On May 7, 2012, at 11:35 AM, Ask Bjørn Hansen wrote: > On May 7, 2012, at 11:26, Matt Simerson wrote: > >> Is there some community I'm unaware of where replying to the individual on a >> public list is the norm? > > The mistake of replying to the individual is cheap.
It also requires extra effort on the vast majority of replies. The point of being on a public list is to encourage "group" discussion, and replying to the list facilitates that. Requiring extra effort to do that is not expensive but is is frequent. It's death by a thousand paper cuts. The "easy" workaround of Reply-All means recipients get duplicate emails by hitting "Reply-All". Of course, good MUA's suppress the duplicate, but it's still wasteful. For the obsessive, that don't like burdening other users with Reply-All detritus, just in case the senders MUA sucks, or they're reading email on a phone where bandwidth isn't cheap/free, I manually change the reply-to address on every single email. > The mistake of replying to the list is potentially expensive in time wasted, > embarrassment, etc. And it's also rare. In the 1990's, and perhaps even early 2000's when mailing lists were new, this argument had some validity. But everyone that ever might join a mailing list already has, and practically every one has already made the "oops, that should have been private" mistake. Because practically every list currently has Reply-To as the default, it is "what is expected" by list users. > http://www.unicom.com/pw/reply-to-harmful.html > http://woozle.org/~neale/papers/reply-to-still-harmful.html Those arguments held some weight 10 years ago. If that were the default on most lists today, the world might be a better place. Or not. But either way, besides a rare few holdouts, that's just not how anyone expects mailing lists to work. Matt
