Re: Experiments on Mailing Lists

[Greg Broiles <gbroiles@netbox.com>]

At 01:10 PM 1/3/97 GMT, Adam Back wrote:
>The only thing I would be happy to see happen in the way of list based
>filtering, is anything to cut out pure commercial, non crypto related
>spam.  Spammers seem to have discovered mailing lists as efficient
>distribution methods in addition to direct mass mailing lately.

Some evildoer has been posting messages to Usenet purporting to be from
"cypherpunks@toad.com"; some of the messages posted have been to newsgroups
frequented by the make-spam-fast crowd, so now we've apparently been
identified as within an especially gullible market segment. The messages
sent to Usenet are labelled "SPAM BAIT" (or something like that) -
apparently the sender of the messages thinks they're doing something useful. 

>Unfortunately this is difficult to filter automatically, and no one
>has the time to do it in close to real time, and time lags hinder
>discussion.

For me, real time access to Cypherpunks is unproductive; I find that I get
the most value out of the list if I read my accumulated messages once every
day or two instead of once an hour.

Also, at a "macro" perspective, too much feedback can be as harmful or
inefficient as too little feedback.

I think that a "3 posts per person per day" rule might produce interesting
results; at least from my perspective, people who send many messages (> 5,
or so) per day usually don't have anything of substance to say and I
frequently skip all of their posts. It would also encourage people to avoid
the "Me, too" or "I think you're an idiot" messages which can just as
easily be sent privately or not at all. Implementing such a rule would be
disproportionately burdensome technically and politically, so I'm not
seriously suggesting that we implement it, but I do think it's useful to
think of "fewer, better" posts as a goal. 

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