I spoke out in support of the idea that non-birding debates should
take place elsewhere, because I was concerned about the future of
Tweeters.

Lisa M. Smith wrote:

> ...why ain't (people on this list who want to...talk *strictly*
> about birds and birding) talking up a storm?

I think they are. I recently took the time to analyze a week's worth
of Tweeters traffic (10/1 through 10/7). What I found may shed some
light on Lisa's question.

274 messages were posted by 76 different people. 53% of the posts
were on-topic. That's roughly 20 on-topic messages per day. That's a
fairly active list.

But what about the off-topic posts? I found that 59% of the off-topic
traffic came from just *13* of the 343 subscribers. If you subtract
the off-topic posts from these people, the off-topic traffic drops
to just 27%.

Now, I'm not suggesting that these people are bad, or should go away.
I'm only pointing out that Tweeters *is* dominated by a very small
group of highly active posters. Furthermore, that these same people
are responsible for most of the off-topic traffic.

It's like were all sitting in a circle, having our discussion. But
we're not all in the front row, because the front row only has a few
seats. There are many rows of seats, in concentric circles. Most of
the people are back there, listening and learning from the discussion.
Occasionally one of them speaks out, or even goes down to sit in the
front for a while. My concern is this: Would the people in front care
or even notice if everybody else just left?

Then Don Baccus wrote:

> How many times do we have to debate this issue? ... This is at least
> the third time the issue's been debated since I joined the list. The
> answer has always been the same, a large groundswell of support for
> the list as it is.

I remember those too, at least one of them. But, Don is right. The
same thing happened then as is happening now: a few very strongly
stated opinions from a small minority of the subscribers.

But I'm not fooled into believing that this means the majority of the
subscribers want to debate non-birding issues here. Especially in
light of the usage statistics mentioned above.

Then M. Smith wrote:

> ...it seems like such a waste of all of our time.

I find it interesting that a serious discussion about the quality of
Tweeters is seen as a waste time, but debates about social, political,
and economic issues are not.

Randy Deardorff
curlew at eskimo.com
Seattle, Washington USA