From: Kristian Koehntopp (kris@koehntopp.de)
Date: Wed Feb 09 2000 - 01:49:34 CST
In netuse.lists.usenet-format you write:
>Its unmoderated groups suffer from the classic "tragedy of the commons"
>you studied in 1st year philosophy class. Nobody owns them, so nobody
>takes responsiblity.
There is more behind that.
USENET cannot evolve, because you cannot own anything on USENET.
Not a USENET group, not a cancel and barely a control message.
Many forms of the robomoderation or retroactive moderation we
are seeing are just a kludge around that, a kludge around the
lack of a public key infrastructure and means to identify people
securely in a distributed environment.
If you wanted to implement features in USENET which are easy to
do in a Web site, you always cross the point where there is a
lack of a working identification mechanism and the
implementation of that feature becomes pointless. This is why
Lotus Notes is innovative (it has a somewhat limited, but
working PKI), while USENET isn't.
Kristian