<nettime> ecology of nettime

["nettime's_bird_watchers" <nettime@bbs.thing.net>]

as we noted a few days ago, the reason why nettime-l carried "only" 150
messages last month is that it is moderated, by hand (actually by eight or
ten hands). apart from dealing with spam, bounces and other menial stuff,
a purpose of the moderation is keeping the list distinct. in practice,
this means mainly reminding people not to forward news without intro and
keeping discussions that are being dealt with in the mainstream media from
flooding the list.

this is a balancing act, particularly difficult in times of geopolitical
crisis and (looming) war. On the one hand, nettime is not an island, so
major events deserve to be discussed. on the other hand, nettime is most
interesting when it can give room to discussions that do *not* take place
anywhere else. so, we'd like to remind nettimers of a few simple ways to
help nettime preserve its uniqueness (whatever that may be) and keep it
manageable for everyone:


     (1) this list is not a news outlet: think twice before forwarding
         news stories in a vain effort to 'get there first.' and, please,
         when you do forward something, take a few minutes to write a
         substantive intro explaining why a story is relevant to *this*
         list. 

     (2) this list is not chomsky-l, zizek-l, hitchens-l, ramonet-l,
         cockburn-l, or dust-off-the-old-foucault-and-deleuze-l. the
         fact that one of these people said something something useful
         or interesting about geopolitics doesn't mean that you should
         automatically forward it to this list.

     (3) this list is moderated. only a subset of what gets sent in 
         appears on the list. we try very hard to do this with a light 
         hand, but we also try to maintain a balance between traffic, 
         substance, and peculiarity. if you send a message in but it 
         doesn't appear immediately, please don't send it again and 
         again. sometimes we reject it; sometimes we save it for a
         digest; sometimes we don't know what to do, so we just wait.

     (4) this list is allergic to: one-liners, unexplained URLs, 
         cross-posting, quotes that haven't been trimmed, sign-your-
         name-and-forward-this pseudo-petitions, needless ad-hominem 
         attacks, and other such stuff.

the nettime info file at <http://www.nettime.org/info.html> says a few 
useful things, among them:

      plain ascii, max 72 chars, no MIME-attachements, binhex, uuencode, 
      etc. maximum size: 40.000 bytes (please split bigger texts)

in other words, if your mailer is configured to send MIME attachments
and/or HTML and/or RTF and/or quoted-printable encoding and/or soft-
wrapped text and/or fantastically roomy windows that wrap text at 250
characters per line, you might consider going back to basics.

     -- the mod squad: andrea, felix, oliver, ted, scot





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