IDM Mailing Archive

quoted 13 lines Have to agree with Wenger that sale/trade lists are

>Have to agree with Wenger that sale/trade lists are >an important part of this list. Without posting my >various lists to IDM I wouldn't have gotten some >Likemind, B12's Prelude Part 1, various ART CD's, >etc. (at least as fast as I got them I suppose) >I think when other people on this list start objecting >to exchanges of the physical pieces of the music >we discuss when the subject titles are clearly >marked "trade / sale" and don't have to be read if >you don't want that sort of thing is when I start >to really become disheartened. Oh well. As for >posting URL's instead of just your list, that just >doesn't make sense to me.

this is sad to read. since a list can only be defined by the purposes to which the community of people who constitute it put it, i can't possibly disagree. but as somebody who does not use the list for trading -- in four years on idm i think i've traded for maybe one or two things -- i can lament idm's devolution into a primarily sell- and trade-focused list. when kim cascone and i started the microsound list, we used idm as a model of what we *did not want* the list to become, which is why the list guidelines contain things like: "Microsound is an unmediated list, but that doesn't mean anything goes...Record and event reviews are encouraged; mean-spirited pissing contests are not...Microsound refuses to become a sounding board for eBay auctions and the periodic expurgations of listmembers' record collections." why post a URL instead of a long list of sell/trade items? the reason is so that people who aren't interested in using the list for selling and trading don't have to suffer through the visual noise of line after line after line after line of somebody's used record sale. i subscribe to the digest version of the list, and i'm getting RSI from scrolling through all of the sale and trade lists, catalogs of ebay links, etc. when you're on the digest it doesn't matter whether the Subject line of the message is clearly marked; you still have to scroll through it to get to the next message. it's become so sufficiently irritating that i'll often delete digests outright, without even looking at them, because the task of finding any signal in all of that noise has become too daunting. i remember years ago the common complaint was that many subscribers had email but not Web access, and that relying on URLs for sale and trade lists was discriminatory (yes, people actually made this argument). if that was legitimate then, it surely isn't now. contemporary objections seem to focus instead on how inconvenient it is for the seller/trader. depends on who you ask, i guess. perhaps we could have brian set up a list like idm-marketplace or something? this would let people who like to use idm as a place to buy and sell gather in one spot to do precisely that, while leaving the rest of the list to do what it was set up to do -- discuss music. sc, not discussing music --------------------------------------------------------------------- To unsubscribe, e-mail: idm-unsubscribe@hyperreal.org For additional commands, e-mail: idm-help@hyperreal.org