Re: Dissolving Choke Points

[Bill Stewart <stewarts@ix.netcom.com>]

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
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