

A huge listserv. Each day, only one random person can write to it.   - ifthenecho
http://thelistserve.com/

======
neonkiwi
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].

[0]: <http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3824420>

[1]: <http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3824434>

~~~
bananarama44
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.

~~~
polyfractal
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.

~~~
TazeTSchnitzel
You mean for people like Losethos?

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

~~~
xxpor
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.

~~~
acuozzo
> 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>].

------
bambax
Tried to enter an email address with a '+' sign in it: "Email address is
invalid".

No it's not.

~~~
dangrossman
Around 20% of the web still tells me my dan@dangrossman.info e-mail address is
invalid.

.info domains have been around for 11 years now, and I can't work around these
sites by removing a character.

~~~
GigabyteCoin
I have heard personally from many Abuse email admins that .info domains are no
longer a threat anymore.

You cannot be penalized in any way for sending email from a .info domain, so
why don't so many websites accept them still?

~~~
dangrossman
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:

    
    
      validationexpression = "^([a-zA-Z0-9_\\-\\.]+)@[a-z0-9-]+(\\.[a-z0-9-]+)*(\\.[a-z]{2,3})$";
    

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.

------
latchkey
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'.

~~~
Karunamon
_sigh_

Lawyers ruin everything.

~~~
jamesaguilar
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.

~~~
Karunamon
>the lawyers are merely agents of the people actually doing the ruining.

And without lawyers, trademark laws would likely not be of the scale or
complexity that they are now. But that's another rant :)

>Also, trademarks are not bad things.

In this case, I tend to disagree. Especially as "listserv" should be
genericized by this point.

~~~
latchkey
> Especially as "listserv" should be genericized by this point.

Have you read the history? <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/LISTSERV>

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.

~~~
reitzensteinm
Sorry, but have you?

\--------------

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.

\-----

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).

------
abcd_f
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.

~~~
bigiain
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)

------
kip_
Question: Will there be a publicly viewable archive of said listserv?

------
garethsprice
<http://play-fame.com> is a similar premise for Twitter.

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.

~~~
AngrySkillzz
That's a novel idea. I'd like to see a webservice that keeps track of what I
look at and intentionally shows me things that aren't like that.

------
nmiller214
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.

~~~
SpiderX
Or give advertisers a huge audience and tell them 'just write it like you are
an average joe'.

------
dasil003
A clever enough idea that I decided to sign up, but my question is not on the
FAQ. How many have signed up so far?

~~~
thechangelog
There's a progress bar right under their video. 2140 just now.

------
parktheredcar
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.

------
dfc
A million people are signed up? How long do you have to wait on average to win
a one in a million daily lottery.

~~~
defen
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>

~~~
rprospero
True, but the median wait time would be merely 693147 days, or around 1900
years.

1-(999999/1000000) __(693147) = 0.5

------
lpnotes
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.

~~~
Splines
"Dear Everyone at the Giant Listserv,

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.

Love,

IEatSnickers

PS: eat snickers"

~~~
polynomial
Never saw that coming...

------
jessicaSFNY
We did an interview with the Listserve guys at Betabeat:
[http://www.betabeat.com/2012/04/10/the-listserve-nyu-itp-
pro...](http://www.betabeat.com/2012/04/10/the-listserve-nyu-itp-project/)

Seems like a super cool project.

~~~
latchkey
It is shocking to me that as a reporter, you wouldn't even bother asking why
they're using a heavily protected and trademarked word for their name.

~~~
fredoliveira
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.

~~~
latchkey
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.

~~~
hangledoff
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.

------
breadbox
Question for someone who's already signed up: What's the process to
unsubscribe?

~~~
jreposa
It's MailChimp, so super easy.

------
codesuela
kind of the social equivalent of the million $ website

------
kadavy
Very clever idea. However, it sounds much more beneficial to the person
sending the email than to those who are receiving it.

It will be interesting to see if it will collapse for this reason, or if some
unexpected mechanic of humanity will keep it afloat.

~~~
azundo
My guess is the same mechanic of humanity that keeps people buying lottery
tickets. Maybe, just maybe, tomorrow it will be me!

------
Codhisattva
Interesting gimmick if it's legit. (I mean gimmick in a positive way.)

------
spyder
Signed up with a few mailinator email addresses. :)

------
evolve2k
Woah. Join our giant spam list. I can't see anything in this which encourages
messages to not be a form of spam. Daily spam. No thanks.

~~~
ajuc
But it's just one message daily. It isn't cost-effective for spammers to abuse
this, I think.

------
mailbait
this takes what I'm working on to a whole new level! I love it. I'm already
joined. Check out mailbait.info for another side of a similar coin.

