community without perennially outraged people is better than a community with them.
The question is whether this benefit is worth the potential cost, which is probably something that almost entirely dependent on the nature of the community and the personalities of the trolls involved.
Edit: By "perennially outraged", I am referring to people who are constantly angry or miserable for no reason other than that such an emotional state is "what they do". They aren't trolls themselves, any more than a particularly unpleasant customer is a troll. They're just constantly unhappy and vocal about it.
Most of the places on the Internet where I hang out, the trolls like the community they are a part of and are rather uninterested in destroying it. They do their thing primarily to get an emotional reaction out of people, and the easiest people to get an emotional reaction out of are the people who are constantly emotional. Because the overlap between permanently unhappy people and the "good" people (the latter group consisting of, e.g., core devs, or mods, or various other "central" members of the community) is (for most types of communities that I'm interested in) pretty small, that's not really a problem.
On the other hand, turning 4chan loose on a Neopets mailing list would probably end badly for the community, yes.
Over at kuro5hin.org we experienced a 'trollocaust' as it were, wherein the trolls successfully drove all the emotional beautiful souls off to another site (hulver.com). If the critical mass of trolls grows too large, community can't really be sustained.
Generally there's three classes of trolls (this is just my opinion):
Griefers are what you describe. People who are more interested in gaming the implied social norms of the community in order to destroy it. These people suck, but totally blocking them eliminates the second class:
Dissenters are people who just disagree with you, and considering nearly every open source project is started by opinionated dissenters it's just bound to happen. I believe that without these people though your project dies because your ideas stagnate and you never really deal with actual criticism until it's too late. Also, they may just be the vocal part of your user base that wants something you don't.
Finally, moderators who use their moderation powers to "indirectly troll". By this I mean people who unilaterally deny people's communications because it would interfere with their hidden agendas. If you go look at nearly every failed community, at the heart is someone like this.
What I think, and what we'll find out, is that what really drives people away is not the presence of all of these, but the dominance of one of these types of "trolls". My idea is to just balance them out and give the community a real vote on what is what.
Your assumption is that it's impossible to differentiate category one from category two. I see no reason for that to be true.
Here's a question for you: If you moderate a list, do you let subscribers see what you've moderated and why? If it's for the benefit of the mailing list community, then why not?
If I did moderate a list (which I don't), and there was an ability for subscribers to see the raw feed, I'd allow that. I am curious if your approach will work. It's similar to how things operate here, but I wonder if it can work with no moderators. (HN does have editors who monitor flagged articles and comments.)
When you don't have to worry about if someone's being a troll or not real conversation happens.
This allows the creation of lists whose entire purpose is trolling each other (i.e. trolls trolling trolls trolling trolls...). Or in general if I think that the 'troll' flag is 'censorship,' then I have the option to disable people (on my list at least) from using it.
edit: fixed a typo
I think usenet can speak to the problem of trolls ruinging the community. Which is why web forms came to dominate, despite usenet's superiority in technical features and access (most people had email clients before web browsers).
Usenet was ruined by a small number of people who were trying to ruin others reputations by posting all sorts of insane diatribes to the group. Plus the spammers. Uggg... the spamemrs.
Perhaps in some way it is better to have "troll trolls" than people who appear to be normal but are actually very trollish. I remember a community where a bunch of people would just answer all questions with:
"OMG WTF? NOT THIS AGAIN. Use the search FFS."
Now this was more or less encouraged behaviour as Admins and Mods did this but these guys took it too far. So it eventually was trolling all but in name.
To be honest i'm not sure I believe all that but at least he has a "troll rating" system.
In other words, with the librelist code, it IS possible to have a middle land where the community can voice their opinion of what's spam or troll without eliminating real dissenting opinions and debate.
I certainly look forward to a community where the "owner" is less able to control people's input according to their own tastes.
Stackoverflow has recently banned swearing.... because. This the kind of thing that pisses me off.
Nothing to allow tyranny of the minority or majority. It’s all about free speech and open communication.
However, this is balanced with the above spam marking, and potentially a “troll rating” that’s similar to a spam rating.Of course presumably there will still be people with the authority to remove really bad examples like that. But will they have the time to look after the many many lists which will probably soon exist?
On the inverse side, I think I'll also track your voting rates, and if you tend to rate too many people as trolls or spam then your voting will also be throttled.
But, it's also just a plan. The goal is to create something that lets communities moderate themselves without too much tyranny of the majority of minority. That's why the code is open, so that people with ideas about how to do that can help make it happen.
While I like the idea, I'm not sure it's a good idea to label it as such in the interface.
You might also have a hard time figuring out the genuine flaggings from the ones made by spambots...
Maybe deliver to people in a reputation order and slight delay to allow the damage to be minimized?
So yeah, you'll get some spam. Install a spam filter and just accept that's the price you pay for being on the internet, and we'll do our best to reduce it.
For fucks sake trolls are just people who do things. They aren't magical beings that need to be warned off or they will eat you.
In Adult World we deal with simply don't give attention to attention wanters.
I'm not saying this to troll, I can just imagine lots of situations where I may want to set up a mailing list, but few where I want that list to become some sort of anarchic debating society where someone else's software handles the moderation for me.
Maybe I'll call it the "tin foil hat" release of Librelist. :-)
Glad he's taking on the neglected lists @ google & yahoo.
Many systems may allow this behavior, but that doesn't mean it actually happens. At least I've never personally encountered it on a mailing list. Is it really that big a problem?
On the other hand, maybe the current state of comp.lang.lisp is a good example of what a mailing list with no moderation might look like. There are still good conversations, but there is so much spam and trolling that I don't bother reading it anymore -- it took too much work to sift through all the junk. Even worse, the trolls create an environment that is not exactly inviting to new users.
That's not exactly true. At Yahoo, I believe this is up to the list owner. (I know my most active list there allows viewing of archives without logging in.)
At Google, it's weirder: if you're not logged into Google at all, you can often view the archives without being prompted for a login. But if you are logged into Google elsewhere, they demand you either reconfirm your login with Groups, or logout entirely, before allowing you to view to the archives.
(That's still a problem -- enough of an annoyance in fact that I wouldn't consider hosting any more groups there until it's fixed. But it seems mainly an eccentricity of their cross-site login policies, and does still offer a route to non-logged-in viewing.)
>You also subscribe to a list by simply sending your first message to list@librelist.com. It will then confirm you and send your original email on to the list. No special subscribe addresses, difficult workflows, or endless help references. Just send an email.
Totally unacceptable IMHO, and unlike how any other mailing list functionality works. If you send a message to the list, it should arrive there, without confirmation from you, and you shouldn't be subscribed unless you explicitly want that. Otherwise how can you participate in a conversation on the mailinglist without subscribing or allow cross-mailinglist posts?
I'm sold
How do you reconcile these two when an unpopular opinion can be marginalized as troll or spam?
What else do you have?
As a year of graduates we use a yahoogroups list since 2000, and we never changed it. Yahoogroups is currently running on 1995 technology, and google groups get spammed, let alone the web pages look like a pharmacy store. Also both lack the "we are a group" feeling.
So yes, since we're looking for a better interface and couldn't find one hitting 2010, if done properly this would be a definite winner.
I personally use the web interface for busy listings just to keep things separate from my actual email, and email client for only very low-volume listings. Am I missing out on something?