On Sat, Aug 18, 2001 at 02:06:29PM +0200, Marcus Brinkmann wrote: > Brandens mail are not educative, but sometimes funny, increasingly > often offensive. "Increasingly often offensive"? Would you care to back that up with real statistics? > You mail was educative. Branden does not include information like > pointers to the developers reference. His mails tend to be targeted at > individuals, and are always triggered by carbon copies to him, but not > by carbon copies to others. Fine, I'll start including the text that Lars did in my messages. > He could decide to post an educative mail to the list every month, for > example. This would do a much better job on educating newcomers. I don't think so. I think that a majority of the time, people who do this aren't fully aware of it. (Of course, a significant minority of the time, people CC *me* specifically on list mails because they think it's funny to be rude in this manner. I guess it's too difficult to meet me on my own playing field with witty rejoinders when one *knows* one is in the wrong, so one just keeps doing the stupid, incorrect thing in an attempt at wit. Clever, isn't it?) > Flaming individuals on a public list is not an effective way to > educate the masses. This is doing more harm than good. The practice of public shaming goes back as far as recorded history, and has been shown to be effective in many cultures. People who CC me on list mail are breaking the rules we've agreed upon as a "society" (that's why it's in the Developers' Reference). Debian has few means of social correction of its membership. This is one. If you rather I quit doing this, provide the Project with an alternative mechanism. Propose and implement a developer demerit system, including rules for explusion from the project after some number of demerits are accrued. Or maybe you think that's a cure worse than the disease. In that case, you can either killfile me or learn to move hastily past my mails griping about CC's. I don't know about your MUA, but in mine it is quite trivial to skip ahead to the next unread message without reading the entirety of the current one. > > In the long run, this improves quality of life for everyone. > > Sorry, but I don't think that my life is improved at all by these > actions of him. And my life isn't improved by spam[1] in my inbox. Neither is yours. While it's possible that people on whom I take this corrective action will only stop CC'ing me on list mails, and continue to CC anyone and everyone else, I think the odds are good that they'll stop doing it generally. So, yeah, you do benefit. This isn't to say that this benefit isn't outweighed by the emotional distress you experience when reading one of my complaints. Maybe it is. If so, I kindly ask that you not take my flames personally until and unless they're directed at you. [1] defined here as redundant or unwanted email -- G. Branden Robinson | Never attribute to malice that Debian GNU/Linux | which can be adequately explained branden@debian.org | by stupidity. http://people.debian.org/~branden/ |
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