It's February, and time for the Second Annual Hughes v. Ts'o "Imminent Death of Usenet Predicted" Debate. For those of you not around this time last year (that's most of you), Ted and I did this already.

"This practice of people wandering about outside without bullet-proof vests is profoundly broken for the long run. This property also requires a 100% completely distributed responsibility of citizens not to go on a shooting spree."

I could take this analogy seriously if I thought that posting off-topic to usenet were as serious as death. Let's try equating speech to speech, OK? How about the disruptive homeless barging into conversations on the street? They are, like it or not, already anonymous insofar as many social relationships go. One can't really shun them as a technique of peer pressure, that's adding one insult to, well, years of insult. If the street were usenet, there would be no way to escape the disruption. Usenet is completely open to all who wish to speak, with no exceptions. In the end, if complaining doesn't work, there is no recourse but to leave usenet. Cypherpunks is a mailing list.

In the meantime, there's a certain thing known as community responsibility, which rabid individualists may or may not choose to recognize.

[...]

In the short run, there's such a thing as net.responsibility (for those remailer operators capable of feeling internal guilt on this issue).

A summary: I advised that only those should post who can to take the heat. One barrier to that is feeling guilt. Ted is trying to instill guilt. The reference to "rabid individualists" is an implicit threat of societal rejection of a madman embodied as a free speaker. And "net.responsibility" refers to whatever guilt you already have. Ted says "there's such a thing" to those who do not perceive it in themselves, and who may let the act of looking for it become the act of creating it. Let me be clear. I think that instilling guilt sucks. I don't want it around me. I desire the public forum. I desire anonymous speech. I desire pseudonymous persons. Usenet does not allow these simultaneously, therefore it is broken for me. Therefore I desire usenet as it is constituted now to die, and as much as I desire that, I also desire a new public forum to exist. Questions of timing therefore resolve into questions of tactics. We are making sure that anonymity is part of usenet; that will break it sooner or later.

Lance is, unfortunately, pointing out some huge, gaping holes in the current architecture of the Cypherpunks remailers. It would be good if they were fixed ASAP.

Unfortunately?? LD is out *best adman*. The holes are not in anonymity, but in the forum. We should be fixing the forum to allow technologically-strengthened anonymity. Eric

Therefore I desire usenet as it is constituted now to die...

I admire your honesty; a lot of cypherpunks weren't willing to say this the last time we had this flame war.

I think, however, that a new system will still be called "Usenet" and still be considered usenet and will be built on top of the existing usenet. I left this out before in order to make my point clearer.

I desire that Usenet live for now, because even though it does not provide simulatneously the features of public forum and anonymous speach, it does solve the public forum problem relatively well, and as such, is providing a certain amount of societal good to the world.

If usenet as it is now must die, that's no reason to make that death occur this week. There is also no reason not to continue to press on the existing system with anonymity. The pressures for better salience and for the asking of fewer FAQ's is already here, and has very little to do with anonymity. Persistent and anonymous disrupters do far less harm that the aggregate blatherings of ten thousand eighteen-year-olds. The net effect of both is to increase the noise. The problem is that one loud person is clearly to _blame_ for that noise, but a single innocent question is not, even though both contribute to the problem. Anonymity removes the path through which the disrupter can be shamed into submission. The would-be shamer subsequently feels frustration at the inability to induce guilt in someone who ... should. Thus does anonymity sharpen the debate about the quality of usenet. It is now particular individuals who are the problem, not the system as a whole. The frustrated desire to blame creates a separation in analysis where none need be. People get so worked up about bad people that they forget about the bad system.

Build the new and better system first, before trying to tear down the old one.

Yet my argument seeks to show that the problem is already here, and that the presence of anonymity changes the nature of the debate about the problem much more that it changes the nature or even the scale of the problem.

If we want both, then we should design and implement a system that has both.

One can do this by building on top of newsgroup moderation, which is the internal mechanism already present to capture salience. Every newsgroup should have moderation. Whether the moderator is one person, a group of people, or a program is an open issue. I have a starting point of discussion. Let the moderator of each newsgroup be a mailing list address. The members of this mailing list are the moderators of the group. All postings to a newsgroup go first to this moderation list. The moderators then read news with software which rates the news articles for inclusion. (This could be a modified newsreader, for example.) After each article was read, a mail message is sent back the mailing list address (or a parallel one) with the rating. Some voting algorithm determines inclusion. This voting algorithm need not require all the moderators to make a rating before transmission. When an article is sent out, an indication of the results of the voting system is included in the header, allowing end-user filtering on moderation. Three basic issues determine the exact character of a newsgroup of this type. (And each newsgroup should be able to be different.) 1. What is the nature of the moderation group? a. Is the size bounded or unbounded? b. Is membership self-selected or constrained? c. Is there a limit to tenure? 2. What is the nature of the rating? a. Size of the rating space 1) yes/no/abstain 2) 1-10 3) Is there veto? b. Rating by category. 3. What is the voting algorithm? a. Any moderator may approve (result is the name of that moderator) b. Any N moderators may approve (result are these names) c. First majority with minimum (used in statistical signifance experiments) d. Voting window and percentage minimum, possibly with quorum As a first and easiest starting point, one might choose the following characteristics for experimentation: -- moderation participation is unlimited. Membership may be restricted if many bad moderation decisions are made. -- yes/abstain -- any moderator may approve The point of this kind of system is that the existing usenet distribution mechanism can be lifted intact. Likewise can the bulk of the readers of news continue mostly unchanged, only unsubscribing and resubscribing. The existing unmoderated groups will continue to be a sewer. Fine. New groups with distributed moderation can be created. If these are successful old groups can be moved over to this method. Two main pieces of new software are needed for this scheme: 1. A change in newsreaders/mail agents to send off ratings. 2. A mail server to implement the moderation a. the initial mailing list b. the voting algorithm c. the actual posting None of this software is particularly difficult in concept. Eric