29 Oct
2020
29 Oct
'20
12:19 p.m.
On Thursday 29 October 2020 04:00:09 Janek Stolarek wrote:
I am responding in part to another user, Steven D'Aprano, because it bears on
what I say here.
I was rather misparaphrased, and my thoughts were distorted into something
quite different; probably not intentionally, but still a misrepresentation.
The TDE mailing list was not compared to a job; what I said (or at least meant
to say) was that, for people who work in tech, or whose jobs involve dealing
with such issues on a daily basis, or whose jobs keep them too busy for idle
chit-chat, then our off-topic discussions must be incredibly annoying, and I
do feel their pain.
If their inboxes are getting 50-75 emails a day, and in the TDE mailing list
we have a long off-topic discussion of apfelstrudel and the kopfs who eat it,
or, for example, "How many Nazis does it take to torture a kitten to
death?" -- Well yes, I do understand: we are wasting your precious time.
The subtext was, Gene and I, for example, are retired from the rat-race, live
alone, and don't mind off-topic distractions from strictly-business
discussions of technical issues.
I don't know the age of others on the list, but I am guessing that most of the
chit-chat comes from people who are rather older, who don't have any urgent
or serious business; and all the kitten-killing Nazis who want to censor and
control everything, and beg for moderators to save them from this madness and
chaos, I believe we would find, are comparatively younger, and have jobs that
claim their time.
While I am now semi-retired, I do remember how it was to work 60-70 hours a
week, toiling away at very hard, gruelling, physical jobs which gradually
destroyed my health. So I was not standing round an imaginary water-cooler.
But before that, until about 1996, I worked either in universities, or with
magazines and newspapers, and also as a free-lancer and a reader for
publishers.
So I do get it; I can understand your point of view, and I do wish that there
were some way that we could find or create, so that we could all just get
along. We have suggested a forum, or a separate OT mailing list; I have also
said that anybody is welcome to email me directly, or to use jabber/xmpp for
private chat. But so far, none of these are generally accepted, and the
only "reasonable" solutions, according to some, is for the moderators to take
a heavier hand, to make stricter rules and enforce them without mercy.
Please spare me any more of this discussion; it is the thread that never dies,
but periodically revives, again and again. It is all vanity and a vexation of
the spirit.
Bill
P.S. I don't seriously believe that anybody here is a Nazi, or even that they
hate kittens, but I wanted to be sure that I worked them in.
The use of
“worked in an office environment” was a reference to any group
of [non-blood related] people. “Chit-chat” is a reference to any
communication between humans (and within this thread’s context a label of
“non-productive” is probably appropriate).
Well in that case, there are times and places that are appropriate for
chit-chat and there are ones that are not. I have many times participated
in meetings that were organized to discuss work-related matters (current
research, teaching, etc.) but were hijacked by 2 or 3 people to talk about
private issues unrelated to the reason why remaining 7-8 people have come
for the meeting. These 2 or 3 people might have had fun talking but for the
remaining majority of people this was unproductive and a waste of time. As
was already said this list was created to give a fairly small community of
TDE users a place to discuss TDE-related issues. The fact that several
individuals have turned this list into their own private social media is
regretable. The reason why I said I'll probably unsubscribe from the list
if this goes on was not to somehow blackmail any of the said individuals -
becuase I doubt they'll notice or care - but to make the list moderators
aware that the community might be eroding because of the messy state of the
list. I know at least several people on the list are happy with the way the
list is at the moment. This is called a selection bias: ones that didn't
like the list have silently left and no one noticed.
There was a suggestion earlier to use filters. That's what I do at the
moment. I use a KMail filter to put all tde-users emails into a dedicated
folder and mark them as read. My original intention was to look into the
folder at my leisure and respond to those emails where I can help someone.
But the sheer amount of off-topic email is often so huge that it's just too
much effort trying to pick out the on-topic ones.
So, a humble request to list moderators: can we turn this list into a
moderated one where every email needs to be approved and thus all off-topic
emails can be rejected? Many lists on the internet work this way.
Enforicing the discussion rules is a common practice, not some sort of
mystical attempt to fight against the laws of the universe.
Janek