> I'm seeing people move to mailing lists as an alternative. See my
> article "Usenetters Leaving the Homeland" at
> http://www.august.com/dfw_uug/newsletters/1997/newsletter_9707.html.
>
> Someone mentioned the web as an alternative, and for reference
> material (like FAQs), I think most of us agree it's superior to
> Usenet. But for interactive discussions, web chat groups haven't
> taken hold.
>
Mailing lists have always seemed more serious and civil. People
connect with them over longer time intervals, and there seems to
be more of a sense of membership and social obligation.
I have had trouble, though, getting mailing list adminstrators to
see themselves as in a covenant relationship with their list
subscribers, as opposed to owners of a thing. I haven't read the
Czar notions of UsenetII but I worry about a weakness in the same
direction.
It would be better if we didn't have to go through a long
training period for people to acquire context, a sense of group
and norms. To convey this, a more wideband and intimate
connection would likely be more effective than asynchronous
ASCII.
An induction/orientation telephone chat with a veteran
participant would be an amazing tool to create a civil tone in a
group with a lot of turnover. The key is to minimize the degree
of hierarchy introduced to achieve this. That is why I am hot on
"spreading servers" -- spreading the welcome-call action items
like lawn seed over the large pool of people who, say, had posted
both since some recent threshold and before some earlier one.
In the Usenet context, a lightweight version of this is a
combination voting/spreading server. If you thing that a given
post indicates an individual needs speaking to, you forward the
post to the voting address of the server. If enough people
complain, the server issues a "please talk to this person" message
to a rotating-selection pick from a broad pool of journeyman
participants. Armed with group policies and FAQ, the assignment
of the messenger from the group is to establish a social
relationship with the offender by individual email. Draw them
out. Let them know that in the NewsGroup they are dealing with
people. It can make a radical change in their behavior.
Soc 101
-- Al Gilman