From: Emlyn O'regan (oregan.emlyn@healthsolve.com.au)
Date: Tue Aug 19 2003 - 00:55:56 MDT
Mark Walker wrote:
>
> I'm not sure I understand the relevance of the voting
> discussion. I'm not
> suggesting that we vote people off the list, I'm suggesting
> that people
> might change their behavior in response to the signals they
> get about the
> value of their posts. Think of it as somewhat like a market. We are
> producers of messages and we want as many people to "buy" our
> messages as
> possible. If I send out messages that have a high perceived
> noise to signal
> ratio many people will put me in their killfile, so I will have fewer
> "buyers". I agree about the perennial dangers of centralized
> authority, and
> while what I am suggesting is not immune from distortion, I
> also think the
> dangers of corruption are fairly minimal. The public display of the
> killfiles might look like a table with everyone's name on
> this list (there
> is what about a 1000 people on this list?) on the X and Y
> axis. I could look
> up your name and see if I am in your killfile and you can
> look up my name
> and see if I am in your killfile. One conjecture then is that
> if people can
> signal their dislike of someone's posts by using the killfile this may
> reduce the acrimonious exchanges that sometimes go on. If we
> are having such
> an exchange I might put you in my killfile and you might retaliate by
> putting me in your killfile--and so would end the exchange.
> Next to each
> person's name would be the number of people that have entered
> him or her
> into their killfiles. The conjecture is that people might change their
> behavior so as not to be entered into too many killfiles.
> Take an extreme
> example. Suppose an individual posts tons of Nazi propaganda
> to the list
> every day. I conjecture that almost all will enter this
> person into their
> killfiles, hence the Nazi's voice will go unheard. This Nazi
> cannot complain
> about a centralized authority squashing her voice since the
> killfiles are
> set by individuals. As I said, the right to free speech does
> not entail an
> obligation on others to listen. The reason this system would
> be relatively
> impervious to corruption is that each person's killfile would
> be displayed.
> If there was an attempt to discredit someone by artificially
> raising their
> killfile quotient this could be easily detected because each
> killfile is
> assignable to a specific individual. If the list managers tried to
> artificially raise your killfile quotient they would have to
> assign it to
> some individuals, say one of them is me. When I look and see that my
> preferences have been tampered with I will scream bloody blue
> murder on and
> off the list.
I'm on record here as supporting the use of killfiles (I certainly use them
myself - as an aside, I've noticed that half my killfile has been unsubbed
or quit in disgust in the last day or two. ROTFL).
I support Mark's idea above; I think public killfiles are a great idea; it's
a strong decentralised alternative to moderation.
But I'd call it a filter; what you are doing, after all, is filtering the
list.
For an implementation, I'd actually like the option to receive all the email
from my killfile, but with a tag in the subject like "[filtered]" so that I
can have them automatically shunt them into a different mail folder, as I do
like to peruse my killfile occasionally.
Anyway, that's two thumbs-up from me.
Emlyn
This archive was generated by hypermail 2.1.5 : Tue Aug 19 2003 - 01:06:29 MDT