As you may know, I'm a moderator on the local Freecycle group, which has just over 20,000 messages and nearly 1000 messages a week. Probably the biggest cause of complaints, both direct to moderators and on the Cafe group is How Rude All These People Are who respond to offers.

I've been decluttering again (yes, one of those posts is lurking in the to-write buffer) and I've been freecycling stuff, and just this weekend I got a high percentage of badly-written responses that didn't do the minimum I asked by way of suggestion collection times, didn't use please or thank you[1], and generally implied it was my duty to feel grateful for their generosity in taking this stuff off my hands.

[1] The person who managed to use both please and thank you and still seem rude was quite impressive!

That last bit is a bit tricky because one of my motivations for freecycle is that I do generally feel grateful that someone is going to use my stuff rather than me add to landfill. But until I actually hand it over it is my stuff and it is up to me whether it gets binned or given to someone to be useful, and actually a "please" or a "thank you" or a "I would be grateful if you would consider me" would be nice. Please. Thank you.

Now, I have a rule of never giving anything to rude people, but it occurred to me today that it's not really very good feedback. If I get 5 really polite emails for 1 item I still have to disappoint 4 polite people. Anyway, I've decided to start giving some explicit feedback when I mail to tell people they can't have something. If people say "I'll have this if it hasn't gone" they are getting replies like "It has gone to someone who gave me a collection time as I asked in my offer email." And I am following Ian's suggestion and excising my usual "Sorry" from replies: I am no longer apologising to rude people for not giving them something. And I am thanking those people who are polite, and making a point of doing so when I am turning them down anyway.

It's quite hard phrasing my replies so I expect I will probably trigger some angry responses, but my experience moderating the group is that repeated specific feedback does change people's behaviour more often than not. Here's hoping, anyway.

Freecycle got mentioned in today's Sunday Times:
http://business.timesonline.co.uk/tol/business/money/consumer_affairs/article4276453.ece

A pity though - 'swap shop' is exactly what Freecycle isn't, and I wish they'd focused less on the getting and more on the giving. I foresee a lot of educational rejection messages being required shortly ...

(I don't think I ever blogged this, but since March, I've been on the moderation team for the Cambridge Freecycle group, current membership approaching 13,000.)