"Every Home Is Wired": 3 -- The Progressive Rock Community on the Net

"Every Home Is Wired":
3 -- The Progressive Rock Community on the Net

Conversation Quality
The quality of their users' interactions is of central importance in determining the success of the various newsgroups and mailing-lists serving the Progressive Rock community. Not only is it necessary, then, to examine the topical areas covered in online discussions, as we have done, but the quality of these discussions must also be reviewed. One obvious measure of newsgroup discussion quality is the topicality of participants' contributions to the newsgroups. Most distractive from meaningful community interaction in newsgroups are outside interjections such as spamming (posts advertising pyramid schemes promising readers to make "$$$$$FAST CASH, GUARANTEED, NO RISK$$$$$$", for example) and trolling (deliberately off-topic posts designed to incite flame wars). While in themselves these posts are not necessarily all that numerous -- thanks to various individuals and Net institutions who have taken upon themselves the task to remove these posts by sending out 'cancel' messages to news servers -- and may be filtered out by the newsgroup users' newsreader programmes, genuine newsgroup participants often respond to spams and trolls with articles denouncing the practice. Since furthermore such spams and trolls are frequently crossposted over a range of unrelated newsgroups, and since replies are by default also crossposted to the same groups unless the respondent specifically changes the crossposting range, off-topic threads with a large number of outside participants may therefore appear in all affected newsgroups. This is particularly so for trolls, which often deliberately set out to include as many unrelated groups as possible within a single thread.¹⁸	Bit 39

Conversation Quality

The quality of their users' interactions is of central importance in determining the success of the various newsgroups and mailing-lists serving the Progressive Rock community. Not only is it necessary, then, to examine the topical areas covered in online discussions, as we have done, but the quality of these discussions must also be reviewed. One obvious measure of newsgroup discussion quality is the topicality of participants' contributions to the newsgroups. Most distractive from meaningful community interaction in newsgroups are outside interjections such as spamming (posts advertising pyramid schemes promising readers to make "$$$$$FAST CASH, GUARANTEED, NO RISK$$$$$$", for example) and trolling (deliberately off-topic posts designed to incite flame wars). While in themselves these posts are not necessarily all that numerous -- thanks to various individuals and Net institutions who have taken upon themselves the task to remove these posts by sending out 'cancel' messages to news servers -- and may be filtered out by the newsgroup users' newsreader programmes, genuine newsgroup participants often respond to spams and trolls with articles denouncing the practice. Since furthermore such spams and trolls are frequently crossposted over a range of unrelated newsgroups, and since replies are by default also crossposted to the same groups unless the respondent specifically changes the crossposting range, off-topic threads with a large number of outside participants may therefore appear in all affected newsgroups. This is particularly so for trolls, which often deliberately set out to include as many unrelated groups as possible within a single thread.¹⁸

Bit 39

Section 3 -- Go on to Bite:

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