So what does this really mean

[Mark Carroll]

On 16 Sep 2016, Roger Bell West wrote:

> On Fri, Sep 16, 2016 at 10:30:39PM +0100, David Cantrell wrote:
>>(Why is this the only one out of hundreds of mailing lists I'm on where
>>people care so much about topic drift?)
>
> You've asked this before. I can only assume you mostly favour lists
> that encourage general chat as well as the subject they're about.

That's an interesting thought -

> Your experience is not mine.

Nor mine, though I tend to favour technical lists (as I thought this
was), maybe that's the difference? A quick look through the topics of
the lists I'm currently on yields nearly wholly software and operating
system stuff. For example, people who are asking general UNIX questions
don't last long on the OpenBSD lists. So, if I want more general chat I
go somewhere more clearly indicated for it (indeed, last night I was
chatting on a Slack channel that was actually named #chatter and earlier
that day one named #random).

I keep an eye on quite a few lists that centre on topics I care about.
There are only so many hours in the day, I have full-time work, a
family, etc., too - it would be a real loss if I had to wade through
everything from political advocacy to social commentary on each list
just to get to the articles that are actually worth my while to read. My
MUA has decent killfile capabilities but I do like to try to give people
a chance and it's not cut-and-dried because some people who contribute
plenty of noise also do offer some valuable signal too so perhaps my
fault is that I do try to killfile only lightly.

None of us really know what the BBC's going to do to make get_iplayer's
life difficult in the future, we can just hope that workarounds are
again feasible. I pay for my television licence, I'd like an easy way to
find and watch the shows without having them bundled with the BBC's
provided UI. It certainly beats when I lived in the US and we had the
awful selection they chose to share via BBC America - I would have
gladly paid for a licence then too if that would have allowed me to
watch the content available in the UK. Though, I could see that the BBC
probably did sell to other US channels besides PBS: at least, on US
television I saw suspiciously many decent American-voiceover
documentaries with weirdly many of the interviewees being from UK
universities.

(That's the end of the metadiscussion / digression again for me though,
back to regular service I hope!)

-- Mark