Re: My Departure, Moderation, and "Ownership of the List"

[Patrick May <pjm@spe.com>]

Sandy Sandfort writes:
[ . . . ]
 > On Sun, 2 Feb 1997, Timothy C. May wrote:
[ . . . ]
 > > Fourth, it sent a message to enemies of liberty that "Even the 
 > > Cypherpunks have found it necessary to abandon their anarchic
 > > ways."
 > 
 > That's one message that one could take from all this, I suppose.
 > I don't see it that way, nor do several list members who thanked 
 > me in private e-mail for improving the list.  Again, YMMV.

     This is the strongest point in Mr. May's essay, and it is not
easily dismissed as a difference in perspective.  I admit to looking
forward to the moderation experiment when it was announce; the noise
on the list was phenomenal even by cypherpunk standards.  My procmail
filters were approaching the level of complexity required for
self-awareness and the ASCII art still slipped through.  Plus, I
generally agree with Mr. Sandfort's positions.

     The point above demonstrates that support of the current solution
is not rationally justified.  Banning people from the list, however
ineffectually, and imposing moderation on the main list, rather than
offering another filtering service, does indeed support the thesis
that even a virtual anarchic society must resort to a central
authority to solve some problems.

     The moderation mechanism is the message.

 > What didn't work was "local filtering" which has no feed-back 
 > loop to engender comity.

     This is a strong rebuttal.  The primary affect of local filtering
is that posts which are filtered do not garner as many responses as
those which are not.  This feedback is swamped by the tendency of
filtered messages to generate flames from those who do not filter
them.

     Filtered sublists are a more effective technique, available to
non-technical subscribers as well.

     Some of the more advanced tools discussed here, such as
collaborative filtering, rating schemes, etc. have potential if the
ease-of-use barriers can be overcome.

     A cryptoanarchic solution, however, should be technical and
individual.  Centralized human moderation does not have the cypherpunk
nature.

Regards,

Patrick May