[sf-lug] Cancellation, Pls.

[Stefano Maffulli]

On Sun, Jan 25, 2015 at 2:17 PM, Rick Moen <rick at linuxmafia.com> wrote:
> The way I remember it working was like this:  As a newcomer, if you
> blundered into misbehaviour that pissed off lots of people, if you're
> lucky, someone told you 'You were being a twit, and here's why.'  If
> unlucky, you would find yourself just quietly killfiled by many.

That's my memory too, don't get me wrong. Those were the days of a few
technical elite using a new thing, we had a mission to learn how to
use our new tool and improve it. Mass consumption is a different thing
though: my accountant doesn't need to know the details of how SMTP
works as much as I don't need necessarily to know how all the details
of IRS codes.

> To my knowledge, we didn't 'screw up', in that we never promised to
> break into the houses of MUA editors and stop them from concealing key
> headers. [...]

We definitely didn't make it easy for newcomers to have some fairly
trivial things automated. There is really no good technical reason for
unsubscribing instructions to be hidden from view, buried behind a
google search. There is absolutely no technical reason for MUAs not to
be smarter than they were when we started using them. Similarly with
strong cryptography, that we fought to make it publicly available only
to realize we couldn't make it easy to use for the wide public we were
aiming at.