comp.os.linux.networking

On Apr 12, 4:57 am, Bit Twister wrote:

> On Sat, 12 Apr 2008 03:10:14 -0700 (PDT), David Schwartz wrote:

> > On Apr 11, 3:47 pm, Bit Twister wrote:

> >> You can take my word that Moe is pretty honest.
>
> > I tend not to agree, at least not based on this comment:

> > "NOTE: Posting from groups.google.com (or some web-forums)
> > dramatically
> > reduces the chance of your post being seen. Find a real news server."

> Apparently you just want to argue.

No, I just can't leave prejudice like Moe's unanswered. It was Moe's
choice to throw that in, not mine. It's off-topic and, IMO,
inappropriate. He has no evidence, it's his personal prejudice.

> All Moe was indicating, is the
> usual subject matter experts who are normally busy people have little
> time to waste time wading through the google spews. They just add google to
> the kill file and be done with it.

Again, what is Moe's evidence that this is true? Has he made
comparable posts from google and another server and measured a
difference in response? Or is he just assuming that a large number of
other people must feel as he does, just because? Or that a small
number of especially vocal people must mean there's a silent majority?

I have been posting through google for *years* and have not seen this.
If all he has is anecdotal evidence, then my anecdotal evidence in the
other direction is just as good as his. If he has real, scientific
evidence, let's see it.

> > I've seen no credible evidence that there's this mass of intelligent
> > people who killfile posts through google.

> Just more argument crap. The great majority of people do not post I am
> killing google posts when they add it to their score file.

In other words, you have no way to know whether this "great majority"
exists or not. Try making two comparable posts in this newsgroup, one
through google one not, and see if there's a difference.

I have *never* seen any post go unanswered in this newsgroup, except
where the post was so confused that I don't think any intelligent
answer was possible.

> > I've been posting through google and other news servers for many,
> > many years and have seen google's reach be precisely the same as
> > everyone else's.

> There is absolutely no correlation with "many, many years" and why
> people are filtering out google posts at this time.

Ahh, so the claim is that this is a new thing? Again, where's the
evidence?

> > I'm not as quick to give up on the value of anonymous speech as you are,

> More argumentative misdirection crap. My reason given was all about
> Usenet abuse and getting the offender terminated. Nothing was said
> about "anonymous speech".

How can you terminate the offender if you don't know who the offender
is? The ability to get the offender terminated is good but anonymity
is good too. You can't have 100% of both. So it is not misdirection,
it is the other side of the coin, the side that you want to ignore.

> > and if you make the administrative overhead of allowing anonymous
> > speech too high, it will cease to exist.

> More argumentative misdirection crap. Nothing was said about "allowing
> anonymous speech"

Again, it is the same thing. Allowing anonymous speech makes it harder
to restrict spam as the spammers can create another anonymous account
and you can't reliably identify them, meaning you have to act against
the same spammer many times. Google's allowing anonymous speech is one
of the reasons they have so much spam.

> google continues to let the abuse flourish, more people kill file google posts.

And they will lose out on the value of the anonymous speech. I don't
doubt that some people will make that tradeoff. What I do doubt is
that a statistically significant number will. You obviously believe
the number is much higher than I do. So we get back to the beginning
-- do you have any evidence?

> > It's very hard for non-free services to offer anonymous speech
> > because a lot of people have no anonymous way to pay.

> Ah, final wrap up of misdirection crap with additional flame bait.
> It has no bearing on kill filing google posts because of google
> refusals to kill spewing accounts.

It does. People who value anonymous speech will know that kill filing
google will cut them off from a lot of anonymous speech. Even if
google does kill spewing accounts, if the accounts are anonymous, that
won't do much -- they account owners will just create new accounts.
There is a tradeoff between the ability to handle abuse and the
ability to let people speak anonymously.

> It was fun playing but I see it is a waste of time.
>
> You have a good day.

You too.

DS