Chris Shugart writes:
"I don't know how Rossman manages to tally his so called loss of readership
and participation."
Chris has surely caught me off-base. When I wrote, " the degradation of the
discourse is as evident as the loss of readership and participation," I
expressed my own sense of its recent textures. But as I haven't tracked the
conversation closely long enough to judge for myself, I was relying on
opinions that others have voiced recently about such losses. I'm afraid I did
digest these uncritically (though not without noticing that they provoked no
serious rebuttal from others, so far as my browsing surveyed) -- and was moved
unconsciously to credit them, since they accord with what I have witnessed
more carefully elsewhere, such losses occurring in other worthy online
conferences afflicted with assaultive personalities and weak moderation.
Can it be that such losses have not occurred in this one, and that my
assessment of its acrimonious texture is mistaken? I'd appreciate others' opinions.
Michael Rossman <mrossman@igc.org>
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