Intro: Hi. I'm a lurker. Name's Amanda. Pleased to meet you.
"Caitlyn M. Martin" wrote:
>> Didn't someone, about a week ago, say that each week we get a CMOTW that
>> dominates?
On Mon, 8 Nov 1999, curious wrote:
>I thought we had a healthy discussion... granted I was as up to speed as I
>should have been... I don't think any discussion is pointless...
*** >I tried very hard to reply to every response... *** (emphasis mine)
Later on he writes:
>don't think I dominated..
Curious: take this or leave this as you wish, but consider this.
If there are more than two people in a discussion, and
If at least one of them *replies to every response they see*...
What are the possible outcomes?
a) Each person responds to every message they see. The discussion grows
exponentially. Each message gets n responses where there are n
participants in the discussion. This is the standard newsgroup pattern,
but this is not (IMHO) what we want out of this mailing list!
b) Only some (or one) person responds to every message they see. If it is
only one person, then they are treating the entire list, and every other
person in the discussion, as their partner in a one-on-one conversation,
instead of as participants in a many-to-many discussion. By default, this
person or small group of persons then "dominates the discussion".
Since we don't want a), most of us don't respond to every message.
However, this lets b) happen, and then the thread gets dominated by one
person. This person is then likely to get nominated CMOTW :)
So, this shows that the strategy you mention in your first paragraph
quoted above leads to list domination. Your two statements quoted above
actually tend to contradict each other.
Like I said, take or leave this bit of wisdom as you will.
Amanda
Lurker, FreeBSD-user, trying to figure out whether to triple-boot or just
convert from FreeBSD to linux
************
[EMAIL PROTECTED] http://www.linuxchix.org
