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Arise, you have nothing to lose but your barbed wire fences!

1997-07-31 - Re: non-censorous spam control (was Re: Spam is Information?)

Header Data

From: “William H. Geiger III” <whgiii@amaranth.com>
To: Adam Back <aba@dcs.ex.ac.uk>
Message Hash: c55e89d49ad4d428fd23fc357c4b592bf3dcd702fc3e40d07a63a7706d141d64
Message ID: <199707311344.IAA17797@mailhub.amaranth.com>
Reply To: <199707311120.MAA00669@server.test.net>
UTC Datetime: 1997-07-31 13:53:14 UTC
Raw Date: Thu, 31 Jul 1997 21:53:14 +0800

Raw message

From: "William H. Geiger III" <whgiii@amaranth.com>
Date: Thu, 31 Jul 1997 21:53:14 +0800
To: Adam Back <aba@dcs.ex.ac.uk>
Subject: Re: non-censorous spam control (was Re: Spam is Information?)
In-Reply-To: <199707311120.MAA00669@server.test.net>
Message-ID: <199707311344.IAA17797@mailhub.amaranth.com>
MIME-Version: 1.0
Content-Type: text/plain



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In <199707311120.MAA00669@server.test.net>, on 07/31/97 
   at 12:20 PM, Adam Back <aba@dcs.ex.ac.uk> said:

>Another longer term way to improve the situation is to charge some small
>token amount per article, just to encourage people to use it with some
>intelligence (use cross posts rather than separately reposting to each
>group).

>It is also entirely possible for people to have 'bots which auto-post in
>response to articles matching keywords, or matching authors. (We've seen
>a few of these on cypherpunks).

>If people want to make a nuisance for others by spewing random garbage
>via bots to newsgroups, they could post mega bytes of stuff per day and
>swamp the content.  What can you do about this?  Charging a small amount
>per post, or per megabyte would provide a small disincentive for this
>type of behaviour.  However it would never reflect the true cost to
>USENET bandwidth as a whole.

>One interesting idea which has been floated on this list in the past is
>for authors to have their free posting rate moderated by other peoples
>ratings of their posts.

>One way to implement this is for other people to pay the author for their
>articles a penny if they like the article.  That way people who write
>things which others find interesting to read get subsidized posting.  Is
>it still free speech if you have to pay for your posts if you're arguing
>for an unpopular minority?

This will not work!!!

Charging for e-mail/news posts will no nothing to prevent spam and more
than likely increase the noise on such lists. It is the spamers who have
the money to post volumns of their crap. Allso I think you will find that
it will be the fanatics who will think it worth the $$$ to get their
message out.

While I find the various mailling lists & newsgroups of intrest the
majority of them are not thet intresting that I would be willing to pay
$$$ every time I post a reply to someones questions (most of my posts
outside of CP are answering questions on programming,crypto, & OS/2). I
think that the overall quality of the newsgroups would decline if you
started paying on a per-post basis.

It should be noted that the Bandwith issue is a red-herring. It is an
antiquated concept from the Fidonet days and does not apply. The bandwith
of the USENET has been *PAID IN FULL* by every subscriber to an ISP. The
ISP customers pay for their connections to their ISP who in turn pay for
their connections to the Access providers who inturn pay for the Backbone.
The PIPE has been paid for what goes over it not an issue. If all I want
to do with my T1 connection is ship *.jpg files via ftp 24/7 that is no
ones busines but my own. If I chooses to use my bandwith to transmit a
variety of file formats using various protocols
(HTTP,FTP,GOFFER,ARCHIE,...ect) who are you to say that some formats are
good and some are not!! (this is not even getting into the content of the
data being shiped).

>Also, this might be an interesting information market model because
>technical experts might even find themselves with a well paid job of
>answering technical questions in newsgroups.

There is a web site that is doing exactly this. They provide forums for
users to post technical questions in which "experts" will answer them.
Upon receiving the answer the person who posted the question is requested
to rate the answer. I haven't been on the site in awhile but the last time
I was there they were working on a mechinism to compensate their "experts"
for answering questions. They had a point system based on the difaculty of
the questions. After registering with them and obtaining a certain number
of points for correctly answering questions you would be classified as an
"expert" for that forum which then would make you eligable for
compensation. I believe all funds were to be generated through web page
advertisement.


I'll see if I can find the URL for the site and post it to the list.

- -- 
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William H. Geiger III  http://www.amaranth.com/~whgiii
Geiger Consulting    Cooking With Warp 4.0

Author of E-Secure - PGP Front End for MR/2 Ice
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