On Tuesday, February 25, 2003, at 04:34 PM, J C Lawrence wrote:
> For instance I've
> one poster who is irascible, dogmatic, zealous and tireless on his
> crusades -- and frequently just wrong. BUT, he's a useful irritant.
But what do you do when they stop being useful? I'm in a situation
where on one of my lists a person who's generally been a useful devil's
advocate (and a bit of a wry wit) has more or less turned into an
eeyore troll who can't lose an argument, and is willing to redefine a
fight or reslant data endlessly to avoid having to. sort of the shift
from snide to bitter, from stubborn to, well, me before I figured out
what an asshole I could be at times (and, in all honesty, that's pretty
much exactly how I explained it to him).
right now, he's quiet, because he started the "oh, you and that 'silent
majority' of yours again", and people started popping up with 'me,
too!' postings, which actually says lots about how annoying he'd gotten
to people...
I'm honestly not sure what to do here. He generates good content --
sometimes. it's almost a phase of the moon thing, we can more or less
plot the cycle. I just can't figure out how to short-circuit the down
phase and encourage the up phase, and it's really started wearing on
folks.
yet I really want to keep the person around, if I can.
>>> How do you structure and present this? Any enforcement other than
>>> willingness?
>
>> Lurker days have very loose rules:
> Gotcha. How do you organise/present lurker days? Just post an
> announcement that next Wednesday is "lurker day"?
>
Pretty much. when we came up with the idea, we threw it out to the list
for feedback adn a sense of "worth a try?" -- since this list is used
to being a guinea pig and sort of gets off on playing with this stuff,
everyone hashed out the logistics, and now it pretty much runs itself.
I've wanted to try it on some other lists, but I simply haven't had
time.
--
Chuq Von Rospach, Architech, Apple IS&T E-mail systems
chuq@apple.com
--
Chuq Von Rospach, Architech
chuqui@plaidworks.com -- http://www.plaidworks.com/chuqui/blog/
The Cliff's Notes Cliff's Notes on Hamlet:
And they all died happily ever after
Follow-Ups:
References:
|
|
