Complaining about signal-to-noise on the internet is a lost cause.
I agree. When a virtual community is small, it's easy to maintain a low ratio. But once a critical mass is reached, it sort of eats itself. I got my start in IT developing virtual classrooms for higher education. It started out small and worked exceptionally well. But then someone came up with the bright idea of extending to multiple universities with many, many professors getting involved. It soon became a horrid morass of runaway egos....

BTW, WTF is WDF?
World Domination Fund

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update: One of the things we found in the virtual classroom is that FTF meetings went a long way in smoothing over some of the bumps and inefficiencies of asynchronous discourse. It also kept people from wanting to strangle each other. I would encourage more monks to meet other monks. suaveant and I fished together earlier this year and I understand his online persona ten times better than I did before (and we caught fish too :)