[Smt-talk] Preserving SMT's social capital

[Gregory Karl]

On May 2, 2014, at 2:07 PM, John Paul Ito wrote:

>
> - emails have been sent off-list (i.e. without moderation),  
> directly to posters, that challenge them or in some way comment  
> negatively on a highly sensitive topic.  This sounds to me a lot  
> like harassment.  It's an oversimplification to speak of "sides" in  
> this issue, but people on both "sides" of the discussion have  
> received these emails.
>

Given your opinion that "significant numbers of people . . . feel  
that an SMT-sponsored discussion is not a safe space," your choice to  
use language reasonably interpreted as inflammatory ("This sounds to  
me a lot like harassment") seems ill-considered — unless you have  
made all reasonable efforts to verify that the off-list  
communications in question were made intentionally. After all, and as  
you have noted, the default reply command on this list sends private  
messages, a thoroughly counterintuitive result potential posters will  
have been unlikely to encounter anywhere else on the web. This is  
especially important in cases like the present one because "hot- 
button topics" are likely to elicit responses from members who post  
infrequently. Before today I hadn't posted for quite a while and I  
very nearly sent a couple of private messages by accident.

Gregory Karl
Jay NY


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