"Usability" doesn't mean that everything should be easy. Many of the things to consider when building communities is how to discourage things you don't necessarily want.

For example, allowing anonymous users makes it easy for people to contribute without registering. If you want as many comments as possible, you'll probably allow anonymous comments. Of course, that means that there's little accountability. If you'd rather not allow people to drive by and flame or spam, maybe you'll require people to register.

Besides that, there's a school of thought that says, "Why should I build a system that doesn't really solve a pressing need if no one's going to use it in six months?" One example came up in my book. You could keep track of user features and task details in a nice, web-enabled system with access controls and workflow. Maybe that's appropriate. A lot of teams do really, really well just by using pens and index cards.

The thesis of the article is that in telecommunication connectivity is much more important than content delivery.

If you define "important" as "makes money" - yes.

They prove that by presenting numbers on money people spent on using telecommunication media for private information exchange and for viewing/listening/reading content made by professionals. The numbers are convincing – but actually this is quite common sense that the public part of information exchange between humans is just a small fraction of the private information exchange.

This isn't a conclusion you can draw from Odlyzko's paper. He explicitly says (my emphasis):

Still, the argument that “content is not king” that is presented here should not be taken to an extreme. All it says is that most of the money is in point-to-point communication. It does not say that content does not dominate in volume of data. Historically, as we have noted above, content has often dominated, and probably dominates now.

...

The argument of this paper is that the entire content piece of the economy is not all that large, and its contribution to network costs is much smaller than that of point-to-point communication. It does not deal with how the content piece is divided.

...content is used to denote material prepared by professionals to be used by large numbers of people, material such as books, newspapers, movies, or sports events. That is the sense in which it is used in this work.

The paper compares revenue from content production/distribution and revenue from communication. All of perlmonks, both messaging and normal posts would fall into the latter category. Nobody pays money for perlmonks to produce content. It's all about communication between the users. The fact that this communication occurs in a public forum is beside the point (in the context of the paper).

In a healthy society the ratio of private and public communication must be in favor of private. It is the way human societies have been acting for thousands of years.

I'm not sure I agree. I'm not saying that private communication is not necessary, but a healthy society needs to allow free public communication. A society defines itself by its public face.

This quite obvious truth is not used by people trying to build online communities. Perl Monks is not an exception here – although with Emessage System (Chatterbox and private messages) it seems to head in the write direction. I believe the EMessage System should be made more usable.

With my usability hat on I have to disagree. It's not an obvious truth and the hard problem with building online communities is enabling public communication. You can tell from the name that "private" communication isn't about the community.

Private communication is easy. Look how e-mail took off. People always want to talk to people. Taking this communication urge into the public arena where you can create public artifacts that everybody can benefit from - that's the hard bit. If you're interested take a look at the body of work in information science, knowledge management and groupware. Clever people are spending time and money with things like Blogs and Wiki's just because they make public communication simpler.

This is the reason why I ++ed the /msg to author of the node node, and was really disappointed to see it with a –3 reputation (it wasn’t until yesterday that I found the right argument in favor of this new feature).

Remember - node rep doesn't mean a great deal. Everybody has the odd post with negative rep for no obvious reason. Rep also changes given time (and artist's node was running at 11 last time I looked.) Nobody said anything negative about the idea, and some solutions were posted. If it's something you feel strongly about get involved and implement it.

Personally I voted ++ for the node since it would make my very occasional uses of msg slightly simpler. However, you can make an argument for keeping the barrier to private communications high.

Above I presented a general reasoning why I believe we need this kind of functionality at PM – here I will present some more concrete arguments. First I know that technically it is not something really different from typing “/msg author_of_the_node The message …” into the Chatterbox, the difference is only in the comfort of using it. It is obvious that for the "social chitchat" the usage barrier needs to be really low. The most important role of this mechanism would be feedback for the author. It would be a more personal addition to the reputation points. This would free the public from reading the abundance of “me too” messages, while providing the author with the feeling that he has wrote something useful for others.

Are "me to" messages only useful to the author? No - they also let everybody else know the author wrote a good node. That's very useful.

It's like the "problem" of multiple responses to a SOPW post with the same answer. This isn't a bad thing, it's a good thing. It shows that there is a commonly accepted correct solution.

Would making private communication between users easier help perlmonks? Almost certainly not. In fact, the opposite could well occur. Conversations that were previously public and benefited all would become private and benefit the few.

In a community it's the public communication that matters.

I don't define important as making money - but money is an indicator of importance. If people want to pay for something they do consider that as an important thing, at least for them. Perhaps for the society as whole one 'chit chat' talk of friends is not that important but the sum of a huge number of those talks is important. I would argue it is a kind of a social lubricant making the whole machinery to operate more smoothly. I don't write here a scientific article - so I feel, I can be a bit less rigorous that the cited Oldyzko paper. They just analyze the data they have obtained from some trusted source - I need to speculate on some data for which I don't have such a source.

If people want to pay more for the private communication than for the public one then in a free market economy the private communication would dominate in the volume too (since the cost of sending both kinds of information is the same). Beside that I believe a very large part of the sent public information is never consumed (read/heard/watched) – nobody reads whole newspapers, while on the private side this is quite different and, if you cut out spam messages, I believe nearly whole of the private information is consumed. And the information must be consumed to have any social effect (contrary to the economical side where the sending of the information must be taken into account).

In the Oldyzko paper they define what is public and what is private communication by some attributes of it – this is just a technique used to simplify the arguments. I believe everybody would agree with me that public is what is exposed to general view (from Merriam-Webster OnLine). But if they use this definition they would have to prove that what is exposed to general view does indeed carry those attributes that they take for the definition of public – this might be difficult to be reached in a scientific manner, but I believe intuitively is quite obvious.

I don’t want to diminish the value of the public communication. I rather treat it as some kind of product that is produced by the whole machinery of the online community. All I wanted to demonstrate is that the private communication is an undervalued part of the machinery.

I feel that the general attitude here at PM is that every piece of information has some positive value – and since you can deduce some true information from nearly every node then deleting any node diminishes the value of the site. I can’t agree with that. As an argument I’d like to recall the (really entertaining) “The Sixth Sally, or How Trurl and Klapaucius Created a Demon of the Second Kind to Defeat the Pirate Pugg.” short story by Lem (in ISBN 0156027593). The Second Kind Demon which produces huge amounts of true if unneeded information is something we all encounter in Internet today. The value of every information is really relative, and might be even negative if it creates an obstacle in searching for the information you need. A personal note does have some value for the receiver but might be an obstacle when searching for more substantial information. Just writing this it occurred to me that there is one distinction – a personal note usually has a very temporal value, you rarely need to search for them.

I don't define important as making money - but money is an indicator of importance.

I know. However, the paper was discussing the economic viability of funding from the commercial content industries (film, music, etc.) It wasn't judging the relative importance or worth of public vs private communication. It doesn't discuss that distinction.

In your OP you said:

The thesis of the article is that in telecommunication connectivity is much more important than content delivery

and that's only true if you define "important" as "makes more money".

I don't write here a scientific article - so I feel, I can be a bit less rigorous that the cited Oldyzko paper.

Fair enough, but your OP drew a conclusion from evidence that wasn't in the paper. For some reason this tends to annoy academics :-)

The paper doesn't compare public and private communication - it compares commercially produced content and everything else.

In the Oldyzko paper they define what is public and what is private communication by some attributes of it – this is just a technique used to simplify the arguments.

Once again - the paper does not comparing private and public communication. It is very explicitly discussing the revenues from commercially produced content. Non commercial content can still be public (the content on perlmonks being an example).

I believe everybody would agree with me that public is what is exposed to general view

Indeed. Unfortunately, since Oldyzko's paper didn't separate public and private communication funding I don't see how you can draw conclusions about public and private communication from it.

All I wanted to demonstrate is that the private communication is an undervalued part of the machinery.

Please do. I've not seen any evidence so far :-)

In my personal experience, and from everything I've read, the problems of building useful communities are in the creation of good public artifacts. The problem people find is that private communication is overrated and public communication is underrated.

I feel that the general attitude here at PM is that every piece of information has some positive value

I don't think this is true. Perlmonks' reputation system is built around judging the worth of a nodes content and authors contributions.

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I'm not arguing against artist's suggestion. I quite like it, the majority of those who can be bothered to vote agree, and there are some suggestions on how the feature can be implemented on the client side.

However the idea that private communication in an online community is more important that public communication is flatly contradicted by my personal experience in helping develop online communities, and by every piece of research I've read on the matter.

Oldyzko's paper doesn't discuss the distinction between public and private communication so can't be used to argue the issue either way.

I am quite content with the Monastery. The performance has improved since i joined (it still bogs down from time to time ... oh well). Having a handful of 'me too' posts does not and never will bother me. The more the merrier, as far as i am concerned. If everyone is singing the same song ... that simply validates the popularity of the repeated advice. Want to /msg the author? Then /msg the author!!! Write a one liner that cans the results and copy and paste it if you get sick of typing.

Isn't it that only level 8 and above can join pmdev? I am just a few points bellow - and I am willing to join pmdev. I found your post quite rich in information - why did you post it anonymously? I understand that by using that invisibillity hat you can be much more harsh - but it does undermine the reputation of the post.

Isn't it that only level 8 and above can join pmdev?

Not AFAIK.You just have to have the spare time and the ability to convince the gods that you'll cause more benefit than harm.

Update: Oopsie. See tye's reply.