Dangers of skipping...my solution for now

[tcmay@netcom.com (Timothy C. May)]

Earlier I wrote about the dangers of skipping too many messages, of a
kind of "response cluster" when the same question gets answered
many times.

Somewhat making their point, several people have responded to me
privately saying they try to answer questions in e-mail and then let
the questioner summarize the responses in public, if he wishes.

Advantages of this approach:
- reduces repetitive answers (saves list bandwidth)
- questioner can synthesize from all answers

Disadvantages:
- others may want to see the answers and may, under this approach,
flood the list with "me too" lines (seen in many newsgroups, when
"send answer in e-mail" gets met by "Hey, I'd be interested, too"
follow-ups).
- others may not know the question has already been answered,
resulting in much wasted time (e.g., 30 private e-mail messages all
addressing the Navajo code talker question).

(Aside: there's a standard game theory example on how often one should
help...it works better in game theory than in practice.)

Finally, to me the most serious problem with moving more responses to
private e-mail is that the discussion group aspect of the list gets
lost.

So I still don't have an answer. However, as an experiment, I plan to
try to move as many of my responses off the list proper as possible.

Things that are clearly of interest to a reasonable fraction of the
entire list, I'll still post to the list.

(Note again, as many of us have described, the Extropians list
software allows threads to be ::excluded, as well as authors, so
repetitive traffic can be reduced. It takes a minute or so to send off
the ::exclude, so many of us prefer to just hit the "D" key promptly.
Still, a portent of things to come.)

-Tim

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