lauren@vortex.UUCP (Lauren Weinstein) (11/12/83)
Amsterdam (and any other countries or individual sites) have my official permission to drop any and all newsgroups that they don't enjoy. But I'll be damned if I'm going to *unreasonably* restrict my modest use of this network for useful purposes simply because of your judgements. I happen to be very concerned about the quality of news programming in this country, since it effects all of us one way or another -- it even effects those of you overseas by helping to mold public opinion here. The loss of "Overnight" would mean the loss of one of the few truly "intelligent" news programs in this country. If you don't think public opinion over here affects you, take a good look at those dandy new missiles that are being installed around Europe. No, we never voted on them, but public opinion polls clearly show that "most people" here are in favor of such deployment. I won't go into my own feelings on the matter at this time. "Misc" means miscellaneous, in case you've forgotten. A warning concerning the demise of an important news source is not frivolous. "Net.tv" alone is not appropriate since it mainly is used to discuss TV trivia and is not read by a large number of people whom I know *do* watch and care about more serious news programming. If you subscribe to misc, expect miscellaneous materials! I didn't send the message to general, specifically since there is concern about that group being used only for "important" announcements that should be read by "everyone". But most other newsgroups are fair game. I'd be interested in seeing the complete list of newsgroups that Europe receives -- I'll bet that there are plenty of "non-important" messages in there one way or another that aren't complained about because you find them to be "amusing". If the usa.* type classifications could be generally and precisely used, it would be much easier to restrict certain materials to the major geographic community of interest -- but my experience so far has been that these mechanisms are not yet reliable. If you're THAT concerned about messages, then hire someone at the gateway to screen misc messages before they make the hop -- you can probably find someone willing to do the job for free -- traffic through net.misc and other broad topic groups is not really very high compared with many of the more "popular" special-interest newsgroups. Europe has special problems with Usenet due to the high costs of the primary link. I agree that we need to deal with them. But classifying a topic as "crap" simply because it doesn't happen to interest you is ridiculous when the topic *does* apply to the vast majority of readers on the network, and when a reliable mechanism for reaching those readers in a more precise manner does not actually exist. --Lauren--
ignatz@ihuxx.UUCP (11/13/83)
Gosh, I've seen this before. This may well be the birth pangs of the world community