cpunk-like meeting report

Tim May timcmay at got.net
Tue Dec 16 09:10:01 PST 2003


On Dec 16, 2003, at 7:50 AM, V Alex Brennen wrote:

> Tim May wrote:
>> On Dec 14, 2003, at 6:07 PM, proclus at gnu-darwin.org wrote:
>>> Hi, I've been admiring your and Tim's contributions, and I was 
>>> wondering if
>>> either of you were planning to subscribe to the (new) news list.
>>>
>>> http://lists.cryptnet.net/mailman/listinfo/cpunx-news
>>
>> No, we don't need a "cpunx-news" list. This is what Google and the 
>> ability to see hundreds of various lists and sites is for.
>
> I don't even plan on subscribing myself.  I just wanted to get
> the traffic off of cypherpunks.
>
> Back when I first joined this list, cypherpunks where
> known for making news, not reading it. I recognized some
> addresses posting here recently from other lists that may
> suggest a revival is possible if we can clean things up a
> bit.
>
> For the most part, the only people who subscribed to the
> new list are the people who tend to forward news
> announcements.  There seems to be very few consumers
> (4 out of 7 subscribers on the new list - there's 8 total
> so far, one person subscribed twice).
>

This figures. And I doubt subscriptions will ever climb much higher.

We've heard similar clamorings for "chat" and "technical" and 
"announcement" sub-lists many times in the past. Nevermind that the 
main list is not terribly high-volume. Nevermind that sub-lists tends 
to wither away. (As when a relatively small city like Monterey gets 
monterey.config, monterey.events, monterey.forsale, monterey.general, 
and monterey.test, all of which are nearly empty or filled only with 
Usenet spam. But, hey, someone thought that what Monterey needed to 
boost traffic was a bunch of newsgroups. Didn't happen, the traffic, 
that is.)

As for Cypherpunks, this was done. Several Usenet newsgroups, which are 
perfectly fine for news announcements, were created by someone (no 
doubt long-since gone on to other projects). Here they are:

alt.cypherpunks
alt.cypherpunks.announce
alt.cypherpunks.social
alt.cypherpunks.technical

But, hey, I hope the subscribers to the new list send their dumpings 
there.

--Tim May





"I think the root of the problem is that we tend to organize ourselves 
into tribes.  Then people in the tribe are our friends, and people 
outside are our enemies.  I think it happens like this: Someone uses 
Perl, and likes it, and then they use it some more.  But then something 
strange happens.  They start to identify themselves with Perl, as if 
Perl were part of their body, or vice versa.  They're part of the Big 
Perl Tribe.  They want other people to join the Tribe.  If they meet 
someone who doesn't like Perl, it's an insult to the Tribe and a 
personal affront to them."
--Mark Dominus, "Why I Hate Advocacy," 2000





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