John Gilmore
Tim, the Cypherpunks have chosen to follow Sandy's lead for this month. I'll admit I made it easy for them, but the results are conclusive. There are 1311 addresses in the cypherpunks list today; 42 in the unedited list; and 19 in the flames list. Forty people cared enough to read every posting; the other thousand either wanted to try the experiment -- or didn't care enough to send an email message. Which, as we all know, is a very low threshold.
I just have to point out that you are ignoring some important factors (though I do trust your intentions and believe it is unintentional). I initially tried subscribing to all the lists, but the headers of the edited and unedited lists were identical making it impossible to sort the mail. To make matters worse, some messages seem to have gone out only to the edited list, and not to the unedited (particularly at the beginning), so that, unable to come up with a decent filtering scheme easily, I finally gave up and just subscribed to cypherpunks. In general, unsubscribing and resubscribing to a mailing list is not completely trivial. In addition to the particulars of cypherpunks, there are also the issues of what if your E-mail address depends on the machine you send mail from and your unsubscribe request gets delayed for confirmation. What if the new list no longer works properly with your mail filter and you end up with 1,000 pieces of cypherpunks mail in your main mailbox, etc. These are not insurmountable obstacles, but they certainly provide a strong enough disincentive for people to switching their list subscriptions that I think the numbers you list above are meaningless. Perhaps a better comparison would be to look at how many people subscribe to the other two filtered cypherpunks lists.
Perhaps at that point I should have shut down the list, as Lucky is now suggesting.
Well, you don't appreciate the content of the list, and you seem to feel that many members of the list don't appreciate what you are doing. Why not shut the list down? I can think of one reason: cypherpunks seems to suck in a lot of crap, and might be keeping that crap away from the coderpunks list. Other than that, though, I think killing this list would probably be a good idea.