[MUD-Dev] To flame or not to flame (was: Usability and ...)

[Ola Fosheim Grøstad <olag@ifi.uio.no>]

caliban at darklock.com (Caliban Tiresias Darklock) wrote:

>I also tend to be of the opinion that some of the most interesting
>conversations come from people playing the Devil's advocate. Many times
>people who attack your arguments from all sides are actually trying to
>see how well thought out it is, and determine whether this is a casual
>off the cuff concept or a real well-considered opinion. 

Well, actually that depends.  If it is clear that they do play the
Devil's advocate, yes sure, but...  Anyway, I don't think it's a very
good idea to play the Devil's advocate in the start of a discussion,
as that severly limits the "search space" explored.  There is a good
reason for one of the rules in a brainstorming session being: "you are
not allowed to be critical to suggestions" (actually you are not even
supposed to evaluate suggestions.)

>It's a double-edged sword; if you do battle with the critics, it
>consumes a lot of time and energy. If you ignore them, they can
>undermine your efforts drastically. There's a happy medium in there
>somewhere, but I haven't found it yet. 

I think all message-based discussions formus (fora?) (news, bbs,
mailinglists) are hampered with the very segmented and shortsighted
"structure" of the dialog.  Sometimes I believe that a moderated
mailinglist with formal rules would be more constructive and
rewarding.

What really annoys me is the inability of a thread to stay focused on
one issue.  It often ends up with someone taking an example too
literally, or making the worst assumption possible about an unclear
sentence, or forgetting the original premises for the discussion.
Still worse is that these offsprings, by their agressive nature,
attracts so much attention that the original topic drowns completely.
Quite often these offsprings manouver themselves to the same old dead
end flame topics.

As programmers we invest a lot of time and effort in a particular
design, so we have a tendency of wanting to defend that design when
someone are critical. Not because the design is a good one, but
because we don't like the idea of having wasted so much time and
effort! :-) Unfortunatly most designs programmers end up with is way
less than perfect, simply because our desire to ease the
implementation process.  Add to this the tendency of replying while
reading a message and you are on your way to a flamewar (or a boring
me-too).

I think it would be interesting if one could have not only
"listowners" or "newsgroup agendas", but thread-owners.  That is, the
person bringing up a topic could state some rules for replies to that
particular thread.  For instance if the intention is to get as many
ideas as possible, the thread-owner could state some brainstorming
rules.

Ola.