Moderation, Tim, Sandy, me, etc. * Strong crypto == DES?!
I'm glad we're talking about some of the real issues here. Tim May said:
I don't want Sandy Sandfort sitting in judgment on my posts, deciding what the Cypherpunks--a group I co-founded for God's sake!!!!--are to be allowed to read and what they may not.
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. If I was a social scientist I might want to run the experiment both ways, or six different ways. Name it this, or name it that. I'm not; all I want is something that works. The cypherpunks list was unusable for this kind of discussion, only a month ago. It's usable now. I'm definitely bugged by the community's attitude toward my "censorship". Rather than being glad that someone, anyone, was doing something about the major problem on the list, 99% of the reaction was to create even more ill-considered, emotional flamage. *I* didn't make the signal/noise get worse at that point -- *you-all* did. Perhaps at that point I should have shut down the list, as Lucky is now suggesting. "Asking the list what to do" was clearly not a useful option. Sandy cared enough about the community to make some concrete suggestions to me about how to get the list back on track. They involved a lot more work than the previous setup. I told him if he was willing to do the work, we could try it. As Dale suggests, I wasn't about to waste my time reading the whole list in real time and passing judgement on the postings. Sandy was, for a month. The element I find most lacking from the whole discussion, until recently, has been responsibility. In an anarchy, *everyone* is responsible; nothing is "somebody else's job". Sandy felt responsible, so he proposed something. I felt responsible, so I helped. But a large part of the community sat on the sidelines and criticized, without making attempts to make things better; indeed the volume and tone of the criticisms themselves made things worse. Unpaid labor for a peanut gallery of spoiled children isn't very gratifying. You-all remind me of a passage from Booker T. Washington's book _Up From Slavery_, describing what happened on the night that news of the Emancipation Proclamation reached the South: The wild rejoicing on the part of the emancipated coloured people lasted but for a brief period, for I noticed that by the time they returned to their cabins there was a change in their feelings. The great responsibility of being free, of having charge of themselves, of having to think and plan for themselves and their children, seemed to take possesion of them. It was very much like suddenly turning a youth of ten or twelve years out into the world to provide for himself. In a few hours the great questions with which the Anglo-Saxon race had been grappling for centuries had been thrown upon these people to be solved. These were the questions of a home, a living, the rearing of children, education, citizenship, and the establishment and support of churches. Was it any wonder that within a few hours the wild rejoicing ceased and a feeling of deep gloom seemed to pervade the slave quarters? To some it seemed that, now that they were in actual possession of it, freedom was a more serious thing than they had expected to find it. Most of the people on the list haven't bothered to face that freedom. Your de-facto "leaders" have faced it for you. It is a more serious thing than than you expect. All it takes it hard work and judgement. Be responsible for setting your society's privacy policy -- without knowing whether you are right. Face the uncertainty and build anyway. Shall I post you an Emancipation Proclamation -- as if you needed one? Start a mailing list on another site! Move this list to somewhere! Create and nurture an alt group! Make an independent moderated list drawn from the unedited list! Hold meetings! Establish for it a home, a funding, the rearing of newbies, education, citizenship, and the establishment and support of philosophies. Dead simple for people as capable as us. Just takes work. Who's volunteering? Just do it! The experiment will be over in a few weeks. Who's going to take over deciding how to run the list, and running it? If you want to help organize what I'll call the `progressive crypto community', for lack of a better term, then please do. Otherwise, in the immortal words of Lazarus Long, "PIPE DOWN!". John PS: Can we talk about crypto too? It's clear from the last few days of press releases that the pro-GAK forces are again working to confuse novices into thinking that two very different things are the same thing. Last time it was "public key infrastructure" and "key recovery". This time it's "strong crypto" and "56-bit DES". What should we do about this? Educate the public?
John Gilmore wrote:
I'm glad we're talking about some of the real issues here. I'm definitely bugged by the community's attitude toward my "censorship".
I'll bet you are.
Perhaps at that point I should have shut down the list, as Lucky is now suggesting.
He'd really like to, but...
You-all remind me of a passage from Booker T. Washington's book _Up From Slavery_, describing what happened on the night that news of the Emancipation Proclamation reached the South:
What we most remind him of are slaves.
Most of the people on the list haven't bothered to face that freedom.
Which freedom is that?
If you want to help organize what I'll call the `progressive crypto community', for lack of a better term, then please do. Otherwise, in the immortal words of Lazarus Long, "PIPE DOWN!".
i.e., stop saying what I don't want to hear and start saying what I do want to hear, after all, it's *my* list.
I'm another long time list member. I've posted before on a number of occasions but not often. And I was one of those who subscribed immediately to the unedited list. Anyway, herein my 2 cents. John Gilmore writes:
Tim May said:
I don't want Sandy Sandfort sitting in judgment on my posts, deciding what the Cypherpunks--a group I co-founded for God's sake!!!!--are to be allowed to read and what they may not.
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.
"Conclusively" this has shown only that most folks are willing to go along with an experiment -- especially if it requires them to do exactly nothing. The results of the moderation experiment itself can't possibly be conclusive until the moderation has gone on for much longer--a few months at least, possibly years. Then, we'll see how many people are willing to put up with the high volume over the long term, even possibly in the absence of thoughtful essays from long-time list members (like Tim) who have been driven away from the list. Even if it "survives" by that criteria, it may not survive in *my* book. There are only a handful of people whose posts make the cypherpunks list worthwhile (IMO of course). There're quite a few others who contribute to the discussion but aren't themselves worth the trouble (no offense intended to anyone; I would certainly count myself in this group as well). I don't deny that putting up with the noise on the list takes some effort. In fact, after years of surviving with only my 'd' key, I'd finally been driven to install a procmail filter shortly before moderation was announced. Interestingly, since that point, it *has* become more difficult to filter--but IMO that's because it's also gotten less interesting (how do you know if you're filtering is successful?). In fact, lately I've begun to "filter" *all* of cypherpunks into an alternate mailbox file, and find that I'm perfectly content to look at it only every couple of days, and just pick and choose among the posts based on author and subject. I don't claim to be representative of the average cypherpunk, but in my view, this is a bad sign--it indicates a lack of compelling "content". It might as well be a Usenet group--I don't feel like a "member of the Cypherpunks list" anymore. As the list stands now, I would hardly even notice (or care) if I were no longer subscribed.
I'm definitely bugged by the community's attitude toward my "censorship". Rather than being glad that someone, anyone, was doing something about the major problem on the list, 99% of the reaction was to create even more ill-considered, emotional flamage. *I* didn't make the signal/noise get worse at that point -- *you-all* did.
Well, I did do something. When the volume got too high for me to take unassisted, I installed procmail to tailor the list to my own likings. Many have been advocating it on the list for years. I was just too lazy to do so until the pain of not having it finally got too high. As for the signal to noise ratio, John hasn't made it worse, but he hasn't made it much better either. No offense is intended--John's posts were always at the top of my reputation list--but he posts so infrequently that he falls into that "not worth subscribing for" group. What was the problem with the list that finally required that somebody "do something"? Sure, the list was high volume. And there were a lot of flames and silly useless garbage. But this is no different than it has been for years. And the Vulisgrams were no more (or less) vicious or annoying than Detweiler's Medusa and S.Boxx rants from the old days. (The reason I personally could stand it [without procmail] back then was that I wasn't on so many *other* mailing lists at the same time.)
The experiment will be over in a few weeks. Who's going to take over deciding how to run the list, and running it?
Can't we just forget any of this ever came up? Drop the moderation, resubscribe the Vulis 'bot and go on as before.
PS: Can we talk about crypto too? ...
Sorry, that would be off-topic; this list is only for discussions of the cypherpunks moderation policy. Maybe you could post something on Perry's "cryptography" list though. (:-) -- Jeff
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.
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on or about 970204:0312 Greg Broiles
participants (5)
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Against Moderation -
Attila T. Hun -
Dale Thorn -
Jeff Barber -
John Gilmore