NONE: Re: email or quality information?
Re: email or quality information?
Walt Boyes (wboyes_at_ix.netcom.com)
Sun, 07 Jul 1996 05:42:30 -0700
Peter Hartley wrote:
>
> At 11:15 PM 06-07-96 -0500, Cliff Kurtzman wrote:
>
> >If someone sends me a direct snail mail piece, they have to pay for
> >writing, printing, postage and the mailing list. It probably comes to more
> >than a doller per item of snail mail. To put an ad on my car requires
> >printing the ad and hiring someone to distribute it, which is less
> >expensive but still costly for large distributions.
> >
> >Doing a direct mass email is nearly free for the sender. You have to put
> >some time and effort and maybe buy some inexpensive software to grab your
> >email addresses, but after that initial investment you can spam away at
> >virtually no cost but a bit of your time.
> >
> >The cost of a doller per snail mail ad prevents 10,000 businesses from
> >snail mailing me an ad each day. Only those that feel I am a target worth
> >spending that dollar on will mail me an ad, and they won't do it very
> >frequently unless I respond. That keeps my junk snail mail level
> >manageable.
> >
>
> I am very uncomfortable with this position. In effect you are saying that
> if someone uses obsolete and expensive technology to communicate with you,
> then it is acceptable, while if they use modern and relatively inexpensive
> technology to achieve the same result then it is not acceptable.
>
Well, IMHO you can be uncomfortable with this position all you want. The
fact is that those of us who feel this way aren't saying that you must use
"obsolete and expensive technology", what we _are_ saying is that we don't
feel like sharing the costs of your intrusive marketing techniques.
> This position doesn't seem to sit very well with operating this list or even
> your contributing to the exchanges on it - should we devalue your input
> because you did not make your contribution on a clay tablet, delivered by a
> runner wearing a loin-cloth and carrying a cleft stick? ;-) Of course not!
>
Should we devalue yours, because you believe that your ability to write
good code gives you an inalienable right to fill up my mailbox with crud?
You go very far down that road, and you'll be looking at yourself in a
mirror. <wry g>
> >If it becomes more acceptable to send out unsolicited email ads, there is
> >no similar mechanism to keep the level manageable. It will go exponential,
> >just like many other aspects of the net have. If I go in to the office
> >each day and need to sort through thousands of email ads just to get to my
> >business correspondence, then I will no longer be able to use the Net to do
> >my job. This is why I and so many others feel so strongly about this
> >subject.
> >
>
> But surely this is far less annoying than having to sift through the average
> half a ton of junk mail delivered to your snail-mail address each year. At
> least you can dump it with a mouse-click, no trees are consumed, the amount
> of pollution created is minimal compared with that produced to generate the
> paper, inks and the transportation of the junk to your letterbox.
>
I keep hearing this "deep ecological belief" argument about email being
better than
snail mail spamming. But it is not true at all. The internet runs on
electricity, and the last time I looked, the anti-nuke crazies were still
forcing us to produce power by burning dead dinosaurs... thus being
responsible for the problem of acid rain and emitting more radiation into
the atmosphere than all the nuclear weapons testing in our history. Just
as the insistence on battery-powered autos will produce a huge unlooked for
problem with what do we do with the waste batteries, the "email spamming is
pollution free" argument is silly and specious.
> >If a company sends me or my staff an unsolicited email ad, my company will
> >refuse to patronize their company. Every purchase request in my company
> >must be signed by me, and I have a long memory. It does not matter if the
> >ad was mass emailed or sent "individually." By sending me an unsolicited
> >ad, they have demonstrated that 1) they don't have a clue about the
> >Internet culture;
>
> One of the many wonderful things about humanity is that it and its cultures
> are ever changing. We do not any longer, in general, roast cats in baskets
> over slow fires or burn people at the stake because they happen to have a
> "suspicious" mole on their body. ARPANET is history. The bbs-to-bbs by-phone
> transmission of usenet, hopefully will die soon - more recent and more
> efficient technologies await their application to this relatively simple
> task. Government subsidies of the Internet are FINISHED - commercialization
> is a fact - domain name registration and two-yearly re-registration to
> finance backbone nameservers is now a fact of life. Indeed I suggest that
> without commercialization the Internet will eventually wither and die.
Why do all spammers equate arguments against spam with arguments against
commercialization of the internet? Is it an unwillingness to read, or is
it a way to try to "spin devalue" the arguments against spam? NOBODY I
know is arguing that the internet should be de-commercialized.
Commercialization is a fact. And we're all here to make money. At least,
I am, and I don't know about you, tovarisch.
But ethical issues aside, the bandwidth limitations of what ARPANET and
USENET handed off to us are making reasonable and knowledgeable persons
very worried about the effects of unregulated spam on transmission times
for "real stuff."
>
> >or 2) they do understand the Internet culture but decided
> >to be rude and offensive anyway. In either event, I don't want to do
> >business with them.
> >
>
> This is, of course, entirely your perrogative, and, possibly your loss.
> With such a pedantic position on this you will probably never know.
I am seriously afraid that the argument between spammers and the rest of us is
degenerating in the same way that arguments with committed MLM'ers
degenerate: even in the face of overwhelming evidence that MLMs cannot
possibly work, people continue to do it because they _want to believe_ in
get-rich-quick. The very low cost of the
ticket-of-entry to spam is just too tempting, especially since most of the
people who are contributing to the "spam index" are coders, not marketers,
and do not understand that if you p*ss off your marketplace, your future is
limited.
Walt Boyes
SeaMetrics Inc.
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