[beat]

Yes, exactly. Public lists can suffer tragedy of the commons very easily. People SHOULD set up private lists. This one has been going since 1999 as a formal list, and was an informal cc chain for a couple of years before that.

There's usually an inverse relationship between quality of discussion and welcoming environment for newbies. If you want to have deep discussion about, well, anything, and you have newbies (or worse, people who think they aren't newbies) asking basic questions and failing to RTFM beforehand, you'll lose.

A few years ago, I was on a panel about intellectual property with Cory Doctorow at a science fiction convention. It COULD have been a really fun conversation - Cory and I agree on enough for common ground, and disagree enough to be interesting, and we both understood the topic really well. But the standing-room-only crowd just wanted to ask obvious question after obvious question, or go on rants that were demonstrably naive at best. It was really frustrating.

Tragedy of the commons, man.

[MetaCosm]

Wow... in a few comments, you have gone down a spiral of embarrassment.

First you post an arrogant self-serving "members only jacket" style post that literally does nothing for anyone. You didn't mention how to get into such groups, no tips for finding such groups or anything else remotely useful to anyone.

After that you intentionally go down the nonsense pedantic path of 'The OP didn't say "open".' ... which means you either (1) thought the OP wanted absolutely useless feedback to his question or (2) you are an asshole. Not sure which is worse to be honest.

Then, in a transparent trick to try to dig yourself out of the hole you had dug... you try to act like a victim of the commons. Just cause everyone hates you don't mean you are a victim in any sense, you might just be an jerk.

In a final, desperate pathetic attempt, you drop "Cory Doctorow" into the conversation and try to peer link to borrow his reputation because you have NONE of your own. Another pathetic, transparent, embarrassing tactic.

Realize that you might be the tragedy.

[beat]

I'll fully own up to my initial comment being not very useful - not because it was "arrogant", but because I didn't provide the backing reasoning. I'm not whining about the downrating there.

The flaming, however, was unnecessary and inappropriate. Downrating reasonable responses was inappropriate, too. Community behavior IS problematic here (and that includes my own community behavior, and yours as well), and that's the "tragedy of the commons" for public forums. A lot go so far down the newbie/flamewar rabbit holes that they become effectively useless. I know people who already consider HN useless for those reasons.

I'm not the victim here. The community is the victim. This shouldn't be so hard to understand.