[lbo-talk] spam subjects

[Chuck0]

Jon Johanning wrote:
> On Tuesday, June 17, 2003, at 05:35  PM, Chuck0 wrote:
> 
>> Spam is a serious problem and it could turn the Internet into a 
>> worthless network faster than we think.
> 
> 
> Perhaps I'm not seeing straight, but I don't quite understand why. To 
> me, it looks like a (probably) unavoidable cost of having an Internet 
> that isn't rigidly controlled. Without an authoritarian system of some 
> sort to clamp down on every e-mail sent world-wide, the only thing that 
> can be done is for people who object to e-mails about genital-enlargers 
> and Nigerian fortunes to be had for the simple act of turning over your 
> bank account information to block as much of it as possible as best they 
> can. This does take work time, and people have to be paid for this work, 
> but I wouldn't object to my ISP raising its monthly fee a couple of 
> bucks to set up a more effective filtering system -- even though I don't 
> personally have much of a problem with it, since it only takes me a 
> couple of minutes a day to delete the weird stuff that gets into my in-box.

One of the chief problems is that newbie users and light users of the 
Internet will constantly see their email boxes filling up with spam and 
they will decide that the Internet is not worth their time. This means 
that those of us who are building or who have built alternatives on the 
Internet will see our reach gradually diminished.

I don't have anything to back this up, but I suspect that the amount of 
spam has prompted some activists to use the Internet less, which has 
serious implications for activists who use the Internet to communicate 
and organize.

Chuck0