Re: A vote of confidence for Sandy

[Greg Broiles <gbroiles@netbox.com>]

At 10:49 PM 1/10/97 -0800, Lucky Green wrote:
>Yes. Igor's STUMP software seems like the way to go. The vast majority of
>posters to this list are not a problem. Discussions amongst them may get
>heated, but they have basic human decency and never even come close to the
>level of abuse and bigotry we have seen from Vulis, aga, et al. 

I think that the move to human moderation is a good thing, and am pleased
that Sandy will shortly begin to act as moderator.

However, I think that forming lists of "approved people" and "unapproved
people" and treating them differently is likely to do more harm than good,
even if we have nice software which does it very efficiently. I don't like
it for several reasons:

1.	Political. It's symbolically disturbing, and it tends to shift the focus
of the group (and of the moderation process) away from messages, and
towards the people who post them. I think it'd be tempting to turn it into
some sort of bureaucratic system, with punishments (being on the bad list)
and rewards and status changes and written warnings and all of the other
features which frequently bring out the worst in people. I suspect that
agreeing on "the 10 people who are clearly a problem" will turn out to be
as difficult as finding any 10 things that cypherpunks can agree on, and
then we've got to decide who decides who's a problem, and then we've got to
decide how we decide things, and argue about whether or not John Gilmore is
a good person, and [...]

2.	Technical. It requires that the people on the "good list" authenticate
their messages (otherwise people will post with the names of "good people"
to avoid moderation), which imports a lot of hassle with different
platforms and signing and certification and key distribution and [...]
which we don't have good solutions for yet.

3.	 Conceptual. It's a complex problem technically and politically, which
means that it's difficult to understand or debug, and it's got a lot of
points of failure. In general, complex solutions (which require many people
to install and learn new software) are difficult to implement, take longer
than anticipated, and are frequently avoided by the people they're
supposedly helping. (See, e.g., RISKS Digest; both for how a
human-moderated list can work nicely, and for examples of how complex
technical solutions to problems often create more or worse problems than
they solve.)

I think that the human moderator solution suffers less from these problems;
in general, it's a well-tested solution to the "what about off-topic
assholes?" problem. It's not perfect, but it does work, more or less; it's
easy to understand, easy to implement, and requires no software changes on
the users' end.


--
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