[net.news.stargate] Commercial product ads and announcements via satellite?

brad@looking.UUCP (Brad Templeton) (02/06/85)

There's something to consider.
-- 
Brad Templeton, Looking Glass Software Ltd. - Waterloo, Ontario 519/884-7473

lauren@vortex.UUCP (Lauren Weinstein) (02/08/85)

This of course is one of the problems with unmoderated channels.
Even if money were charged for access to a totally unmoderated
service, guess who might be most likely to have the most money
for buying time slots?  You got it -- people who want to send out
masses of advertisements.  They could easily sap a large portion
of the bandwidth into /dev/null.  Now, if you say that you're going
to forbid such things, you have to start watching message contents
to catch them.  And once you've done that, you've taken on the
responsibilities associated with such "moderation."

I still think that moderated groups are the only way to keep
things fair for everyone.  They would require checks, balances,
and oversight, but could avoid an awful lot of waste and hassle.
A personal opinion, of course.

--Lauren--