greenber@acf4.UUCP (ross m. greenberg) (01/19/85)
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Just a thought on the recent idea of moderation of stargate:
Given some group on stargate, say star.unix-wizards. People will attempt
to post to it, via the moderator. Anything that the moderator FOR ANY
REASON does feel is approriate to post via stargate goes out on normal
UUCP phone lines as net.unix-wizards. Anybody would be able to post to
net.unix-wizards, but as time goes by (if all the theories about the net
are right), fewer sites will be subscribing to net.anything as star.anything
picks up.
If star.anything becomes the fascist state that Frank Adrian seems to think
it will be, then sites will continue to absorb the cost of UUCP phoneline
news rather than subscribe to stargate. If Adrian is wrong (and I think
he is!) then what you'll have is a news system via satellite for perhaps
80% of the news that you might really want to read, and 20% of the news
on phone lines. Maybe the 20% will be junk. Maybe it will be the gems
that the moderators in their <whatever> opted not to put in THEIR
newsgroup. But the screams about censorship will drop, and the 20%
over phonelines are (hopefully) of little enough data-density that
it will cost next to nothing.
The important thing is that nothing was dismantled while this experiment
is tried.
I think that we on the net all owe Lauren and the boys (where are the
women, you sexist dogs! :-) ) a very big round of applause!
Thanks, guys.
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Ross M. Greenberg @ NYU ----> { allegra,ihnp4 }!cmcl2!acf4!greenber <----