Re: Dissolving Choke Points

[Greg Broiles <gbroiles@netbox.com>]

At 10:55 AM 2/3/97 -0800, Peter Hendrickson wrote:

>Moderation has been a failure.  I'm pretty good at filtering and I
>can sadly report that there is very little signal out there.

I don't think it's reasonable to expect an increase in signal within 2 1/2
weeks of the start of moderation. Improvement in the s/n ratio, yes. But
(at least if my speculation is correct), the good posts driven away by bad
posts (because some good authors are too busy to wade through lots of crap,
and some good authors are reluctant to publish their work amidst crap)
would take a much longer time to return.

(I'm working on a message re moderation and the list which will better
explain what I think about that - but I'm not trying to argue, above, that
we *must* have moderation for a long time - simply that it's too early to
call it a failure for failing to significantly increase the number of
useful messages.) 

>There are lessons to be learned here.  One is that censorship does
>not promote a stimulating and creative dialogue.

No, that is a silly lesson to draw from this experiment. There are lots of
useful and interesting "moderated" (on paper, it's called "editing")
publications/lists/digests where the content is intentionally controlled
for content and style. 

This particular implementation is imperfect. However, just as it would be
overreaching to conclude from the relative uselessness of the
pre-moderation list that "every list must be moderated, unmoderated lists
cannot succeed", it overreaches to conclude from the current results that
moderated lists cannot succeed.

>Toad.com is a choke point, not just in terms of moderation but in
>terms of the rate at which it can distribute messages.  Let's
>replace it.
>
>What we want are many machines carrying the cypherpunks list.  A
>message posted to any machine goes to all of the others.  Each
>machine sends messages to its subscribers only once.  Some of
>these machines should be across borders.
>
>The mail loop and multiple posting problems are solved by observing
>the message IDs.

I think you misspelled "Usenet". Hope this helps. 

Seriously, if you want a distributed no-choke-points "flooding" message
distribution system, you're talking about Usenet. Robust software exists
for clients and servers, and it's already supported worldwide on many
operating systems. No need to write more software to graft that
functionality onto E-mail. 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?)

(Of course, Usenet is a technical success and a spectacular failure,
content-wise. So opponents of moderation will be forgiven for failing to
mention this sparkling example of an unmoderated, anything-goes forum for
discussion.)


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