mailing list life cycles, bits, and Downside's Deathwatch

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From: Kragen Sitaker (kragen@pobox.com)
Date: Thu Oct 19 2000 - 18:33:52 PDT

So we're firmly into stage 5, "Discomfort with diversity"; let's avoid
stage 6.1.

We're getting into noise about noise now, though --- metanoise. This
post is metametanoise. The bits ratio has fallen significantly, and
that's a shame.

The criterion for whether something should be posted to FoRK is, in my
view, whether people will be interested. If people --- meaning, in
particular, people *on* *FoRK* --- will be interested, you should post
it. Long, boring streams of nonsense masquerading as information, like
Yangkun Zhang has been posting, are not interesting. Complaints about
what other people are posting, like this post, are not interesting.
Long .signatures are not interesting. Entire previous quoted posts are
not interesting.

Information is interesting. A lot of the chat is interesting, although
it's getting in the way of the information. But the

A quote from Wayne to sum up:
> Bwaaahaahaa. *burp*. I'm just having a blast mouthing off in this big
> Bullsession of Rohit Khare's, BoRK, BoRK, BoRK. I don't expect to
> change any minds. And I am getting to know a lot more about RK's
> friends in the process. Yeah, I suppose spam is probably the reason I
> subscribe.

And one from Joebar, who is no longer Joebar since leaving MSR:
> *YAWN*
>
> (just one man's opinion)

Here are some extremely interesting bits from another mailing list:

> Downside's Deathwatch is a cash-flow analysis. The death date is
> simply the day the company will run out of cash, based on their
> reported liquid assets and loss rate. When the cash runs out,
> something bad for stockholders has to happen.
>
> Deathwatch is an automated screen, based on the company's 10-K and
> 10-Q filings in the SEC's EDGAR database.
>
> http://www.downside.com/deathwatch.html

Unfortunately it seems to be overloaded right now; best.com charges for
outgoing bandwidth and cuts off outgoing traffic when you use up what
you've paid for. Perhaps the owner will cough up the cash to bring it
back up. It should, at least, give him the incentive to support things
like openCOLA and Freenet and Gnutella, which promise to remove this
perverse incentive to make your web pages unpopular. 

-- 
<kragen@pobox.com>       Kragen Sitaker     <http://www.pobox.com/~kragen/>
Perilous to all of us are the devices of an art deeper than we ourselves
possess.
                -- Gandalf the Grey [J.R.R. Tolkien, "Lord of the Rings"]

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