| I'm sorry, but I have been very taken aback by the recent rants about my
| posting, however innocent and tongue-in-cheek it was. IMO, people are way
| too sensitive here.
I tried desperately to stay out of this, but I want to make one simple point:
People here fervently defend their right to post their no-so-witty remark to
the previous not-so-witty remark or any other comment they please. If this
is to be the case, other people have the same right to say that that all the
non-Olympus chatter and one-liner replies after quoting 100 lines of text
bothers them. It seems that the flames fly undirectionally to those who
suggest people control the urge to post nonsense or other off-topic messages.
Therefore, I don't see it as strange coincidence that Acer, a once prolific
and valuable contributor, decided to delete most of his messages and miss the
e*ay suspension thread. It would be great to see the statistics of list
members, how many messages they read vs. delete, and how much each list
member contributes on-topic, off-topic and way off-topic. I know that I
often begin to write a reply to a post, but I always ask myself, "Does this
reply contribute to the list?" or "Would a majority of list members want to
read this?" before I send the message. If the answer is "no", then I either
send it off-list or scrap it all together. That said, most of you probably
don't want to read this and it certainly doesn't contribute to the list, but
a few list member _should_ read this.
FWIW, I think John's (?) initial point was simply to say that before you
start calling someone an idiot for buying this-or-that at such-and-such
price, you should have a better understanding of why the person is acting is
such a behavior that you find questionable. If you cannot ascertain the
motives of the individual, then it's not worth wasting the bandwidth writing
about it. Also, if you do decide to start criticizing someone, be sure you
would be willing to say the same things if that person were a list member.
Well, that was more than one point. I suppose I will lurk for a while, if I
don't un*ubscribe altogether. I, like Skip, am beginning to remember too
clearly why I un*ubscribed for 6 months.
Cheers (and apologies for the rant),
--p.j.
|