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Hot Tubbing an Online Community (calebclark.org)
25 points by vamsee on April 25, 2011 | hide | past | favorite | 4 comments


A bizarrely long-winded way of saying "when an email list gets unpleasant, kill it and start a new one with only your favorite participants"


... but told as a nice urban legendish story with beautiful imagery :-)


There's another part of the story which is left out. Only women get the code. At first it wasn't this way, but eventually they discovered that by only giving the code to women, it kept the space much safer for everybody. Of course some women do share it with me, and they know the code, but there are many codes, and if one is abused, you're code gets reset. If you share your code with the wrong person, it might get reset. So you have to be careful about who you share it with. Once you're locked out, you've got to ask around to get a new code.

I've only been to the famous hot tub once, i didn't get the code, but it was really nice. There's a lot to be learned in online communities about how to manage things from the famous hot tub.


A great analogy for the small, private mailing lists that seem to be every community's back channel.

Thanks for sharing.




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