Meaningful Messages and Human Discussion on Mailing Lists
On a mailing list I'm part of, we started having a discussion about how we felt about large swaths of AI-generated prose. To share? Not share? Here are some thoughts I had on the topic, and also a bit of a recap of early "netiquette" from the old days of the Internet, circa 1990s. I am grateful to Jessie Upp for thoughtful comments on an earlier draft. -- Peter Kaminski, 2025-10-10
I'm going to go out on a limb and suggest that "LLM vs. not LLM" is the wrong metric.
I find that I value messages that have more meaning and ease of use, and get fatigued by messages with less meaning or that are hard to read. So when I draft and edit a post to the list, I try to notice whether my message adds meaning and reduces friction for the reader.
Meaningful messages (to me):
- anything that touches on your lived experience
- news I didn't know about
- thoughtful replies to other people's posts
- LLM passages that convey or organize facts, as long as they've been carefully fact-checked
Features and characteristics that make messages easier for me to read:
- subject line reflects topic of message (in other words, change the subject line when the subject changes)
- formatting is used to make it easier to find the important parts to read
- "noise" (superfluous quoted lines, signatures, attributions that don't apply anymore) from previous messages is removed
Messages that I find fatiguing:
- copy-pasted material that could have been a link instead (from a website or an LLM, doesn't matter)
- news, marketing, or self-promotion I don't care about
- links without an explanation of why you found the material interesting, or your thoughts sparked by the material
- very short replies that don't say much (in chat, emoji reactions are super useful, but the overhead of email messages means that very short replies are more noise than signal)
- conversations between you and an LLM which were probably high-context for you, but won't be high-context for me
Features and characteristics that make messages harder for me to read:
- subject line is used as a thread marker rather than a subject marker
- formatting or presentation is hard to wade through to find your useful contributions
- "noise" (superfluous quoted lines, signatures, attributions that don't apply anymore) from previous messages
I will stipulate that different people have different email clients, reading styles, and cognitive styles. It is easy for me to wade through certain kinds of noise, and very difficult for me to deal with other kinds of noise. But someone else's ability to do so, and even what constitutes "noise" may be very different.
A particular shout-out to Gmail users: I know your client is unfriendly to people with other clients without your intending to be. For instance, Gmail loves to include all the messages in a thread in each email, and makes it difficult to even see that it's happening inside Gmail. I think changing subject lines can confuse Gmail too, because I think it uses the subject line as a thread ID, which it shouldn't -- there are better ways to handle threading. But I'm used to it; these kinds of things we could properly argue about 30 years ago, but I know Gmail is here to stay, whether or not it's friendly for non-Gmail users.
And lastly, a heuristic we used to use a lot on USENET and older mailing lists:
It's assumed that readers may not read all emails, and readers who find that a particular poster doesn't add a lot of meaning can add them to their "killfile" (filter their messages so they won't see them).
The cool thing about this heuristic is that since different people have different definitions of noise or low meaning, each reader can decide for themselves about posters, rather than using a nuclear option of removing a poster from the list.
Bonus prompts to try with your LLM:
Look at old USENET, mailing list, and listserv "netiquette" posts for guidance on making posts / emails more meaningful and more usable for readers, and how to avoid making noisy or low-relevance posts / emails.
(follow-on prompt after entering the prompt above)
Considering the above, produce a modern “Netiquette Today" checklist tailored for a modern mailing list for discussion between friends and colleagues. Make sure to include suggestions for including content generated by LLMs.
=== LLM-generated content follows (Claude Sonnet 4.5, reviewed by Peter Kaminski) ===
The golden rule: Treat every message as if it's taking 5 minutes from each recipient's day—because it is.
=== End LLM-generated content ===
Pete