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Sigh. You can see in the data that this mailing list suffered a catastrophic dropoff after a specific month. What happened in that month? (checks archives) Oh, right, giant flamewar that moderators did not (could not?) put a stop to. Wish I could see how many unsubscribes happened that month.

What a sad example of how one set of terrible conversations, mostly between a couple basically decent people who unfortunately can't shut their mouths online, can scar a community for a long time.

(And also a good reminder that community volume is not the same as health, since it looks like that particular month was the highest-volume month the list ever saw butttttt....)

@luis_in_brief I know these feels. I think nearly all online communities can benefit from either banning or at least having "Hey you need to dial this back" convos with their top-flagged members. And then repeat it monthly until things calm down some (people always move in to fill the vacuum). MeFi always had a "Top ten assholes" list and it was always worth just keeping an eye on because maybe people would be low grade jerks but ALL OVER the site. Good info to have.

@jessamyn Yeah. I think this particular community, still being on mailman, doesn’t have the granular visibility that might be nice for this sort of thing.

And maybe more to the point now, I wonder if it can ever regain the critical mass it used to have.

Space Hobo

@luis_in_brief @jessamyn I remember @joeyh published a blog post once that was sort of a Jane's Guide to Thread Structures. You could see from screenshots of the thread indicators whether something was a dogpile (lots of people responding to one post midway through a thread, but no further engagement after that), or "get a room" (two people replying back-and-forth, for screenfuls), or any number of other common patterns.

Of course he also set up the mailman-haters list, which I recommended use the controversial "moderate unsubscription" feature, so nobody could leave...

@spacehobo @luis_in_brief @jessamyn that was joeyh.name/blog/entry/thread_p

still a banger, and I can still recongnize certain people from the anaonymized thread trees

joeyh.namethread patterns

@joeyh @spacehobo @luis_in_brief @jessamyn why am I not getting anything out of this? is it a graph or something? I mostly get <handle> -+> or something like that, I'm missing something there, right?

@bgtlover
That's mutt thread view. The arrows are elided subject lines, and indicate (sort of in reverse) which message replied to which.
@joeyh @luis_in_brief @jessamyn