META: Re: SL4?

From: Mitchell Howe (mitch.howe@gmail.com)
Date: Wed Jan 18 2006 - 14:08:54 MST


So SL4 is no longer the lean, fresh list that it once was. There was
never any reason to think that it could stay new forever. The SL4
idea-space is no longer virgin territory. The main avenues have been
surveyed out. The old-growth forests have been thinned. The tavern by
the pier has already burned to the ground twice.

Does this mean it's time to redefine the posting guidelines, especially
in regards to reading the archives? I leave that to the owner to decide.

I was countermanded a while back when I tried to kill a thread about AI
Jail. It was an official "dead horse" topic, so I thought it was a
no-brainer. But Eliezer felt that, as a highly relevant topic, it
deserved continued debate, so long as people could maintain quality
standards in the process. Is this possible without tracking back and
forth over older ground on occasion? Probably not.

So, I've been hesitant to snipe on-topic threads sustained by people who
communicate reasonably well and have something to say, even when I know
that, somewhere in the archives, the points have been made before.

That said, the archives do exist. If I were a relative newcomer to SL4,
I wouldn't try to read them from end to end, but I would definitely
search for specific topics I was interested in discussing, if only to
avoid embarassing myself.

With this in mind, another good question to ask yourself before posting
is, "will this comment be 'signal' or 'noise' to people going through
the archives?" This is subtly different from the question of whether a
posting will be relevant in the here and now.

I'm not going to kill a thread about list moderation, for obvious
reasons... but let's at least tag it as the META discussion it is, lest
we muddy up the archives even more.

--SL4 List Sniper



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