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