One email per day - a moderation scheme

I am a participant to a few online mailing lists and I am worrying about the flame-wars that from time to time burst on them. I am pretty much against moderation as it always brings some political issues so I thought that perhaps setting a limit of one email per day for each participant would break the pattern.

Here is some analysis supporting my point.

The mechanism of flame wars:
1. People interpret textual communication to be more emotional than it
was really written, so one more emotional letter can lead to a vicious
circle of more and more emotional answers (see DampenEmotions, Flames: Emotional Amplification of Text)
2. Emotions crowd out deliberation so anything that is below the
emotional level of the flame war is not even noticed by anyone

The negative effects:
1. Avalanche of automatic, not thoughtful responses that clutter mailboxes
2. Reasonable opinions are not noticed
3. Those that can post more than others can use this as a political power - this benefits those who work less on their posts at expense of the readers, it also undermines the democrating notion of everyone having equal votes

I would expect that the one day wait time would
cool down the emotions and also give people more time to think about
what they want to say. The participants would value the chance to be
heard publicly more and put more work into crafting their message,
that work would be not lost in the noise of the mass posters. It
would also give everyone more equal standing.

The delay of one day is of course something that can be adjusted to
the circumstances – but what I propose is that it was something
substantial not like the seconds used in Slashdot.

Update: It's all about me: Why e-mails are so easily misunderstood

Reading: "The Wealth of Networks : How Social Production Transforms Markets and Freedom "

Yochai Benkler did it again: "The Wealth of Networks" . After reading the first 200 pages my verdict is - 'a must read', for anyone wanting to understand our world and our civilisation at the beginning of the 21 century. Impressively broad and systematic analysis, not only of the economic mechanism, originally covered in "Coases Penguin", but also all the political, cultural and sociological consequences of Peer Production.

The chapter on individual autonomy was really resonating with my feelings as an Open Source author. Yes - this is the feeling of freedom, the feeling that you really choose by yourself, that you don't need to ask anyone what to do but really weight all the input data by yourself - this is what attracts programmers to Open Source. I found the approach of analysing the autonomy of individuals much closer to me than the dogmatic discourse of Stallman.

Brudnopis reloaded

I think the Brudnopis wiki lacked the narrative that attracts people to blogs - so I hereby restart the blog version of my notebook (and yes Reloaded was the best, least trivial part).