Who’s been a part of a mailing list that’s suffered from poor-quality posts drowning out an otherwise-useful conversation?<\/p>\n
OK, hands down. \u00a0It seems like it happens to just about every worthwhile mailing list I’ve ever been on: the quality of the posts goes to hell. \u00a0And in fact there are a few sub-problems:<\/p>\n
I was watching this happen yet again, to yet another list, and it got me to thinking. \u00a0The classic solution is moderation, but that tends to turn in to a dull dictatorship, not to mention cause a lot of work for the moderator. \u00a0What if there was some sort of “game mechanic” that could cause people to self-regulate the quality of their posts in a simple mailing list?<\/p>\n
As with many ideas, I started complicated. \u00a0The idea revolved around a points system, where people could up- and down-vote participants. \u00a0Submissions that got more upvotes would be disseminated to more people – the most popular posts would go to everyone; the lousy stuff would just go to a dozen random subscribers and die out. \u00a0 If you liked something you read, you could reply, and it would go to the author, plus everyone else who had replied or “liked” the post, so you could have a more in-depth conversation about topics. \u00a0And as an afterthought, there would be some sort of cool-down period so that people couldn’t get in to flame wars – once you replied, it would take a while before you could post again.<\/p>\n
At that point, I realized that:<\/p>\n
a) There was no way I was ever going to implement something this complicated, and<\/p>\n
b) I had pretty much just reinvented Hacker News.<\/p>\n
I was about to shrug and abandon the idea, but one tiny bit stuck in my head – the cool-off period. \u00a0What if mailing lists had a limit to how frequently you could post? \u00a0This seemed like an interesting idea. \u00a0It would let arguments cool down between replies, plus – if it was a little longer – it might make you think twice about if your writing was good enough to warrant a period of enforced silence. \u00a0Self-moderate, that is.<\/p>\n
And what if you took it to an extreme? \u00a0What if every utterance contained within a vow of monastic silence, digitally enforced? \u00a0Wouldn’t you think twice before invoking Goodwin’s Law over a comic book? \u00a0<\/em>Hypothetically speaking, of course, not that I would be involved in any such argument.<\/p>\n And so I created “The Best Thing This Year” around the idea of a mailing list with an enforced 1-year quiet period after every post. \u00a0Created is a bit generous, actually – I threw up a launchrock page\u00a0\u00a0and waited to see what would happen.<\/p>\n And what happened was \u00a0surprising. \u00a0First, a lot of people signed up. \u00a0 It started when I shared the idea (still just a launchrock page) with John Cook over late night karaoke, and he wrote up a quick article<\/a>. That got my butt in gear to actually build something to, you know, deliver emails. \u00a0The result was a terrible hybrid of Amazon SES, PHPlist running on an EC2 micro instance, and some custom PHP courtesy vworker.com to replace the signup page and pump directly in to the mailing list. \u00a0I also threw up a phpBB discussion board on my Dreamhost account for good measure.<\/p>\n My friend Elan kicked things off with the first piece about his new, augmented-reality sitcom (!) at rides.tv<\/a>, and Pando Daily<\/a> and Mother Jones Magazine<\/a> jumped in, talking about the post and the list. \u00a0And here we are, two weeks later, and the list has nearly 2,000 subscribers… and a surprising lack of submissions.<\/em><\/p>\n Not a total absence, mind you. \u00a0There’s been an epic piece about parenthood that came out for Mothers’ Day. \u00a0Yesterday was a unbelievable story about the first man to do a commercial bungee jump off of Corona arch in Moab, Utah. \u00a0But the pace has been slow.<\/p>\n And I’m afraid not all submissions represented the best thing a year had to offer. \u00a0The first submission was mostly shit – not metaphorically, but literally; the primary topic of the post was human feces. \u00a0While I hope to keep a light touch, I decided that did not need to wind up in a few thousand inboxes, and did not allow that submission to post.<\/p>\n But in general, there have been few submissions to this rather incredible audience. \u00a0I won’t out list members, but I’ve looked through the email signups and there are a lot of awesome people listening to what gets said.<\/p>\n So the rules continue as before. \u00a0You can sign up at thebestthingthisyear.com<\/a> and you will get new posts immediately. \u00a0Over at discuss.thebestthingthisyear.com<\/a> you can read previous posts and chat about new ones when they come up. \u00a0New signups have a cool-down period before they can submit, to ensure everyone doesn’t post at once – in retrospect, probably not solving for the right decision, but the policy is two weeks old and this is the internet so that makes it a tradition.<\/p>\n The posts will be, it seems, mostly excellent. \u00a0And if current trends hold up, fairly rare.<\/p>\n And I have the answer to my original question. \u00a0What would people do on a mailing list if they could only speak once a year?<\/p>\n Mostly just shut up and listen.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" Who’s been a part of a mailing list that’s suffered from poor-quality posts drowning out an otherwise-useful conversation? OK, hands down. \u00a0It seems like it happens to just about every worthwhile mailing…<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-308","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.danshapiro.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/308","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.danshapiro.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.danshapiro.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.danshapiro.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.danshapiro.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=308"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.danshapiro.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/308\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.danshapiro.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=308"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.danshapiro.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=308"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.danshapiro.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=308"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}