Alan Olsen wrote:
I have been watching the debate on Cypherpunk Extremism, filtering spam, and the like and have a few comments.
When Tim May claims that Cypherpunk solutions lead to elitism, he is more correct than Vullis or any of his ilk are willing to realize. The reasons
Alan, everything leads to elitism because it is a natural way of existence of large masses of different people. The most anti-elitist societies turned out to be most segmented in the end.
I have watched the conversations on filtering and have seen few, if any, methods that would be usable by a poster of average experience without alot of extra frustration and/or time involved. For a filtering or posting method to be useful (or used), it has to be uncumbersome to use, no matter the platform.
First of all, do you really want to see these posters? Second, there are very simple filtering techniques such as 1) eliminating duplicates 2) eliminating any cypherpunks messages not directly addressed to cypherpunks (prevents mailing list attacks) and 3) deleting messages originating from certain persons. These methods, I believe, do not require any kind of high intelligence. Therefore, the people who leave are either very stupid people who cannot cope with the higher traffic, or very smart people who do not see enough of good thoughts.
Those who are working towards "elitist" solutions are at least working towards solutions. I think people need to ask themselves what goals they desire for themselves and what it will take to get there. You don't need to write code necessarily, but you do need to do something other than just bitch and moan.
The only two persons who do anything with this list are Gilmore and Vulis. - Igor.