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They are willfully wrecking a worldwide communication medium just to save marketing costs by forcing the burden onto innocent people. They're doing more harm to

They are willfully wrecking a worldwide communication medium just to save marketing costs by forcing the burden onto innocent people. They're doing more harm to our civilization than the average thief or killer. If there were a way to ban them from ever touching a networked computer for the rest of their lives, I would.

jat850 16y ago
What? I can only hope this is a joke.
CapitalistCartr 16y ago
"They" aren't wrecking the system, so much as the inherent flaw in the system makes it inevitable. Email costs a negligible amount to send and there's no way to reliably control the overall system. It's not a problem in isolation, either. The bigger issue of systems that no longer meet the definition of economic scarcity is growing. Scarcity has always been our way of controlling abuse by excess, but many things are becoming so cheap as to negate this method. We need to build other methods into our World. Some systems that have dropped dramatically in price, such as phone usage minutes, haven't become a problem (much). Others, such as calories, have become severe ones. Email abuse didn't hurt much else, but it's nearly ruined email itself.
dmoney 16y ago
They're doing more harm to our civilization than the average thief or killer. I'd be interested to hear the argument for this.
- prodigal_erik 16y ago
  Email is a reliable, negligible cost, vendor neutral communication system that's accessible to about two billion people worldwide. There has never been anything quite like that in history, and a mere handful of spammers (probably thousands, definitely not millions) are making it unusable. If those spammers had instead each gone on a local crime spree, any carnage and mayhem would have gone completely unnoticed by 1.99 billion of those people.
  - dmoney 16y ago
    So they have a global effect, true. But with spam filters that effect is very small. One or two spam messages get through now and then, but you delete them and move on. If you get murdered you stay dead, people around you mourn, and your neighborhood is perceived as less safe.

jat850 16y ago

What? I can only hope this is a joke.

CapitalistCartr 16y ago

"They" aren't wrecking the system, so much as the inherent flaw in the system makes it inevitable. Email costs a negligible amount to send and there's no way to reliably control the overall system. It's not a problem in isolation, either. The bigger issue of systems that no longer meet the definition of economic scarcity is growing. Scarcity has always been our way of controlling abuse by excess, but many things are becoming so cheap as to negate this method. We need to build other methods into our World. Some systems that have dropped dramatically in price, such as phone usage minutes, haven't become a problem (much). Others, such as calories, have become severe ones. Email abuse didn't hurt much else, but it's nearly ruined email itself.

dmoney 16y ago

They're doing more harm to our civilization than the average thief or killer. I'd be interested to hear the argument for this.

prodigal_erik 16y ago
Email is a reliable, negligible cost, vendor neutral communication system that's accessible to about two billion people worldwide. There has never been anything quite like that in history, and a mere handful of spammers (probably thousands, definitely not millions) are making it unusable. If those spammers had instead each gone on a local crime spree, any carnage and mayhem would have gone completely unnoticed by 1.99 billion of those people.
- dmoney 16y ago
  So they have a global effect, true. But with spam filters that effect is very small. One or two spam messages get through now and then, but you delete them and move on. If you get murdered you stay dead, people around you mourn, and your neighborhood is perceived as less safe.