From: Eric Murray <ericm@lne.com>
Date: Thu, 19 Sep 1996 08:47:46 +0800
To: cmefford@avwashington.com (Chip Mefford)
Subject: Re: cypherpunk listserve usefulness
In-Reply-To: <v03007801ae65b79e711a@[207.79.65.35]>
Message-ID: <199609181601.JAA28161@slack.lne.com>
MIME-Version: 1.0
Content-Type: text/plain


Chip Mefford writes:
> 
> 
> As much as it shames me, I have recently discovered that by filtering
> messages from only 2 participants and setting body filters on 3 keywords
> have remarkably improved the usefulness of this listserve.

Out of curiosity, what are those keywords?
 
> As much as I do enjoy some of the filtered subject matter, I really feel it
> is very off subject and makes this listserver useless for the intended task.
> 
> I guess that makes me a censor and it has me reexamining some things.

No, filtering your mail does NOT make you a censor, unless you're
filtering the mail before it is gatewayed to a list or newsgroup
where other people read it.  And they didn't ask you to do the filtering.

Filtering your own mail is akin to choosing which articles
in a magazine to read.  It's not censorship if you don't
read an article; it's the article's author's fault that
he didn't make the article interesting enough for you to read.


I think that anyone who has to work for a living must filter
the cypherpunks list in order to cut out some of the crap.
Most people just don't have the time to wade through everything, and
filtering some of it out is a good start on upping the S/N ratio.
What you consider Signal and Noise however is entirely up to you.

-- 
Eric Murray  ericm@lne.com  ericm@motorcycle.com  http://www.lne.com/ericm
PGP keyid:E03F65E5 fingerprint:50 B0 A2 4C 7D 86 FC 03  92 E8 AC E6 7E 27 29 AF