No responses on the main list (Was: Wizarding Education )

[davewitley]

Shaun wrote:

> I think part of the problem is how large the list is getting - not 
> that I have a solution to that problem - but because probably 
> everybody is having to skim messages, a huge amount that people 
are 
> writing probably isn't even being read by most of the list.

The evidence of the posting record is that it's not the size of the 
list per se that drives the posting rate, but the rate at which new 
people join, and the incidence of external factors to write about.  
jkrowling.com is now providing a fairly steady stream of comment-
worthy material, and in particular recently recommended the Lexicon, 
which in turn recommends HPFGU.  So there has been a massive spike 
in new members.

If you look at the home page of the main list, you will see that the 
join and post rates have already begun to fall off slightly.  
Posting was up at almost 1400 a week - 200 a day - but is now below 
1000.  At about 160, the join rate is still high (about a dozen a 
day would IIRC be normal for a quiet period), but I think it has 
declined.  Unfortunately, Yahoo keeps a poor record of membership 
numbers (list administrators can in theory reconstruct them from the 
records of people joining and leaving though it would be quite a bit 
of work, I think), so it's hard to see this, but, say in late 2000 
the post rate was not very different to now with about 10% of the 
membership.  Even allowing for the hiving off of OT and movie lists.

> I don't have any type of solution to that problem - but if I'd 
> posted that message a year ago, I'm almost certain I'd have had a 
> lot more comment - back when the list had about 5000 members, it 
> seemed to me that most things got read. Now it doesn't.

> But, to be frank, if I write anything similar again, it's unlikely 
> I'll bother to post it to HPFGU because it seems to be a waste of 
> time. When I joined HPFGU, it wouldn't have been. I'd have been 
> fairly confident it was being read - even if nobody commented. 

This will probably be cold comfort, but my own experience is that 
people sometimes comment, on or offlist, months or even years later, 
on posts that raised scarcely a ripple at the time.

We are all pushed for time, and have three activities on the lists: 
reading, posting substantive thoughts, and posting to acknowledge 
others.  I think it's probably pretty accurate to say that for most 
of us, the acknowledgement activity gets brutally shoved into a 
distant third place as far as priority is concerned.

> Short posts tend to get read. Long posts now get ignored.

It would be interesting to see if there's any objective evidence of 
this.

It is a longstanding summer HPFGU tradition to whine about how the 
list is going downhill.  The fact that people have crawled out of 
the woodwork bang on cue says to me that the continuity in all this 
far outweighs what is new.  In 2000, there was oldbie eye-rolling by 
August about how newbies would ask about Dumbledore's gleam - less 
than two months after GOF was published.

There was no golden age.

David