From: Against Moderation <antimod@nym.alias.net>
Date: Tue, 4 Feb 1997 11:23:19 -0800 (PST)
To: John Gilmore <gnu@toad.com>
Subject: Re: Moderation, Tim, Sandy, me, etc.  *  Strong crypto == DES?!
In-Reply-To: <199702041421.GAA27742@toad.com>
Message-ID: <19970204192309.25692.qmail@anon.lcs.mit.edu>
MIME-Version: 1.0
Content-Type: text/plain


John Gilmore <gnu@toad.com> writes:

> Tim, the Cypherpunks have chosen to follow Sandy's lead for this
> month.  I'll admit I made it easy for them, but the results are
> conclusive.  There are 1311 addresses in the cypherpunks list today;
> 42 in the unedited list; and 19 in the flames list.  Forty people
> cared enough to read every posting; the other thousand either wanted
> to try the experiment -- or didn't care enough to send an email
> message.  Which, as we all know, is a very low threshold.

I just have to point out that you are ignoring some important factors
(though I do trust your intentions and believe it is unintentional).
I initially tried subscribing to all the lists, but the headers of the
edited and unedited lists were identical making it impossible to sort
the mail.  To make matters worse, some messages seem to have gone out
only to the edited list, and not to the unedited (particularly at the
beginning), so that, unable to come up with a decent filtering scheme
easily, I finally gave up and just subscribed to cypherpunks.

In general, unsubscribing and resubscribing to a mailing list is not
completely trivial.  In addition to the particulars of cypherpunks,
there are also the issues of what if your E-mail address depends on
the machine you send mail from and your unsubscribe request gets
delayed for confirmation.  What if the new list no longer works
properly with your mail filter and you end up with 1,000 pieces of
cypherpunks mail in your main mailbox, etc.  These are not
insurmountable obstacles, but they certainly provide a strong enough
disincentive for people to switching their list subscriptions that I
think the numbers you list above are meaningless.

Perhaps a better comparison would be to look at how many people
subscribe to the other two filtered cypherpunks lists.

> Perhaps at that point I should have shut down the list, as Lucky is
> now suggesting.

Well, you don't appreciate the content of the list, and you seem to
feel that many members of the list don't appreciate what you are
doing.  Why not shut the list down?  I can think of one reason:
cypherpunks seems to suck in a lot of crap, and might be keeping that
crap away from the coderpunks list.  Other than that, though, I think
killing this list would probably be a good idea.