Pointers to news sources and other mailing lists

[Black Unicorn]

Maybe we should form cypherarticles at lne.com ?  cypherlinks at lne.com?


----- Original Message ----- 
From: "Tim May" <tcmay at got.net>
To: <cypherpunks at lne.com>
Sent: Monday, July 30, 2001 10:28 AM
Subject: Pointers to news sources and other mailing lists


> I've noticed that about 90% of traffic to the Cypherpunks list, at 
> least the slightly-filtered list at lne.com, is now one-line pointers 
> to news on Yahoo, CNN, ABC, LA Times, and to articles on Slashdot, 
> Politech, Extropians, Cryptography, and other such Net outlets.
> 
> If I wanted to subscribed to Perrypunks, I'd do so. If I wanted to 
> subscribe to Declanpunks, I'd do so. (In fact, I subscribe to one of 
> Declan's lists, the Nym list. Alas, it seems to be mostly forwarded 
> news items and pointers.) If I wanted to subscribe to Gaylorpunks, 
> I'd do so. And I already see more Yahoo, ZDNet, CNET, and similar 
> headlines and stories than the NSA has bits. Having dozens of other 
> lists is all well and good, but there is no point in bouncing their 
> stuff around. There are exceptions, as when some particularly urgent 
> or clueful point is made. And even then it is best for the forwarder 
> to at least take a few minutes to introduce the post and to comment 
> on it. This shows that he's not just dumping pointers.
> 
> (And when one of my articles is "helpfully forwarded" to one of these 
> other of the dozens of such lists, I tend to get strange personal 
> mail from people asking me what it is I'm talking about. Sometimes I 
> bounce them info on subscribing to the Cypherpunks list, sometimes I 
> just give them a couple of lines of explanation. And often I don't 
> reply at all.
> 
> I think most of the "pointers" are just symptoms of laziness. It 
> looks like people just think "cross-pollinating" without analysis is 
> the thing to do.
> 
> My solution is to add more and more of you who do this to my filter files.
> 
> When the average list traffic, minus advertising, spam, pointers to 
> Yahoo, forwarded Politech items, etc. drops to less than 3 per day, 
> then I can finally unsubscribe completely.
> 
> --Tim May
> 
> P.S. The worst situation is when N different lists are copied, many 
> of them open for posting only to subscribers. Nothing worse than 
> having an e-mail conversation spanning N different lists.
> 
> 
> -- 
> Timothy C. May         tcmay at got.net        Corralitos, California
> Political: Co-founder Cypherpunks/crypto anarchy/Cyphernomicon
> Technical: physics/soft errors/Smalltalk/Squeak/agents/games/Go
> Personal: b.1951/UCSB/Intel '74-'86/retired/investor/motorcycles/guns
>