Re: Dissolving Choke Points

At 10:55 AM 2/3/97 -0800, Peter Hendrickson wrote:

>Moderation has been a failure.  I'm pretty good at filtering and I
>can sadly report that there is very little signal out there.

I don't think it's reasonable to expect an increase in signal within 2 1/2
weeks of the start of moderation. Improvement in the s/n ratio, yes. But
(at least if my speculation is correct), the good posts driven away by bad
posts (because some good authors are too busy to wade through lots of crap,
and some good authors are reluctant to publish their work amidst crap)
would take a much longer time to return.

(I'm working on a message re moderation and the list which will better
explain what I think about that - but I'm not trying to argue, above, that
we *must* have moderation for a long time - simply that it's too early to
call it a failure for failing to significantly increase the number of
useful messages.) 

>There are lessons to be learned here.  One is that censorship does
>not promote a stimulating and creative dialogue.

No, that is a silly lesson to draw from this experiment. There are lots of
useful and interesting "moderated" (on paper, it's called "editing")
publications/lists/digests where the content is intentionally controlled
for content and style. 

This particular implementation is imperfect. However, just as it would be
overreaching to conclude from the relative uselessness of the
pre-moderation list that "every list must be moderated, unmoderated lists
cannot succeed", it overreaches to conclude from the current results that
moderated lists cannot succeed.

>Toad.com is a choke point, not just in terms of moderation but in
>terms of the rate at which it can distribute messages.  Let's
>replace it.
>
>What we want are many machines carrying the cypherpunks list.  A
>message posted to any machine goes to all of the others.  Each
>machine sends messages to its subscribers only once.  Some of
>these machines should be across borders.
>
>The mail loop and multiple posting problems are solved by observing
>the message IDs.

I think you misspelled "Usenet". Hope this helps. 

Seriously, if you want a distributed no-choke-points "flooding" message
distribution system, you're talking about Usenet. Robust software exists
for clients and servers, and it's already supported worldwide on many
operating systems. No need to write more software to graft that
functionality onto E-mail. If the list is going to turn into Usenet (we've
already got most of Usenet's better kooks), we might as well just move the
damn thing over to alt.cypherpunks and be done with it. (Anyone care to
guess who founded alt.* as a way to route around censorship?)

(Of course, Usenet is a technical success and a spectacular failure,
content-wise. So opponents of moderation will be forgiven for failing to
mention this sparkling example of an unmoderated, anything-goes forum for
discussion.)


--
Greg Broiles                | US crypto export control policy in a nutshell:
gbroiles@netbox.com         | 
http://www.io.com/~gbroiles | Export jobs, not crypto.
                            |

At 07:59 PM 2/3/97 -0800, Greg Broiles wrote:
>If the list is going to turn into Usenet (we've already got most of 
>Usenet's better kooks), we might as well just move the
>damn thing over to alt.cypherpunks and be done with it. 
>(Anyone care to guess who founded alt.* as a way to route around 
>censorship?)

The big argument against going to a newsgroup in the past
was that signal-to-noise would degrade to the point of alt.2600ness
due to newbies, flamers, overflow to/from political ranting newsgroups, etc.,
and there's already a sci.crypt for that.  The main argument
in favor of moderation has been that the list has become unreadable
due to newbies, flamers, political ranting, and directed attacks
and maybe moderation would fix it, at the cost of annoying people
who don't like moderation (which is realistically most of us;
two practical reasons not to have moderation are that the volume is too high
for most people to be willing to moderate, and that the delays 
inherent in the moderation process reduce the interactivity that's
been one of the valuable things about this list.)  I'd prefer that
we all just get along, but things really were getting uncivil.

An advantage of Usenet is the ability to deploy whatever NoCeM is
called these days as a way to let people avoid spammers.

Personally, I'd switched to the fcpunx filtered list a couple months ago,
mainly to cut down on volume but also because I was getting fed up
with Vulis's attacks through remailers, which were getting to be
too much trouble to filter out.  I switched back to the main list
after the moderation announcement, with Eudora filters
to make some discussions and some people go away.

Of course, there have been several different demonstrations of
ways around the moderation since then.

#			Thanks;  Bill
# Bill Stewart, +1-415-442-2215 stewarts@ix.netcom.com
# You can get PGP outside the US at ftp.ox.ac.uk/pub/crypto/pgp
#     (If this is a mailing list, please Cc: me on replies.  Thanks.)

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At 10:58 PM 2/3/97 -0800, Bill Stewart wrote:
>An advantage of Usenet is the ability to deploy whatever NoCeM is
>called these days as a way to let people avoid spammers.

My mention of Usenet was somewhat tongue-in-cheek; I don't know if I'd bother
with the list if it were moved to (or gated with) Usenet, as Usenet has
become for the most part 100+ Mb/day of uselessness.

But my impression is that many moderation opponents would also be opponents
of a move to Usenet. Perhaps I'm wrong. But Usenet offers precisely what many
people claim we must have for the list to be viable, e.g.,
uncontrolled/uncontrollable distribution and messaging. So I'm curious about
whether or not the proponents of an open, uncontrolled list really want it to
be *that* open and uncontrolled. In the past, there's been strong opposition
to that. But it's possible that most of the people who had strong feelings
about not wanting to be subjected to the downside of Usenet have already left
the list.

(And if the current opponents of moderation don't want to see the list be
quite that open, I think what we're arguing about here is not "censorship v.
no censorship" but "what degree of censorship do we want? one lump, or two?",
which pretty much eliminates anyone's claim to have a moral high ground from
which to argue.)  

There's really nothing stopping anyone from just setting up a gateway. The
list is already gated one-way to Usenet; it shows up many places as
mail.cypherpunks. What's missing is a gateway running the other direction;
from looking at the headers as messages are received at my ISP (io.com),
toad.com is already in the Path: line, so preventing backfeeding shouldn't be
a problem. (Doh, it's been a few years since I fussed with mail-to-news and
back again, but this isn't rocket science.) 

The good side I see to a move to Usenet is that it lets people use the
comparatively better tools for managing messages - e.g., NoCeM, threading, nn
(whose killfiles will kill by thread, author, regexp, and can be time limited
so you can easily give annoying people a 30-day 'timeout' and see if they're
still a kook later on), AltaVista and DejaNews archiving/searching, and
server architecture that's designed to cope with storing/indexing many
messages.

The down side is that Usenet is more or less a sewer these days, and some of
it's bound to spill over. 


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--
Greg Broiles                | US crypto export control policy in a nutshell:
gbroiles@netbox.com         | 
http://www.io.com/~gbroiles | Export jobs, not crypto.
                            |