The Difficulty of Source Level Blocking

[hughes@ah.com (Eric Hughes)]

>>For the first
>>such group, whoever hosts the ratings site can decide who gets to
>>moderate.  A benign autocrat is ideal in this case.

>That may be true, but the benign autocrat of today will all too soon be
>replaced by a not-at-all-so-benign fascist, who then has the power to keep
>critical post of the net "for the common good".

You're missing a few qualifiers.  The benign autocrat mentioned above
is for _bootstrapping_ a workable _distribution_ of moderation.  Once
the dynamic of moderator selection is stable, this autocrat then loses
most all power to influence, since the initial distribution of
articles to moderators need not be in any particular place.

>Just say NO to Usenet moderation.

I'm not proposing that every newsgroup be moderated, even in
distributed form.  What I am proposing is a system for a distributedly
moderated newsgroup which can compete for attention with other
newsgroups and other fora.

Eric