From: Chris Barrus, xibalba@no-fi.com Subject: Re: seance: where you hear it second Date: 2/22/2002 2:32:04 PM To: Seance List, seance@lists.no-fi.com On 2/22/02 7:44 AM, Tony Nelson at tenelson@mac.com wrote: > I must say this interview deeply disturbs me. There was a time (after > MATS) that the Church recognized that it was the two online efforts > (Seance and Shadow Cab) that kept them alive as a band. And now we're > being made fun of after being faithful to the band through some very > tough times? F*ck that! From looking at that bit of the interview, I get the feeling that they were referring to *all* the on-line chatter about them and not a hotelwomb.com vs. Seance List division. Only the the hard-core narcissists wouldn't be unsettled by knowing there's an international community of at least 400 people talking about themselves and their personal creations. We're obviously not all pre-programmed Manchurian Candidate Mark Chapmans, but admittedly some of us do go off the deep end at times. Remember that "fan" is short for "fanatic". Getting back to the Seance vs. Hotel Womb East Coast/West Coast Church-fan war... It is indeed easier to deal with the web-based board if you just want to quickly post some stuff without having to deal with subscribing and all that, but there are a lot of disadvantages to the web-based boards that I don't like. I'd actually talked back and forth with David of HotelWomb about web boards vs. mailing lists way back in 1999 and my viewpoint hasn't really changed. It's too bad, but I would have figured that in the intervening two years, the methods to how we communicate would have at least evolved a little bit, but I still find the tried old standards of email and nntp news (which is what I use for the Spiritualized/Spectrum discussion boards if any of you are there) Anyway, here was my reply to David. This is in no way a slam on David or Hotel Womb - just the reasons why I don't like web-based discussion. On 10/31/99 12:17 PM, David Barnard at hotelwomb@yahoo.com wrote: > --- Chris Barrus wrote: >> And hard to navigate and ridiculously slow. This >> isn't a slam on you, but >> I've always found web-based discussion groups are a >> complete pain. > > Chris, thanks for your honesty! Only through a healthy > exchange of ideas can something be made stronger. Your > dissenting opinioning is welcomed. Obviously, there is > plenty of positive feedback already to stroke my ego. David - I was going back through old Seance mail in my recent rash of posting and realized that I never got back to you on this. The foundation of all my grumbling about web-based discussion boards is strictly based upon my own personal design and technical philosophy that's been tempered after years of being a net.old-timer bordering on net.crank. It all revolves around four points... 1) Design and technology should aid information, not get in the way. 2) Discussions are organic things and can/will grow in directions you won't suspect. 3) Don't waste anyone's time. 4) The reader should be in control as much as possible. Web-based boards violate all of these rules to some degree or another. To rattle off a few complaints from the top of my head: -If I don't want to see any posts from a particular user, I can't create a filter to auto-trash his or her messages. -If I'm working on a message, I can't save a draft of it to continue working on later. -Related to that, I often download all my email and news onto my laptop and read/write somewhere where there isn't a net connection handy. Can't read a web-board with that. -This is direct shot at the Womb, but are 30 subdivided topics really necessary? It makes it harder to see what people are currently talking about. What happens when the topic begins to deviate into an area which is covered by another sub-board? -And lastly, the usual complaints about speed, slowness of browsers, etc. > Curious, is your observation of performance speed (or > lack there of) based on specifically visiting the Womb > or other web-based bulletin boards? The Womb is faster than most, but even when the graphics, et. al. are cached onto a local RAM disk, it's still faster to hit cmd-opt-] to delete the current message and go to the next one in my email client than it is to reload a page. > As far as difficulty to navigate, I don't really > understand this. I mean, yes, you don't get the > messages lumped into one place to wade through, but > you get the organized in easily read conversational > threads... My email client filters mailing list mail into their respective folders which are then sorted by subject. Posts from people I like reading are highlighted. Posts from people I don't want to read are trashed. Almost the same thing. > This is not a knock on you, just mailing lists in > general. Heh. And vice versa! :) > The ability to read history is incredibly valuable. No different than having a web-searchable archive of the mailing list. Guess I finish writing that search script... > Very easily, you can read through a topic > (conversational style) before replying! Instead of > firing of an ill-informed missive, readers are > encouraged to read the past before replying. I find it > provides an opportunity for a more intelligible > discussion. In a perfect world, everyone would think twice before firing off an ill-informed post, but I can dream. The mechanics of the forum don't matter at all unless you have good quality people posting. Fortunately, both Hotel Womb and Seance seem to have both, despite the occasional nonsense post. I hope some new band news leaks out soon! > And it gets rid of all the quoting! I actually prefer the quoting. > Since the board has visual cues to represent new > messages (lightbulb and folder color icons), you are > notified if anything new in a forum has been posted. More graphics that take time to download. > Formatting: Pix, bold, italics, ordered lists, links, > etc. make it a wonderfully rich space to develop a > converstaion. There are already ASCII conventions to do this in regular email. I'm only interested in the information at hand, not the window dressing. > Plus, you can mail a link to a topic thread to a > friend. You don't have to register to read. You can > even have the board mail you when someone has > responded to your topic! Depending upon whether you actually need these functions. > Thanks for the latitude of opening this topic up for > debate. Criticism is even sweeter than praise, > because that's how you become better! You're welcome. As you might have guessed, I'm not going to be convinced on web-boards, but the argument is not too dissimilar from arguments over favorite albums, cars, sauvignon blanc, Linux distributions, etc. - it's all a matter of personal preference. If anything, it's better to have more avenues of conversation than less. Cheers, Chris -- ___________________________________________________ Chris Barrus, No-Fi, etc. http://www.no-fi.com/