Re: Dissolving Choke Points

["E. Allen Smith" <EALLENSMITH@ocelot.Rutgers.EDU>]

From:	IN%"gbroiles@netbox.com"  "Greg Broiles"  4-FEB-1997 14:55:18.91

>But my impression is that many moderation opponents would also be opponents
>of a move to Usenet. Perhaps I'm wrong. But Usenet offers precisely what many
>people claim we must have for the list to be viable, e.g.,
>uncontrolled/uncontrollable distribution and messaging. So I'm curious about
>whether or not the proponents of an open, uncontrolled list really want it to
>be *that* open and uncontrolled. In the past, there's been strong opposition
>to that. But it's possible that most of the people who had strong feelings
>about not wanting to be subjected to the downside of Usenet have already left
>the list.

>(And if the current opponents of moderation don't want to see the list be
>quite that open, I think what we're arguing about here is not "censorship v.
>no censorship" but "what degree of censorship do we want? one lump, or two?",
>which pretty much eliminates anyone's claim to have a moral high ground from
>which to argue.)  

	Umm... there's a difference. Moderation is control by a _person_;
not moving to Usenet is control by nobody except how things happen to be set
up.

>The good side I see to a move to Usenet is that it lets people use the
>comparatively better tools for managing messages - e.g., NoCeM, threading, nn
>(whose killfiles will kill by thread, author, regexp, and can be time limited
>so you can easily give annoying people a 30-day 'timeout' and see if they're
>still a kook later on), AltaVista and DejaNews archiving/searching, and
>server architecture that's designed to cope with storing/indexing many
>messages.

	Hmm... since both you and Bill Stewart are pointing out various
advantageous things about Usenet, I may need to retract my previous statement
that mail fitering is better. On the other hand, other people have mentioned
the susceptibility of email to write-your-own filtering and other
processing. (For instance, I've got a project that needs cypherpunks (and
other controversial groups) to be on mailing lists instead of (or at least
as well as) news servers to work right.) Is there a full-scale equivalent
of procmail for Usenet, including functions like shunting messages to
programs et al?

>The down side is that Usenet is more or less a sewer these days, and some of
>it's bound to spill over. 

	Quite.
	-Allen