Re: Proposal: an "important-news" IETF announcement list

[Jay Daley <[e-mail]>]

> On 30/09/2021, at 11:49 AM, Brian E Carpenter <[e-mail]> wrote:
> 
> 
>> The second is the misconception of just how much we can create an engaged community by pushing messages at them.  The experience from every organisation I have ever seen try this is that it’s a Pareto distribution and if you want a list that reaches everybody then it must receive virtually no messages at all otherwise people unsubscribe in such numbers that it rapidly drops below any usable approximation of everybody.
> 
> Sure. (Nevertheless, the traffic on the announce list is so tiny compared 
> to my daily spam load that it's very hard to perceive it as a problem.)
> 
>> So far, I’ve heard the following broad reasons for not breaking up ietf-announce into multiple lists:
> 
> I'm not arguing against that, when linked to weekly summary messages. I'm 
> arguing that Last Call messages are of such importance to the standards-making goal of the IETF that we really do have to send them to as much of the community as we can.

I think you are still misunderstanding how this works.  

No matter what we do, we cannot change the inherent level of interest that people have in particular categories of messages.  If we push messages to people for which they have a low level of interest then they adapt their behaviour in response and we cannot stop that.  Generally this means unsubscribing, not reading specific messages, or simply becoming frustrated, and the more messages they are not interested in they receive, then the more they do that.  

This means that  we simply cannot tell how much that happens with any reliability and so with a list many different types of message we end up mistaking X subscribers to a list as X readers of each message sent to it, when the reality could be quite different.

By contrast, if we separate out those categories and people choose to subscribe then we get closer to X subscribers = X readers, correctly reflecting the inherent level of interest in those messages and minimising the message avoidance behaviours above.

Jay

> 
>> a) a detrimental effect on the process of subscribing to and managing subscription to multiple lists
>> b) a detrimental effect on reading/searching/finding email once those messages have been received
>> c) a detrimental effect on understanding what message is important and what is not and making sure nothing important is missed
>> d) a view that separate lists reduces overall engagement
>> e) a view that separate lists reduce cross-area discussion
>> 
>> I understand a) and c) - we need a much better interface for managing subscriptions to 100+ lists that also helps us understand the subject matter, volume and perceived importance of any list as well as what other lists are related.
>> 
>> For b), d) and e), while list organisation plays a part, in most practical situations there are other factors that are much more important.
> 
> Yes.
>   Brian
> 
>> 
>> Jay
>> 
>> 
>>> 
>>> I'm not against weekly summaries for most of the categories Lars listed, but I suggest that the model should be, for category X, that the raw messages go to [e-mail] <mailto:[e-mail]>, and the summary comes labelled "X-announce messages for the week ending $DATE".
>>> 
>>> (And yes, I know there would be complaints about too many summary messages. Or too few.)
>>> 
>>>   Brian
>> 
>> -- 
>> Jay Daley
>> IETF Executive Director
>> [e-mail] <mailto:[e-mail]>
>> 
> 

-- 
Jay Daley
IETF Executive Director
[e-mail]