A thread to discuss naming threads, board policy, new thread suggestions, and anything else that has to do with board administration and maintenance. Guaranteed to include lively debate and polls. Natter discouraged, but not deleted.
Current Stompy Feet: ita, Jon B, DXMachina, P.M. Marcontell, Liese S., amych
I was just coming over with that 'Suela. Instead, I'll just drop some quotes that made me go "Ah."
he was driving himself crazy, in the colloquial sense of the term, trying to figure out whether or not he should be looking at the situation as: Are these individuals taking action on their own? Or is this a coordinated group?
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So there's this question "What is required to make a large, long-lived online group successful?" and I think I can now answer with some confidence: "It depends." I'm hoping to flesh that answer out a little bit in the next ten years.
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Of the things you have to accept, the first is that you cannot completely separate technical and social issues.
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The second thing you have to accept: Members are different than users. A pattern will arise in which there is some group of users that cares more than average about the integrity and success of the group as a whole. And that becomes your core group
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The third thing you need to accept: The core group has rights that trump individual rights in some situations. This pulls against the libertarian view that's quite common on the network, and it absolutely pulls against the one person/one vote notion. But you can see examples of how bad an idea voting is when citizenship is the same as ability to log in.
I do disagree, however, with his "things to design for" section.
Isn't the ID numbers a way of determining an "Old Hat" ita?
There's also backchannel. It's all so familiar. At the Bronze, people used shout out lists as a way to sort of announce how long they've been there. Status. Or announcing that they've been around forever, frequently.
I'm sorry that he doesn't talk about death-by-obsolescence as well as death-by-flameout, though.
Isn't the ID numbers a way of determining an "Old Hat" ita?
Unreliably. Is Joy an Old Hat? Margaret T? Jim Perry? They all have IDs under 50.
They all have IDs under 50.
In a year, they will be ancient. When member numbers hit 2000, they will be as the mighty redwood shading the struggling sapling. Why do we have member numbers? I think I missed out why.
Why do we have member numbers?
Technically, we don't. People started looking at the URLs for their profiles and noting the numbers there.
They could be any randomly generated unique identifier, but the one the database does by itself (and therefore faster than any other method) is sequential numbering.
Please, I beg of you all, can we not call longtime users here "Old Hats?" Please?
For what it's worth, the original OH list was whipped up by the owner of the newsgroup archive from memory, and left off a whole bunch of regular posters he'd plumb forgot about.
And using user numbers doesn't work to establish involvement here -- I'm 200-something, and I helped build the damn thing.
Fair nuff. I've been clear about my elitist leanings, so you all know where I fall in opinion on the matter, I suppose.
Not to get all meta, but for me supporting voting was me trying to compromise between the people with elitist leanings and the people with populist leanings, and yet still get us some closure on issues. And these two groups BOTH contained peopled who are part of the "core group" in my opinion, so it was very hard to think of a solution that imposed some rules without imposing too many. Of course, since some of the people with libertarian leanings now neither vote nor read this thread, I don't know how successful it was.
