I've noticed that about 90% of traffic to the Cypherpunks list, at
least the slightly-filtered list at lne.com, is now one-line pointers
to news on Yahoo, CNN, ABC, LA Times, and to articles on Slashdot,
Politech, Extropians, Cryptography, and other such Net outlets.
If I wanted to subscribed to Perrypunks, I'd do so. If I wanted to
subscribe to Declanpunks, I'd do so. (In fact, I subscribe to one of
Declan's lists, the Nym list. Alas, it seems to be mostly forwarded
news items and pointers.) If I wanted to subscribe to Gaylorpunks,
I'd do so. And I already see more Yahoo, ZDNet, CNET, and similar
headlines and stories than the NSA has bits. Having dozens of other
lists is all well and good, but there is no point in bouncing their
stuff around. There are exceptions, as when some particularly urgent
or clueful point is made. And even then it is best for the forwarder
to at least take a few minutes to introduce the post and to comment
on it. This shows that he's not just dumping pointers.
(And when one of my articles is "helpfully forwarded" to one of these
other of the dozens of such lists, I tend to get strange personal
mail from people asking me what it is I'm talking about. Sometimes I
bounce them info on subscribing to the Cypherpunks list, sometimes I
just give them a couple of lines of explanation. And often I don't
reply at all.
I think most of the "pointers" are just symptoms of laziness. It
looks like people just think "cross-pollinating" without analysis is
the thing to do.
My solution is to add more and more of you who do this to my filter files.
When the average list traffic, minus advertising, spam, pointers to
Yahoo, forwarded Politech items, etc. drops to less than 3 per day,
then I can finally unsubscribe completely.
--Tim May
P.S. The worst situation is when N different lists are copied, many
of them open for posting only to subscribers. Nothing worse than
having an e-mail conversation spanning N different lists.
--
Timothy C. May [EMAIL PROTECTED] Corralitos, California
Political: Co-founder Cypherpunks/crypto anarchy/Cyphernomicon
Technical: physics/soft errors/Smalltalk/Squeak/agents/games/Go
Personal: b.1951/UCSB/Intel '74-'86/retired/investor/motorcycles/guns
