From: Bryce Wilcox <wilcoxb@nagina.cs.colorado.edu>
Date: Sat, 16 Sep 95 16:54:06 PDT
To: droelke@rdxsunhost.aud.alcatel.com (Daniel R. Oelke)
Subject: Re: "alt.cypherpunks" Newsgroup vs. Mailing List?
In-Reply-To: <9509161930.AA08524@spirit.aud.alcatel.com>
Message-ID: <199509162353.RAA06965@nagina.cs.colorado.edu>
MIME-Version: 1.0
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Several people are working on improvements to netnews which allow more active
filtering.  The most promising techniques that I have heard about involve a
lot of "ratings" being generated by readers and then taken into account by
other readers when filtering/sorting the articles.


I am perfectly happy with the social scene on the cypherpunks list as is, and
I think those who want to move to a newsgroup don't know what they are asking
for.  (Go read sci.crypt and talk.politics.crypto for awhile.  I expect an
"alt.cypherpunks" would be indistinguishable from those two in short order.)


BUT, I was thinking that this group (I mean, this group of people) would make
an excellent group to test this new technology.  Think about it:  Perry
Metzger could routinely give conspiracy articles/authors a "-10" rating, and
those of us who agreed with him could set our "Perry coefficients" to
indicate the degree to which we agree with his evaluations.  Thus we might
actually gain a *higher* SNR by moving to UseNet.  (And it would provide an
exciting example of reputations in action...)


I don't know if the technology is there yet, or if it is accessible to most
of our readers.  One person who is working on such a scheme is "(cm)", or 
"na48985@anon.penet.fi".  I have added his name to the Cc: line so perhaps he
would be so kind as to tell us about his "NoCeM" ("No see 'em!") software.


Bryce

signatures follow:


                                    +                                        
      public key on keyservers      /.      island Life in a chaos sea       
      or via finger 0x617c6db9      /           bryce.wilcox@colorado.edu    
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