Free-fire zones (Score 1)

I don't think that free-fire zones will work, for the same reason they failed to work on Usenet newsgroups long ago. Newsgroup people thought that it would be great to segregate the flamers and extremely argumentative types in subgroups with "flame" in their names (or "advocacy", or even just .d for discussion), but the discussion in the real groups turned out to be more interesting even for the flamers, and the flame groups generally withered on the vine. Decreeing that certain playspaces are safe and others are dangerous is meaningless without some kind of enforcement. I don't think all this is as huge a problem as Katz does (but then Katz really needs to believe in the Voiceless Oppressed to give his voice a reason for existing). I think that /.-style moderation solves much of it, and self-selection takes care of much of the rest (people who find /. too harsh will just go somewhere else, which is fine). If it were really true that women and minorities were all much tenderer plants than the mean young white males Katz wants to protect them from, this could be a big problem, but fortunately that's not the case. (Hi Troutgirl!)