Meta-P-List ramble

[Doug Millison]

I've supported a moderated list for quite a while -- got flamed like crazy
last time I suggested it, in fact.

With a moderator, as soon as a debate becomes personal, it goes offlist.
You could also easily lose anonymous email participants who care enough to
drop their flame-bait but not enough to sign their names.

I follow two lively lists that are moderated, PSYARTS and H-FILM, and one
list for Web design professionals that is a private list where messages are
just passed through without filtering but with a moderator who will step in
to moderate as necessary. There's no shortage of debate, sometimes quite
sharp. But the moderators block the bs, or stop it when the participants
don't seem to be able to disengage. The discussion on those lists is
consistently more substantial than Pynchon-L's for quite a while.

Moderating a list takes substantial effort, of course.  And list
participants have to accept a different set of expectations for list
discourse. Needless to say, virtually every frequent P-list poster, present
company included,  has been involved in onlist exchanges that probably
wouldn't be tolerated on a moderated list. A hell of a flame war was raging
when I first subscribed to Pynchon-L a couple of years ago, and the embers
were still glowing from JS's Lineland research project. Having a moderator
also wouldn't stop the determined troll who has mastered the art of baiting
a hook, setting it, and reeling in foolish interlocutors -- but it would
stop the results from dragging on.

-Doug

At 8:09 PM -0400 6/24/99, davemarc wrote:
>This nonsense is tiresome.  The more it continues, the more I find myself
>supporting a moderated list.