From: tcmay@got.net (Timothy C. May)
Date: Sat, 2 Dec 1995 09:23:29 +0800
To: rsalz@osf.org>
Subject: Too much crossposting! Choose your community and stop crossposting.
Message-ID: <ace4d54c0e021004966b@[205.199.118.202]>
MIME-Version: 1.0
Content-Type: text/plain


Note: I'm not subscribed to any of the lists here except the Cypherpunks
list, which I've of course been on for several years, since the start in
'92. I try to avoid cross-posting to multiple lists, and almost never to
lists I am not a subscriber to. (Cypherpunks gets enough spams from
well-meaning folks and groups who simply must have their announcements
blasted out to all the lists they think are important.)

In this case, I am leaving all of the cc: lists on this message, which is a
meta-message. (Hopefully some of the lists block messages from
non-subscribers, which will mean those readers won't see this.)

At 9:30 PM 12/1/95, Robert Hettinga wrote:
>At 12:45 PM 12/1/95, Rich Salz wrote:
>>And my god,
>>five lists this time, at least some of which have over a thousand readers?
>
>Ouch! Actually, semper.fi has many times that many readers... ;-).
>
>Rich, you must be the *only* person, (besides myself), who's subscribed to
>*all* of those lists. I think if you check it out, that post was germaine
>to every single one of the lists in question.
>
>However, I'm sorry to bury you in a snowstorm. Getting 6 copies of the same
>thing must have pissed you off, and for that, I apologise.

Bob Hettinga often has some good things to say (though his journalist-style
prose can get a bit purple at times, but that's just his style). However, a
lot of folks have good things to say at times, and clearly these good
things cannot be bounced around to all the lists which might contain
readers of these good things.

Mailing lists simply cannot survive if these kinds of cross-posts to four,
five, or even six different lists continue. Filters are nice, though I
don't relish putting Bob H. into a kill-file.

People pick the mailing lists, the communities, they wish to participate
in. This means they are electing not to read the traffic of other lists.
C'est la vie.

Even worse, massive cross-posting often produces follow-ups--such as mine
here--which are "out of synch" with the themes of the particular lists.
Thus, on the Cypherpunks list we sometimes get cross-posts which argue why
privacy is or is not a good thing. Perhaps a reasonable thing to argue, but
not on Cypherpunks. I'm sure the other lists here have had similar
experiences.

I urge everyone to practice some restraint.

--Tim May, who has a hard enough time reading the traffic on Cypherpunks
and Cyberia-l (legal issues in cyberspace) without gettting traffic on
CyberHound, WWW-BUYNOW, etc.


Views here are not the views of my Internet Service Provider or Government.
---------:---------:---------:---------:---------:---------:---------:----
Timothy C. May              | Crypto Anarchy: encryption, digital money,
tcmay@got.net  408-728-0152 | anonymous networks, digital pseudonyms, zero
Corralitos, CA              | knowledge, reputations, information markets,
Higher Power: 2^756839      | black markets, collapse of governments.
"National borders are just speed bumps on the information superhighway."