Oxygenating the flame in threads was Re: [extropy-chat] a futurist prediction

[Dan Clemmensen]

Emlyn wrote:

>On 26/08/05, The Avantguardian <avantguardian2020 at yahoo.com> wrote:
>  
>
>>My idea is similar, only people vote by filtering the
>>offender rather than having some sort of organized
>>balloting. You are the computer guy, Eugen, so can
>>this be done?
>>    
>>
>
>IANAE, but here are my two cents...
>
>Filters are passive client side things, so there's no way to detect their use.
>
>What you could possibly do is set up an email address - say
>extropy-crap at lists.extropy.org. People could forward email they
>disliked to that address, as a vote against it. Instead of killfiling
>someone, you could forward their entire output to that address, as a
>permanent mark of disdain!
>
>  
>
IAASA. (I Am a Systems Architect)

Emylin, If we choose to implement anything at the list level, we should 
implement
a way to allow each list member to push the member's killfile rules back 
to the list mailer.
This has two effects.

First, the mailer can apply the rules on behalf of each member thus
reducing the mailing of posts that would otherwise be killed by the 
recipient. 
As a general rule it is far cheaper (in CPU cycles and bandwidth) to 
kill a post than
it is to send it, This is true for the mailer machine. It is 
overwhelmingly true for the
Internet as a whole.

Second, this gives the list mailer the information it needs to feed the 
kill ratio back
to each poster. Thus, if Eugene posts a message, the list system will 
respond with a
message that says: "This message was sent to 100% of the list, and 75% 
say  'thank you'
automatically." If an unknown author sends a message that includes the 
term "viagra" then
the system will respond with a message that says: " this message was 
sent to 0% of the list.
 0% say 'thank you' automatically. Based on these percentages, you may 
not post another
message for 24 hours."

At a meta level, a list member could decide to depend on the consensus 
of other members to
kill messages. In addition to personal killfile rules, a recipient could 
ask the list to establish
a rule such as "kill any post that is killed by >50% of the personal 
killfile rules" or "kill any
post that is killed by Natasha's killfile rules."

NOTE: I do not personally use an automated kill system. I when the inbox 
is too full, I manually
kill messages based on the subject line: this takes about 2 seconds per 
message. If I knew that my
kill rules were to be implemented at the list level and that they could 
be used by others, I would
create such rules in a heartbeat.