[Reader-list] What ails the Sarai Reader List?

Sat Aug 27 15:13:20 IST 2005

Dear Kiran,

After composing this e mail, I recalled that the form argument you
were making used the Sarai reader list as an example of a 'community'
that the audience was familiar with.And in a sense, one is devoting
more time to the 'ills' /'ailments' of the list as an end in itself,
hoping that the questions of form and content will also be addressed
in one's responses to you.

I think some feedback from Sarai readers (and administrators) as to
what they want may be helpful in attending to the question of helping
improve an e mail based list.You said the list was crumbling and I
wonder what the 'symptoms' of this are.Was it better than it is? I do
not know, being relatively new to this list.

I am sure the responses will be both about issues to which technical
solutions have to be found/can be found and others would be about
critical responses to say the lack of discussion, which was a grouse
you certainly had.Would solving the latter problem be dependent
entirely on rearranging the structural elements ?

Sarai's own targets and agenda will also have to be taken into consideration.

I think the qualitative differences between the Live Journal and the
Reader List must be considered too.The first is primarily from your
account of it, a bloggers network.

I want to as a 'consumer' want to answer things of concern to me:
Is the load of the Sarai Reader List too high? No.
Does the flood of e mails by month end bother me? No.
How does one deal with the list? Does one want it more orderly
accessible fashion? I see little problem in the exercise of a degree
of judgement and selection.Why should deletion of messages be a
problem? I would like to receive whatever is posted and do the
screening myself.

Hard boundaries and Soft boundaries apart, I think the Reader needs to
be included as a formal element in your analysis.

I wish I understood the 'breaking of thread' technicalities a little
better but I do feel that I would like greater options in searching
the archive which is in principle a faithful chronicle but not an
archive, a sequence and not a set of categories.

Punam

On 8/27/05, Kiran Jonnalagadda <jace at pobox.com> wrote:
> Dear Punam,
> 
> Thanks for writing back. Since some people commented my presentation
> appeared like a sales pitch for LiveJournal and that I was
> overemphasising form over other contributing factors, I'd like to
> clarify a few things:
> 
> The LiveJournal statistics page [1] gives us some interesting
> information:
> 
> 1. Of those users who declared their gender, 67.4% are female, with a
> peak age of 17 years.
> 
> 2. Of those who declared their country, the US ranks first with
> 3,818,375 journals. I summed up the distribution-by-country from the
> directory [2], and the rest of the world has 1,233,298 journals. The
> US outnumbers the rest of the world 3:1.
> 
>  From this I suppose I can claim that the stereotypical LiveJournal
> user is an American female teenager. To put it in the uncharitable
> words of some others, hysterical teenage girls whining about their
> little worlds. (Unfortunately, I can't find the source of these
> sentiments, having seen them too often to bother keeping track.)
> 
> [1] http://www.livejournal.com/stats.bml
> [2] http://www.livejournal.com/directory.bml
> 
> 
> And yet, of my 300-odd LiveJournal correspondents in the indicated
> period, none of them fit this profile. My correspondents are
> predominantly Indian. In several years using LiveJournal, I've rarely
> encountered the stereotype. There is something deeper to LiveJournal
> than is apparent to the outsider. To dismiss LiveJournal as merely a
> blogging service provider with a better commenting system is to see
> all forest, no trees.
> 
> I came to realise that LiveJournal with it's 8 million users works
> like one single large community where every user gets to see only the
> parts they want to see. It's much like living in a city of 8 million
> where you're not required to be familiar with everyone else, except
> there is no limitation of geography online. Just as a larger city
> battles crowding with better infrastructure, LiveJournal manages
> great volumes of traffic without completely crowding out the mind.
> LiveJournal has it's limitations, some of them serious, but what I'm
> interested in are the parts that are well done.
> 
> This is where I think there are lessons to be learnt and applied to
> the Reader List to help manage it's growing traffic. This isn't a
> problem unique here -- it affects any email-based list.
> 
> Let's look at the types of traffic this list has. Off the top of my
> head:
> 
> Announcements, Independent Fellows postings, General discussions, and
> responses to all these.
> 
> The independent fellows cover a large breadth of topics that not
> everyone is interested in. An individual already facing email
> overload may choose to follow only topics that are of particular
> interest to him or her. In this case, there is no option to ignore
> the rest. Even if you figure out who's discussing interesting topics
> and take to ignoring the rest, there is still effort involved in
> reading the names and deleting the unwanted posts. Sure, you could
> set email filters to discard all posts from certain individuals, but
> then you also miss their responses to topics of interest.
> 
> On the other hand, if the list is split into several on the basis of
> topics, membership is also fragmented. List boundaries are "hard"
> boundaries. If you're not on a list, it's hard to check on that
> list's postings even occasionally. If you didn't receive a posting
> via email, you can't respond to it without breaking threading (both
> in the mail client and web archive), making it hard for others to
> follow your response.
> 
> The interesting thing about LiveJournal is how it manages to define
> soft boundaries between its millions of sub-communities. Let me try
> to explain:
> 
> At the core of it, LiveJournal provides personal journals. Every user
> on LJ has a journal that they may or may not choose to update. This
> journal has a hard boundary. It contains your posts and nothing else.
> Either people see your journal, or they don't see it.
> 
> At the second level, LJ provides an aggregator (called the Friends
> list). You select other accounts that you're interested in, and the
> latest updates from all are shown in a single page. LJ now resembles
> an RSS aggregator or the linearity of the email client, except there
> are no unread flags. There's no count of messages left to be read,
> just the length of the scrollbar. This level also has the problem
> that you will not see postings from people you didn't choose to read
> -- there's no way to discover a newcomer.
> 
> At the third level, LJ provides shared journals, called communities.
> For the sake of avoiding confusion, I'll refer to these as shared
> journals. The crucial thing about shared journals is, if you add one
> to your Friends list, you no longer control who posts to your Friends
> page (which in some sense is the community you defined for yourself).
> This has two effects: you discover new people via shared journals,
> and shared journals evolve policing systems to determine who or what
> topic is allowed there. Unlike the Friends list (where you silently
> add or remove people), shared journal policing tends to be a public
> spectacle, with moderators with approve, delete and ban powers who
> have trouble participating fairly in a heated discussion, and
> (sometimes) social processes for appointing moderators.
> 
> Finally, at the fourth level, LJ allows threaded commenting on a
> post. Who comments? The intersection of people who have something to
> say and who saw the post. The latter is determined by the community
> of people who chose to read this person or shared journal, the
> "Friend Of" list. This too is a place to meet new people, more
> prominently than at the third level. This is also where
> representation of identity via the user picture becomes important.
> You may not track a particular person, but you may see them often
> because they comment in a journal you read. The picture serves as an
> important visual identity (as I've explained in another post, most
> people notice pictures, not user ids). People tend to use pictures to
> signify emotion, but this is not system enforced. This is a tendency
> of users and indicative of the atmosphere they've come to expect.
> 
> Notice that we now have two areas with hard boundaries, the personal
> journal and the shared journal, and two with soft boundaries, the
> Friends list and the Friend Of list. The latter two are private to
> each user. They're soft because their contents, shared journals and
> comments, keep leading to new areas beyond their boundaries. You
> don't have to explore, but if you must, exploration is effortless.
> 
> (I must credit here Nishant Shah at CSCS in Bangalore whose thesis is
> that the independence of sub-groups is important to the health of the
> larger group. He made me aware of the parallel between his research
> and my observations of LiveJournal.)
> 
> So how can this help the Reader List? Migrating everyone to
> LiveJournal doesn't make sense. Communities rarely survive such
> transplantation, and there is no guarantee that the LiveJournal
> experience is suitable for the sort of discussion the Reader List
> aims to foster.
> 
> What I think is necessary is to understand the abstracts that drive
> the LiveJournal experience and look at how they may be adapted to the
> Reader List. I'm not sure how this may be achieved, since the
> limitations of email are hard to transgress. This is what I'm
> currently engaged in understanding.
> 
> 
> Kiran
> 
> 
> On 25-Aug-05, at 1:11 AM, punam zutshi wrote:
> 
> > Greetings!
> >
> > I think the archival problem is an important one to highlight.The
> > Search feature for locating authors and keywords in subject headings
> > would be a real boon.
> >
> > I am not so sure that the question of identity ( supported with
> > photos) bothers me. Call me old fashioned I also baulk at the listing
> > of emotions and other such gambits.That's great for blogspots but a
> > reader list?????
> >
> > What is the problem with a thousand peering while one responds? Yes,
> > one selects the option of a direct response to a list mailer in any
> > case.
> >
> > A quick glance at the slides of your presentation tell me that the
> > form is important most certainly, but is it also the case that there
> > genuinely is a lack of comprehension or interest in some rather than
> > other mails? I respond to this mail of yours as it seems to do with
> > Our List, but I was too mystified by your earlier postings!
> >
> >  Is the list crumbling because people would rather lurk than respond
> > or post? Is there a profile of Live Journal Readership as compared to
> > the Sarai List?
> >
> > Yes, but your presentation achieves something very interesting : I am
> > sure a lot of us will want to figure out a little more about what
> > Live Journal is like!!
> >
> > Punam
> >
> > On 8/24/05, Kiran Jonnalagadda <jace at pobox.com> wrote:
> >
> >> Hello all,
> >>
> >> The Independent Fellows are at Sarai in Delhi for the workshop. I
> >> made my presentation today on how form shapes online community. For
> >> the sake of illustration, I picked a familiar community, the reader
> >> list itself.
> >>
> >> From empirical evidence, I was aware that several readers have
> >> trouble keeping up with the volume of the list. I made a contrast
> >> with LiveJournal, another community system which manages to scale to
> >> a far higher volume of traffic before it becomes a burden, looking
> >> for things they do that the reader list could do with.
> >>
> >> Due to time constraints, I could not go into as much detail as I'd
> >> have liked to. Here are my slides: http://jace.seacrow.com/misc/
> >> sarai-
> >> rl-lj
> >>
> >> This has been a great opportunity and I thank everyone who was
> >> involved, especially those present today. This was the best response
> >> I've had to a presentation yet.
> >>
> >> I will continue exploring how form shapes community and post to the
> >> list as appropriate.
> >>
> >> --
> >> Kiran Jonnalagadda
> >> http://www.pobox.com/~jace
> >>
> >>
> >> _________________________________________
> >> reader-list: an open discussion list on media and the city.
> >> Critiques & Collaborations
> >> To subscribe: send an email to reader-list-request at sarai.net with
> >> subscribe in the subject header.
> >> List archive: <https://mail.sarai.net/pipermail/reader-list/>
> >>
> >>
> >
> >
> 
> 
> --
> Kiran Jonnalagadda
> http://www.pobox.com/~jace
> 
> 
>