It's always interesting to see how another person, particularly a writer, filters and reshapes an experience you shared with them . Differences in the telling are inevitable -- but I perceived the recent experience of the C'punks List quite differently than what Declan described and implied in his column. My understanding of Sandy's effort, for instance, was that he was to filter out the sludge of spam and contentless name-calling with which some idiots were flooding the list. My impression was that he was passing along any posts with content (ideas, pro or con, on almost anything) but filtering out the empty obscene name-calling and slurs (many of which seemed anon or forged, with varied and misleading titles, to duck my kill-file filters.) I, for one, was appreciative. I don't mind flames (and I expected to still be able to recieve them, from whatever POV -- and it seemed that I did!) but I also want a little meat somewhere amid the smoke. Who did the filtering (at the minimal level I expected) was almost irrelevant. If the filtering was on content, I'd be unhappy -- but I was eager to see some effort to cut out the empty hate messages. I even suggested to Dale, off-list, that he take it on for awhile. To me, the issue was whether this community could develop some mechanism to defend itself against a willful and intentional effort to destroy it. I think we failed to do so, despite the creative search for alternative venues -- and I think the triumphant cackling I read on what's left of the List is quite out of place. It may be that ideological purists were able to develop dynamic local filters on their PCs which satisfied them, but my filters just could't do enough. It was clear that the fecal-buckshot attacks on the List were designed to evade them. I'm still here, but it was more than a minor annoyance. (A year ago, I knew maybe five friends and acquaintances who subscribed to C'punks, but they all ran out of patience with the unchecked flow of sludge and unsubscribed... months before John tried to introduce his moderation experiment.) If 700 dropped off right after the moderation experiment was announced -- which I somehow doubt -- I wonder how many were battered into unsubscribing in the six or eight months prior? And, of the fleeing 700, how many became bored with the obsession of some (exhaustively prolific) writers with the "Moderation & Me" -- and went off to find some discussion of cryptography, politics, and ideas elsewhere? (Gawd knows, on the then-Moderated List I never found any lack of overwrought attacks on Sandy or John. I even read them for a week or two;-) From this whole experience, I carry away something different than those who gleefully celebrate Gilmore's surrender. I think something unusual and valuable is being killed. I'm now convinced that virtually all mailing lists will soon be forced to either limit posts to authenticated subscribers or introduce some sort of moderation -- just to deal with the spam threat and the problem of concerned attacks by those who decide they hate or dislike or simply want to destroy that particular List community . By the logic of Tim and others, a clever and dedicated crusade against Cypherpunks by any minimally-organized group, bir or small -- your local coven, CoS, RC bishops, FBI, Romanian Govt, , whomever! -- could have destroyed the List at any time in the past. I'm glad they never realized how vulnerable we were; I've enjoyed this Community greatly in its current manifestation. I also hate to think of how gleeful the sociopaths who mail-bombed us into the choice of submission or suicide must be today. I think it is a particularly henious crime to destroy a virtual community; something akin to book-burning, but maybe more like arson -- like burning village schools. There was a willful attempt to destroy C'punks, an attack of depth and volume which led many of us (even those who had ignored at least three earlier efforts to offer filtered subsets to the List) to welcome the Moderation Experiment. Unfortunately, the attempt at moderation just twisted our own energies against ourselves. We were, perhaps predictably, quite easy to manipulate. If I have any criticism of John et al, it is that our List-Owner (a statement of function, rather than property) never gave the List Community an overt option to vote for minimal moderation. A tactical error. That that allowed the anarchists, nihlists, and others pure of heart to focus their ire on toad.com and Sandy -- rather than on those of us who (when John finally acted) might have gladly re-subscribed to another version of the List in order to obtain minimal spam and slur filtration. So now we ourselves burn the village in order to save it. <nostalgic sigh> How American! Suerte, _Vin At 11:23 PM 2/13/97 -0800, you wrote:

Date: Wed, 12 Feb 1997 21:24:37 -0800 (PST) From: Declan McCullagh <declan@well.com> To: fight-censorship@vorlon.mit.edu

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A List Goes Down In Flames by Declan McCullagh (declan@well.com) February 12, 1997