xen on wrote:
hello everyone,
i am a new list member unlurking for the first time.
Glad to have you aboard
i belong to many lists mostly to do with music, film, and liturature. ive noticed that the literary and cinematic lists seem to have a relatively laissez faire attitude about off-topic posts as long as they started somewhere on-topic, but music lists are, as a rule, very intolerant off off-topic posts.... does anyone have any reasons why they think this is?
This is probably because people generally like many different bands, and are therfore subscribed to several f band specific lists. It's easy to end up seeing the same off-topic discussion half a dozen times on different lists, which gets very irritating very quickly, especially when people are trolling and flamewars erupt. To make following the antics of dozens of bands a viable spare time proposition rather than a full-time job, the lists have to be fairly low traffic. People seem to be happiest with a wide assortment of tightly regulated on-topic lists and just one or two free-form discussions with like minded people, if everything goes free-form it gets unmanageable and repetitive. I'm reminded of the Underworld fan list, which was a very high traffic list, with maybe 100 posts a day. Many people missed the opportunity to see a secret comeback gig because the slightly subtle message about it simply got lost in the noise. The same think seems to (sadly) have happened here, with people missing out on the new blacksmoke track because they assumed the whole list was in flame-mode. - Andy_R