Re: [ga] This is so sad !!

[Joe Kelsey <joe@zircon.seattle.wa.us>]

Mikki Barry writes:
 > While I totally agree with the fact that harald and roberto have 
 > offered constructive solutions, I have a problem with anything that 
 > cuts out voices of others, as insane or unwanted as they might be.  I 
 > personally use Eudora filters and refrain from responding to those 
 > that DO get through.

I find this attitude, as exhibited here by Mikki and earlier by Karl
completely naive.  You have obviously never spent time in the wilds of
Usenet, a cooperative anarchy in action.  Usenet is, of course, the
ultimate open, chaotic public forum.  In response to the general chaos
present on most Usenet newsgroups (which are quite different beasts than
a mailing list in spite of the fact that many people experience Usenet
through gatewayed mailing lists), the participants have come up with
many ways to constrain public behavior.  You have mentioned one of them,
the newsreader filter, carried over from news readers into mail
readers.  Simple filtering is never the complete answer, as you have
seen.  Disruptive people seem to spend their entire days looking for
ways to annoy and pester those who strive to ignore them.  They do so by
running rogue cancel bots to remove legimate posts, or masquerade as
other users to inject their unwanted content in spite of the best
filters.

Ultimately, Usenet users and administrators have to face the fact that
Usenet exists as a cooperative anachary and anyone can choose to carry
or not carry news messages from anywhere since you are using your
personal computing resources to carry the news groups.  Therefore, your
decision to carry or not carry news is a completely personal decision
and the fact that you choose to ignore someone has nothing to do with
free speech.

The same arguments apply to mailing lists.  Participation in a mailing
list is not now and never has been a free speech issue.  Each mailing
list is founded to discuss a particular subject.  The operators and
users of the mailing list set it up for a particular purpose and have
every right to limit participation by those who choose to ignore the
mailing list topic and spew their personal filth in a unwanted area.
Removing disruptive persons from a mailing list in no way "cuts out the
voice of others".  They have every right to participate in the list by
discussing the list topic.  If they want to set up their own list to
discuss their own topic, they are perfectly free to do so.

Please spend the time to think about this realistically.  You choose to
use a mail filter to "cut out the voice of others".  This still means
that these others have already imposed themselves on you since you have
to first consume your own personal or corporate resources to receive and
store their unwanted postings before you happen to run your mail client
and automatically delete their messages.  The fact that you did not
personally see these messages does not mean that you did not spend
precious resources storing their messages.

The rest of us are saying that we already consume enough network
bandwidth and computer resources on messages that we want to see and
choose to impose that same filtering that you already use at the mailing
list source where it prevents any down stream sites from expending
resources on unwanted traffic.

Once again, this is not about placing any sort of limits on anyones
speech and it is not about any restriction of "inclusiveness".  The
presence of disruptive, off-topic posts serves to drive away the
productive participants and creates a divisive atmosphere which is
certainly not my definition of "inclusive".

/Joe