Re: [hackers] Edge-to-Edge Principle / Reed's Law
You can build just-as-effective slashdot moderation stuff into the aggregator as you could in the central site. The way in which the system collects metadata has no effect on this. There is no us and them. We are all on the same team. I am not accusing DFA of having bad intentions. I am sure they would do the best job they could. I am pointing out that there are very unfortunate and inflammatory problems with having DMT control the vetting of nodes media repositories. The vetting of a nodes media should be controlled by the node, not DFA nor any third party. -Zack Date: 8/2/2003 00:39:34 -0700 From: Ka-Ping Yee [EMAIL PROTECTED] Reply-to: Ka-Ping Yee [EMAIL PROTECTED] To: Zack Rosen [EMAIL PROTECTED] CC: 'Jon Lebkowsky' [EMAIL PROTECTED], [EMAIL PROTECTED] Subject: Re: [hackers] Edge-to-Edge Principle / Reed's Law All headers Zack Jon -- i'm not sure it's a good idea to copy David Reed and Larry Lessig on these huge e-mail messages. It might be impolite to ask their opinion Without giving them the context of the discussion. (And for God's sake i finally had to fix the spelling in the subject. I couldn't take it any more...) Anyway, i just wanted to address one thing for now -- On Sat, 2 Aug 2003, Zack Rosen wrote: So either the media-network intelligence goes in the nodes of the network, or it goes straight to the center of the Dean Media Team mother-ship. A few times now you've talked about having to get permission from DMT or being controlled by DMT, and now the DMT mother-ship. It's clear that you don't like the idea of someone else telling us what to do. But it's unfair to describe DMT so adversarially, as though they were some sort of independent controlling entity. There is no us and them. We are all on the same team. We're in this together. Would you feel different if we were talking about america.fordean.net as the search hub instead? Why does it matter? Slashdot has a reasonably open moderation system, where they hand out moderator access to lots of people. The end result of the moderation is a pretty good consensus on which comments are informative and which ones are pointless flames. And i don't have a sense that the discussion there is being stifled or censored by single-minded moderation. (The discussions may be biased because of the user population, but that's a different thing). Would you be so unhappy with a system that worked as well as Slashdot? It would probably be better, since (a) we wouldn't be relying on a couple of dictators to select all the articles, and (b) our user population would probably be better-behaved. -- ?!ng
Re: [hackers] Edge-to-Edge Principle / Reed's Law
So either the media-network intelligence goes in the nodes of the network, or it goes straight to the center of the Dean Media Team mother-ship. A few times now you've talked about having to get permission from DMT or being controlled by DMT, and now the DMT mother-ship. It's clear that you don't like the idea of someone else telling us what to do. But it's unfair to describe DMT so adversarially, as though they were some sort of independent controlling entity. If the DMT were the only place to go to get media, they would by necessity be a controlling entity. Slashdot -- which invites some user moderation -- works ok, but you'll also find many people who are disgruntled with the way it is run. Luckily for people who don't like slashdot, there are 100s of places you can go for News For Nerds, Stuff that Matters. What we're talking about here would be a system where DMT would be the only source for Dean Media. As such, any top-down control by anyone will create friction. There is no us and them. We are all on the same team. Not really accurate. We have the same ultimate goal, but for various reasons (legal, technical, political, social) we are not on the same team. Look, as Zack pointed out, a user-driven moderation system doesn't depend on a centralized media server. Being able to link media doesn't depend on a centralized media server. Being able to widely promote media doesn't depend on a centralized media server. The only thing a centralized media server does is (potentially) shorten the development time. As a tradeoff to that you have legal liability due to cost, a high admin load, and the potential of stifling innovation. No one is arguing against a search hub for media. This is clearly necessary. The question is which entities have control over how media is produced and what it contains, how media is promoted and released to the public, and where in cyberspace media is hosted. All of these questions push me in the direction of a distributed media system, and the cost/liability issue seals the deal. We obviously need search hubs for the many types and shapes of Dean media, but we cannot have one host for it all. cheers -josh
