Subject: Re: The toxicity of trolls From: Erik Naggum <erik@naggum.no> Date: 24 Sep 2002 21:22:05 +0000 Newsgroups: comp.lang.lisp Message-ID: <3241891325635597@naggum.no> * Kenny Tilton | While you are at it, in the "no good deed goes unpunished" category, I would | be interested in how many articles thanked quasi for his efforts, and how | many others attacked him for same. You do not have to actually read all the | articles; IIANM, no one thanked him. I get a handful of thank-you notes in the mail every week. It is one of the reasons I keep using a repliable mail address when I post. If the people who take the time to respond thus positively had to post it, I very much doubt that they would bother. If I cannot figure out the spam-protection mechanism of some poster or I get a rejection slip from some mailer daemon, there goes my positive response to them, as well. I doubt that anyone who has been on Usenet for more than a week would fail to understand that "me too" articles receive harsh treatment. It is not that a barrage of thank-you notes would receive harsh treatment, but it is a private response, not a public response. Do you write thank-you notes to individual people you read about in the newspaper or do you send them to the newspaper? If the latter, do they get published? More importantly, if they were published, and people got into the habit of making their individual appreciation of individual achievements publically known, what would that do with the way we /read/ newspapers? Newspapers with a circulation of only 100,000 copies would likely have to use numerous pages every single day on thank-you notes. Would that actually do as much good as the thank-you notes by sms, fax, postcards, letters, flowers, etc? Why not publish your Christmas greetings in the newspaper and be done with it instead of sending them out personally? I think the picture emerges. -- Erik Naggum, Oslo, Norway Act from reason, and failure makes you rethink and study harder. Act from faith, and failure makes you blame someone and push harder.