hi all. Ive been fascinated with the problem of signal to noise for as long as Ive been dinking around in internet-cyberspace (now over a decade).
oldtimers may recall that Ive had many various proposals over the past on the list. it does seem that cypherpunks has succumbed to significant entropy lately, surely partly related to the "official" anarchist policies... in the spirit of the great cpunk accomplishments such as remailers, encryption code etc, I would like to talk to any gifted programmers that would like to work on a very innovative prototype mailing list system that might solve the signal-to-noise problem. this would be an outstanding grad student project if you ask me. experiments in collaborative filtering. the basic idea is related to something I call a "self regulating network". its never really been shown but the internet comes close. basically everyone on the network has some say (vote) as to how it is governed. this has some related ideas. http://www8.pair.com/mnajtiv/spam.html I have some ideas that wouldnt be too complicated to code, basically tweaks to a majordomo system to allow some extra out-of-bandwidth info that gets passed around, something like a reputation system. yes, I could code it myself, but I have other projects, I want to contribute design time. Id like to run it "extreme programming style", getting something up as fast as possible & making tweaks & modifications while it runs. if it "clicks" I think it could have major implications. for example there are now tens of thousands of yahoo groups, its a multimillion dollar company. now imagine approaching yahoo & selling them proven, tested technology for egalitarian managing of mailing lists to maximize signal to noise that doesnt require a moderator to babysit the mailing list. on the other hand maybe there are no longer any serious coders on this list.... a pity/shame if that were the case. (this is not to imply that coders would immediately agree to work on this haha) anyway just out of curiousity I'll post this. plz email me if you're interested.
