17 Dec
2003
17 Dec
'03
11:17 p.m.
At 6:22 PM 2/4/1997, Declan McCullagh wrote:
What Vulis and the rest (whom I killfiled long ago) have done is polluted a common resource, making it unusable for the rest. It's the tragedy of the commons. When all can speak without limit in a public forum, the drunken boor can shout everyone else down.
I think this analogy is inappropriate for modern communications forums. Mailing lists have the wonderful property that the drunken boor cannot shout everyone else down. This is what is so great about the Net. It is trivial to filter the drunken boor. This cannot be done in a crowded auditorium. Another neat property is the fact that people can't interrupt each other and everybody can "talk" at once. Peter Hendrickson pdh@best.com