Re: <nettime> a note about nettime

["Michael H. Goldhaber" <michael@goldhaber.org>]

Hi Ted, Felix, and everyone else.

I feel great gratitude for all the work of Ted and Felix have done for so long. Having moderated a smaller list for a shorter time, I have some sense of how hard and time-consuming it can be. Evidently, not until F & T seemed to threaten the absolute end, have possible successors come forward.

While interests and involvement change, this seems to me an important time for a list such as this to probe all the angles around “AI”. So I hope a way forward can be found.

Best,

Michael via iPhone, so please ecuse misteaks.

> On May 15, 2023, at 11:32 AM, Ted Byfield <tedbyfield@gmail.com> wrote:
> 
> David, one of my concerns was the haste gathering around one of
> the ideas so far. Some of it was obvious, some less so — for
> example, that two of the people named for a moderation team never
> agreed to any such thing. In my message, I *almost* added a
> request that people speak for themselves and not for others, but I
> decided against it lest it seem provocative. Oh well. Do I really
> need to say — in the context of a discussion about moderation! —
> that "voluntelling" unwitting third parties is problematic in
> several ways?
> 
> So, yes, you're right that my email involved lots of background
> thinking and could be read as less than complete or candid. That
> happens when you try to condense thoughts involving long experience
> into a few paragraphs. Even so, I really don't see how you got from
> me asking for a bit of time so we all can have a deliberative
> process to a smorgasbord of clichés about manipulation and corruption.
> 
> I hope the coming conversations go a bit better than that.
> 
> Cheers,
> Ted
> 
>> On 15 May 2023, at 11:43, d.garcia@new-tactical-research.co.uk wrote:
>> 
>> Thanks Ted,
>> It's good to get some clarification and a bit of detail about the issues going on behind the scenes. Its also great to see so many eloquent defences of the list and the list form in general in these bad times.
>> 
>> Not to mention so much sincere appreciation for decades of work by moderators, visible, and invisible. I am not keen on the term 'janitor'. You and Felix are still clearly in charge and rightly so as you are both widely respected.
>> 
>> I am happy to follow the advice to be patient, as those behind the scenes work to identify a way forward. But I have to say that recent discussions have felt a bit weird, rather opaque and to be honest somewhat manipulative. Its felt analogous to a teenage spat with endless - "on again off again" teasing - sprinkled with dark unspecified hints of bad faith, implied by terms by terms like "first mover advantage". This all feels a bit peculiar in the face of so many apparently open generous offers of support. I could be being naive but sometimes its good to take things at face value. Maybe you think (like Bismark) that the back room discussions and decisions are like sausages "best we don't know too much about how they are made." On the other hand maybe there's a better way of dealing with each other ?
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