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A huge listserv. Each day, only one random person can write to it.

thelistserve.com

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Re: A huge listserv. Each day, only one random person can write to it.

#81

Let's start off by seeing how long the name lasts: http://www.lsoft.com/corporate/legal.asp http://www.lsoft.com/corporate/trademark.asp http://wiki.list.org/display/DOC/Mailman+is+not+Listserv This is why people call them 'mailing lists'.

It's "Listserve", not "Listserv." The HN title is incorrect.

Re: A huge listserv. Each day, only one random person can write to it.

#82

Earlier quoted context omitted.

apologies if this is a dumb question, but what does 'hellbanned' mean? i understand folks' concern about dubious intentions, but if it's any consolation, this is merely a class project from Clay Shirky's Designing Conversational Spaces class at NYU.

That's called "shadowban" in my neck of the woods.

I think it should be called ghosting.

He dropped a hard J, so we ghosted him on the spot.

Re: A huge listserv. Each day, only one random person can write to it.

#83
post #78

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm not familiar with Losethos...mind explaining? A particularly egregious user?

He wrote a 64 bit OS from scratch where the shell uses C as it's scripting language, and I believe everything runs in Ring 0. Also no protected or virtual memory. So if you go over on an array index, well you could screw up some of the kernel memory space. Brilliant, but crazy. See above, and read some of his comments. He seems to be some sort of fundamentalist christian, and IIRC his comments were about saving every…

> Brilliant, but crazy. See above, and read some of his comments. He seems to be some sort of fundamentalist christian, and IIRC his comments were about saving everyone though Jesus or some such thing.

This isn't the whole picture. He's, unfortunately, schizophrenic. Read [http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3642308] and [http://qaa.ath.cx/LoseThos.html].

Re: A huge listserv. Each day, only one random person can write to it.

#84

Let's start off by seeing how long the name lasts: http://www.lsoft.com/corporate/legal.asp http://www.lsoft.com/corporate/trademark.asp http://wiki.list.org/display/DOC/Mailman+is+not+Listserv This is why people call them 'mailing lists'.

That's why my first thought was that this whole service is a hidden marketing capaign for L-Soft. The only time I ever heard the word 'listserv' was when I was working in a place that managed mailing lists for academia using LISTSERV. It's a total mess, by the way.

Re: A huge listserv. Each day, only one random person can write to it.

#85

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Hellbanned means the poster sees his own comments as normal, but no one else can see them. Someone who is hellbanned typically does not know they are banned until someone tells them (or they eventually get suspicious of no one commenting on their comments or up/downvoting). Frankly I find the idea of hellbanning childish, but it has a long history on the internet.

It's not childish, it's used to defeat trolls. If you ban a troll, they'll realize it next time they try to log in and it says "YOU HAVE BEEN BANNED." But if you hellban them, then they'll log in just fine, they'll post just fine... but no one will respond to their posts. Eventually they'll get bored because they can't get a rise out of anyone and they'll leave.

Fair point. I guess it's easier to hellban than block them off the site or keep removing their new usernames.

Re: A huge listserv. Each day, only one random person can write to it.

#86

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's not childish, it's used to defeat trolls. If you ban a troll, they'll realize it next time they try to log in and it says "YOU HAVE BEEN BANNED." But if you hellban them, then they'll log in just fine, they'll post just fine... but no one will respond to their posts. Eventually they'll get bored because they can't get a rise out of anyone and they'll leave.

Fair point. I guess it's easier to hellban than block them off the site or keep removing their new usernames.

Easy to block a single account. Very time consuming to continually block the same person over and over and over again - especially on a large and very active forum where the admins don't read every post on every thread.

Re: A huge listserv. Each day, only one random person can write to it.

#87

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What? You find this shocking? While you may be biased towards looking at things from a trademark/copyright perspective, you must at least assume some people look at things from other perspectives. It is more interesting to look at this from a social impact/psychology perspective, rather than to undermine the idea based on a word trademark.

Sorry, but I don't see how getting people to sign up to a mailing list so that they can receive a random email from a stranger once a day is such an amazing idea. It sounds rife for abuse and the fact that the authors didn't bother to check to see if the name they choose was trademarked first shows to me that they don't seem to care what anyone thinks. My guess is that this doesn't end well and your email address get…

You're taking this way too seriously. "They don't seem to care what anyone thinks" because they're thinking about it at a scale and profundity exactly appropriate for what it is--a one semester class in a grad program that's very big on experimentation, rapid prototyping, and art, but not very big on process, paperwork, or structure. It's a school project. Remember that.

Re: A huge listserv. Each day, only one random person can write to it.

#88

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What? You find this shocking? While you may be biased towards looking at things from a trademark/copyright perspective, you must at least assume some people look at things from other perspectives. It is more interesting to look at this from a social impact/psychology perspective, rather than to undermine the idea based on a word trademark.

Sorry, but I don't see how getting people to sign up to a mailing list so that they can receive a random email from a stranger once a day is such an amazing idea. It sounds rife for abuse and the fact that the authors didn't bother to check to see if the name they choose was trademarked first shows to me that they don't seem to care what anyone thinks. My guess is that this doesn't end well and your email address get…

You're taking this way too seriously. "They don't seem to care what anyone thinks" because they're thinking about it at a scale and profundity exactly appropriate for what it is--a one semester class in a grad program that's very big on experimentation, rapid prototyping, and art, but not very big on process, paperwork, or structure. It's a school project. Remember that.

Re: A huge listserv. Each day, only one random person can write to it.

#89
post #34

This is not going to end well. Mark my words. Temptation to game an access to a 1 mil opt-in mail list is very real. From auctioning a chance to write, to product placements, to ads, to god knows what else. That's not to get into messages on highly controversial subjects.

It took 3 days to blatant advertising. Good call, I laughed heartily. I copied it to pastebin. Just a warning, it is about feminine hygiene. http://pastebin.com/A99zWncj
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