Kevin said: > A few weeks ago, the idea of kill-files made me queasy - the notion > that some people simply silence voices they don't like without even > listening to them seemed very wrong.
But surely people do that sort of thing all the time. There's only a limited amount of time I have for reading email, and that means that I cannot give all messages my full attention, and that in turn means that I have to rank messages by priority. If certain members of mailing lists or newsgroups have a very low probability of saying anything I consider worth reading, then killfiling them is the most efficient way to filter out those messages. I don't see how it's any different to me not reading messages on the Israel/Palestine situation or whatever. In any case, killfiling someone is not silencing them - it's just deciding not to listen to them. It seems to me no worse than, say, not reading any of the messages on alt.music.spice-girls because I think they're highly unlikely to say anything of interest. Rich, who is intrigued by the idea of treating all mailing lists and newsgroups as a single open publishing system by using filters based on trust-graphs.
