Steve Jones wrote:
In any event, my strong feeling has always been that the best lists are self-organizing and self-sustaining.
I recently published research in a conference paper on Usenet discourse dynamics (Jones et. al. (2002) "An Empirical Exploration of Mass Interaction System Dynamics: Individual Information Overload and Usenet Discourse." In: Proceedings of the 35th Annual Hawaii International Conference on System Sciences, IEEE, Big Island, Hawaii.) and just sent off a paper today to a journal that examined and compared Usenet and Listserv discourse dynamics. I looked at over 1000 discussion spaces and 3.5 million messages. Moderation appears to impact negatively on the chances of messages getting a reply, on discourse being sustained, and on the average word length of messages (moderated discussions appear to have on average longer messages). Obviously there are a variety of reasons for this but I think the evidence speaks against moderation unless 1) a moderator is prepared to spend a significant amount of time boot strapping discourse or 2) the discourse is so politically sensitive that it is required. Quentin