observation

[waider]

The Shirky article that tritone linked to has a personally interesting paragraph:

But recently we've had this experience where there was a social software discussion list, and someone said "I know, let's set up a second mailing list for technical issues." And no one moved from the first list, because no one could fork the conversation between social and technical issues, because the conversation can't be forked.

This very thing happened on the DSPsrv mailing list, which started life as pretty much a hacking list and gradually became more and more social, at which point the non-technical people started objecting to the technical conversation and a second list was created for technical stuff. Of course, then when one of the non-techs wanted to ask a technical question they'd ask it on the social list because they weren't signed up to the technical list.

Comments

[zadcat.livejournal.com]

Even with nerdsholm, there was the aspect that we easily could've had separate rooms for technical discussions, but we never did. Tom had to invent topics because everyone really wanted to be in the main chat room, even if they also wanted to have a geeky discussion with a subset of the people present. And then the same kind of thing would happen when someone asked a technical question openly...

[wisn.livejournal.com]

In retrospect, nerdsholm was an IRC-patched mud. It took me a long time to realize - to the extent that I was vehemently opposed to topics for a while.

There was a time (several incarnations before perlmud) when people would go freely exploring. The mud was robust and eclectic - there were spatial puzzles and a working subway - and one of the first times I logged in I spent a while wandering around and kept getting paged: "Hey, we're all in Klortho's. You can teleport straight here."

[tritone.livejournal.com]

I remember a long time ago, when someone had set up a t.b MOO (don't remember who it was--maybe it was mjd), mjd had built a room with a little Cornell box in it, very carefully described. I always thought that was cute.

I really liked the building aspect of the t.b MOOs/MUDs, and sort of lost interest after they mostly turned into chat rooms. But it's understandable--once you've seen all the clever rooms once, you don't really need to see them again--it only continues to be interesting if people are continuously actively building new stuff, and eventually people run out of clever things to do.

[zadcat.livejournal.com]

mjd brought that old t.b moo up once, a few years ago, just briefly. It was wonderful to wander around in it, finding all these old t.b in-joke references. It too had a subway system. dhalgren remembers that occasion too, with great fondness. I wonder if it's still revivable now.