[Air-L] (in favor of) Re: Change of default reply setting on air-l

[Kevin Guidry]

On Sun, May 10, 2009 at 11:31 PM, Gordon Carlson <gordycarlson at gmail.com> wrote:
>
> What is the social or political repercussion in this particular case?

   As already argued by many others, changing the default behavior of
the "Reply" button to direct replies to only the original writer
instead of the entire list seems to be a pretty big social
repercussion in itself.  In fact, using Gmail I've had to change my
own behavior to send my replies to you to the entire list.  I've had
to (a) use the "Reply to all" button instead of the "Reply" button
that I almost always use, (b) remove your e-mail address from the
"To:" field so you don't get two copies of my messages, and (c) move
the AoIR listserv address from the "Cc:" field to the "To:" field.
That all seems a bit excessive compared to the old behavior of just
hitting the "Reply" button.
   We could certainly make some improvements to my e-mail client but I
think my general point stands: This change presents a (admittedly low)
barrier to the standard and welcome practice of replying to the entire
community.  I personally think that replying to the whole community
was the right default and it's what I've used on the (much smaller)
listservs I'd administered.  I believe that the value of regularly
encouraging community discussion and sharing outweighs the occasional
personal message accidentally sent to everyone.  Reasonable people can
disagree about that as amply demonstrated by this ongoing discussion.
:)


Kevin