acsgjjp@sunybcs.UUCP (Jim Poltrone) (10/05/85)
This has been sitting in my directory for a few months (in various
incarnations), waiting for me to polish it up a bit. I was thinking of
posting to net.general, but with the current discussion on overload here, I
felt it would have greater relvance and impact here. I am making some
changes near the end as I finally post this file.
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With Usenet growing by leaps and bounds (?) every day, it would
appear that it would soon collapse under its own weight. As more and more
people post, the newsgroups get bigger and take more time to read. With some
newsgroups, it's almost impossible to keep up on all the postings. With this
in mind, I decided to take a look at my own posting patterns, and also
overview the patterns of others.
So why do we post? Do we post simply for our voice to be heard? Do we
post just to get attention? Do we post just to see other people's reactions?
Do we post just to start some debate going?
If I see a question to which a response is desired, and if I know that
most of the people reading the newsgroup know the answer, I would mail
the answer to the one asking the question. If there is a lot of followup,
but no answers, I'll post the answer, if no one hasn't already done so.
Why post? Because there might be more than one person who wants to know.
What I don't like is when my postings make me look like a know-it-all.
Usually, I post to second someone's statement, thus confirming it.
A while ago, I noticed several postings that had "new net user" blantantly
stamped on them. They were quotes of the entire article, with only one line
of reply--a few even contained the ubiquitous line "*** REPLACE THIS LINE
WITH YOUR MESSAGE ***".
From my own experiences, the best postings are the ones thought out over
a relatively long period of time. For example, I started composing this
article around Christmas [1984], and I let it sit in my directory for about
5 months before I made some changes. Then it sat for another four months in
that state. (This technique avoids the carelessy considered, spur-of-the-
moment response which is so common nowadays.) The only problem is that if
left too long, it gets outdated.
According to the newsgroup description, net.general is for items which
concern *ALL* users of the net. But the abuse of the newsgroup by a number of
individuals have caused some to unsubscribe, thus decreasing the circulation
and defeating its purpose.
Perhaps there is a better method of organizing news. A while ago, Brad
Templeton suggested a keyword-based news system. This would be extremely
beneficial to those groups that have existing subgroups (net.micro) or cover
a wide range of topics (net.sf-lovers).
The key to keep Usenet the powerful tool that it is is self-moderation.
If we can keep our own posting down to a minimum, there will be less postings,
less overhead, and people will take less time reading news.
Posting to Usenet is a privelege. Please don't abuse it.
--
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