Re: Response to Perrygram

At 10:16 PM 2/13/96, Perry E. Metzger wrote:

>I will repeat, Tim. You have no job and do nothing for a living. For
>you it is probably hard to understand that some of us prefer to get
>our mail segregated by topic so that we don't have to spend more time

The issue of what I do with my time is a red herring. As it happens, many
folks in the "cyberspace activism" spend as much time or more as I do on
the Net. In any case, who cares how I spend my time?

I also note that for several years Perry was clearly spending a whole lot
more time than even I am now on the Net, making the "Top Ten Usenet
Posters," or somesuch.

I am sure that when Perry was a Shearson-Lehman, or Lehman Brothers, or
whatever it was called, and was posting several articles an hour on
Extropians, Cypherpunks, Libernet, Usenet, etc., that he would have roughly
the same reaction I am now having to someone writing: "Perry, you are
writing too much--some of us are trying to get some work done!" He would
likely have dismissed their complaints as irrelevant, that no one is forced
to read his articles.

Likewise today. No one is forced to read my posts, Perry's posts, or anyone
else's posts. This is what filters are for. As it happens, I do *not* read
all of the posts here. In fact, I delete about 90% of them after scanning
the first paragraph, the subject, and the author. Takes me about 15
seconds, tops, to do this, and sometimes I'm even faster. (Do the math: I
can "dispose of" about 50 or 60 messages a day in 10-15 minutes...and this
is about the best that can be hoped for, even if Perry were the moderator
and the 10 or so messages a day that are truly off the wall were screened
out...it just wouldn't change the basic time to screen all that much.)

>than needed reading our email. However, for some of us, time is
>money. I have failed to directly answer your comments on this sort of
>thing out of deference to your "elder statesman" status around here,

Spare me, Perry. As I mentioned, you certainly used to write a truly vast
number of rants to Extropians, Libernet, and, yes, even Cypherpunks. A
check of the archives will show this clearly.

It is well and good that you apparently are now very busy and cannot write
your customary number of articles. But spare us the insinuations (in
several of your perrygrams) that because you are too busy to write you are
doing critical work and because some of us use our time to write we are
slackers.

I write because setting down my thoughts and exploring ideas is far more
important to me than just about anything else I can imagine doing,
including writing C programs. If you don't like this, learn how to use
filters and filter me out, or leave the Cypherpunks list. Seems simple
enough to me.

--Tim May




>but this is getting silly. If you want to post about libertarianism,
>libernet, so far as I know, still takes postings. If you want to read
>about the habits of migrating birds, there are interest groups for
>that. We don't have a lot of good places to discuss specifically
>cryptography and its impact, and this group was set up *for that*.
>
>I mean, why not just have one mailing list for all topics of all sorts
>if "filtering" and "hitting the 'd' key" are supposed to be the only
>way we deal with this stuff, hmm?
>
>Perry

Boycott espionage-enabled software!
We got computers, we're tapping phone lines, we know that that ain't allowed.
---------:---------:---------:---------:---------:---------:---------:----
Timothy C. May              | Crypto Anarchy: encryption, digital money,
tcmay@got.net  408-728-0152 | anonymous networks, digital pseudonyms, zero
W.A.S.T.E.: Corralitos, CA  | knowledge, reputations, information markets,
Higher Power: 2^756839 - 1  | black markets, collapse of governments.
"National borders aren't even speed bumps on the information superhighway."

I'll post a bit more on this because trying to lower the noise levels
around here is a matter of community importance. If you are sick of
this, kill it now, and I apologize in advance for it.

Timothy C. May writes:
> I also note that for several years Perry was clearly spending a whole lot
> more time than even I am now on the Net, making the "Top Ten Usenet
> Posters," or somesuch.

Actually, I made #19, for one month. I was between jobs at the
time. It was 1990. I was not starting my new job for several weeks and
had nothing better to in the meantime. I always posted to the right
groups, or tried to.

As I keep emphasizing, the problem is not volume. It is selection. It
is very easy for me to select only those channels of information I
want to read provided that people keep the information going into the
proper channels. This is an effort that everyone across the net has to
work on. Nothing wrong with posting PROVIDED IT IS TO THE RIGHT PLACE.

> Likewise today. No one is forced to read my posts, Perry's posts, or anyone
> else's posts. This is what filters are for. As it happens, I do *not* read
> all of the posts here. In fact, I delete about 90% of them after scanning
> the first paragraph, the subject, and the author. Takes me about 15
> seconds, tops, to do this, and sometimes I'm even faster

Kill files help a bit, but ultimately they are not a substitute for
human filters. I *do* in fact just "d" messages I don't want to read
very fast -- within seconds -- but there are still limits to how many
messages one person can process. Between this and other lists I have
to spend several seconds each on hundreds of messages a day. That adds
up fast. 300*15=75 minutes of my day. I actually do better than this,
but I figure about one hour of my life, day after day, is spent
deleting garbage. Unfortunately, there are nuggets of gold inside, but
they are becoming harder and harder to find.

As I said, if its fine to put everything everywhere, then why not have
one single newsgroup and post everything there instead of thousands of
newsgroups and mailing lists?

The reason people are upset to read about Joe's Wash and Toast on
comp.lang.c isn't that there isn't a reasonable place to read about
that, but because the content is inappropriate for the particular
place. The problem with spamming is entirely that it forces people to
waste time looking at inappropriate junk. Its fine to read about the
green-card lawyers on a newsgroup dedicated to visas (and they will
probably be flamed there for charging for something free, but thats
another story), but its a public nuisance similar to dog poop on every
square of sidewalk when you have to read about it in every other
newsgroup. Inappropriate posts are exactly like dog crap on the
sidewalk. They don't kill you, and you can just "walk around",
but after a while you get sick of dealing with it hour after hour, day
after day.

Keeping appropriate postings in appropriate places is much like trying
not to park in such a way as to take up two spaces, trying not to
track mud into your apartment building, or other forms of good
citizensship. It isn't required, no law forces you to do it, but
everyone who isn't an asshole tries to follow the social conventions
because it makes life for everyone. Yes, its your right to park such
that no one can fit in behind or ahead of you, but is it something you
really should be doing?

> I write because setting down my thoughts and exploring ideas is far more
> important to me than just about anything else I can imagine doing,
> including writing C programs. If you don't like this, learn how to use
> filters and filter me out, or leave the Cypherpunks list. Seems simple
> enough to me.

Thats fine -- you not only have the right to write everything you like
but as a good writer you should. However, not all thoughts belong
everywhere. Do you randomize your public library, or do you try to
sort it? If you have ideas about whether Uri Geller is a fraud or not,
why not post them to sci.sceptic instead of here? Why try to post
everything everywhere?


Perry

"Perry E. Metzger" <perry@piermont.com> writes:
> Keeping appropriate postings in appropriate places is much like trying
> not to park in such a way as to take up two spaces, trying not to
> track mud into your apartment building, or other forms of good
> citizensship. It isn't required, no law forces you to do it, but
> everyone who isn't an asshole tries to follow the social conventions
> because it makes life for everyone. Yes, its your right to park such
> that no one can fit in behind or ahead of you, but is it something you
> really should be doing?

The protocols for both Usenet and the open mailing list were designed with the
assumption that the posters will follow the rules and post into "appropriate"
forums. This sort of worked 10 years ago, when I started reading Usenet, but
clearly doesn't work anymore. People should be free to post anything they want
anywhere they want. As more and more posters excercise this right, the readers
lose the right not to have their time wasted by the traffic they don't want to
see. A good friend of mine called this "the right to non-association". It's an
imporant part of one's privacy. While we have some technical people left on
this mailing list, perhaps we can discuss technical solutions to this problem?

---

Dr. Dimitri Vulis
Brighton Beach Boardwalk BBS, Forest Hills, N.Y.: +1-718-261-2013, 14.4Kbps