Seems like one of the people behind this, joshbegley, is hellbanned on HN. His comments on this page so far are just showing up dead.
Any ideas as to why this is? It makes me wonder about entering my email address on his site.
Edit: If you don't have showdead on, he says that plus signs are now accepted in email addresses[0], and that they won't be serving ads, and are looking for an inexpensive way to send mail[1].
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.
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.
Similarly, some sites use "discouragement," where the site will run fine, but on their machine it'll behave slowly and sometimes fail completely (bad page loads, excessively long waits then nothing happens, etc).
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.
That's not too surprising, since the name (though possibly not the practice?) originated at SomethingAwful, and SA bans are pretty deliberately intended to be a mixture of serious and prankish, with a bit of arbitrariness thrown in.
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 everyone though Jesus or some such thing.
> 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.
It's just bad code, not a conscious decision to block any specific e-mails. Here's the code of a local construction project's e-mail subscription form:
It assumes all e-mails end in 2 or 3 letters after a dot.
I run into it all over the place. I can't redeem reward points on my Visa card because the redemption 'shopping cart' requires an e-mail to notify you when the rewards ship, and says mine isn't valid. I was blocked signing up for a checking account online because of my "invalid" e-mail, but opened the same account at a branch with the same e-mail address, where they now e-mail my statements.
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.
In this case, as in most cases where this accusation is thrown around, the lawyers are merely agents of the people actually doing the ruining. Also, trademarks are not bad things.
It appears as though the author of the software decided to commercialize it and now you fault him for trademarking it? I think you're kind of baseless in your argument here.
Update: I don't fault the guy for taking some software, re-writing it and then commercializing it. If the original authors didn't want to trademark the name or even protest the trademark application, then that is their fault.
The original LISTSERV software, the BITNIC LISTSERV (1984-1986), allowed mailing lists to be implemented on IBM VM mainframes and was developed by Ira Fuchs, Daniel Oberst, and Ricky Hernandez in 1984.
In 1986, Eric Thomas developed an independent application, originally named "Revised LISTSERV"
LISTSERV was freeware from 1986 through 1993 and is now a commercial product developed by L-Soft, a company founded by LISTSERV author Eric Thomas in 1994.
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Eric Thomas started a competing product years after the original LISTSERV, and trademarked the name. He didn't trademark Revised LISTSERV - just LISTSERV. He wasn't the first to use it, but will now be the last. I absolutely do fault him for that (I don't know where that stands legally, but I do know I wouldnt want to get sued to find out).
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.
FWIW, I pretty much solely signed up to see what "interesting" emergent behaviors get displayed. I _want_ it to be creatively gamed. So long as the list sticks to it's "one mail per day" claim, I'm perfectly happy to sign up for "one creative possible spam email per day".
If it turns out dull, I'll just unsubscribe (and, if it turns out dull _and_ malicious about not unsubbing, I'll just filter it like all the other spam)
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
As recommendation algorithms and walled gardens fragment and homogenize our private online bubbles, perhaps these "anti-recommendation"/serendipity apps will help broaden people's horizons.
This is a great social experiment. What happens when you give a normal person a voice magnified far beyond what they are used to. Will the self-promote? Share a social message? Spam like crazy? I for one am interested in finding out.
Cool idea. A current count on the subscribers would be nice, so I could have an idea of how much progress has been made towards the initial goal of 10k.
Assuming people can "win" more than once and no one else signs up, the expected wait would be 1 million days.
Edit: Guess I need to explain the math since I've been downvoted.
Let X be the random variable representing the number of draws until you are the winner. The probability that X = k is (999999/1000000)^(k-1) * (1/1000000)
From the definition of expected value:
E = Sum(n*P(X=n), n, 1, Infinity)
From here it's a simple matter of arithmetic to calculate E. Here's the Wolfram Alpha link since I don't feel like typing up math in this input box (shortened so as not to overflow the layout): http://bit.ly/HzRUUt
Pretty cool... are you planning to switch from Mailchimp, though? It lists $240/month as the fee for 25K-50K subscribers. I'm curious about the business model behind something like this.
Boy, do I love Snickers! They are my favorite snack, I eat them all the time. Their crunchy texture and silky smooth chocolate satisfies my cravings like nothing else.
great question. we'd like to. have any ideas for the most inexpensive service? we don't have a business model (and don't plan to serve ads)...we just want to see what happens.
If this thing gets good open rates, advertising is a very viable option. It sounds like they have a delay from when the email is submitted until they send it out. I would think that is enough time to find a relevant sponsor for the topic at hand. Or maybe they have a way to target ads based on the email address of the subscriber.
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 gets sold to the highest bidder.
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.
Any ideas as to why this is? It makes me wonder about entering my email address on his site.
Edit: If you don't have showdead on, he says that plus signs are now accepted in email addresses[0], and that they won't be serving ads, and are looking for an inexpensive way to send mail[1].
[0]: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3824420
[1]: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3824434