benson@odi.com (Benson Margulies) (05/29/89)
I've had the, um, privilege to follow news.admin and news.groups for a couple of years. Recently, I've spent some time trying to think through the underlying assumptions that fuel some of the depressing volume of flamage these groups carry. I have an hypothesis. I'd like to offer the following thought experiment as a was of illustrating it. Let's imagine a different technical base for the news. Assume, if you will, that newsgroups were merely automated mailing lists, as on BITNET. Each one would have a sponsor, who would provide the computational resource for redistributing the mail. An automated server would handle adding and removing people. The sponsor might merely set up a reflector. Or perform digestion. Or even full-blown moderation. One such list would advertise all of the other lists. Now, how would this be different from the news as we see it today? Technically, the biggest difference would be wasted bandwidth. However, that could be addressed as it is today for lists like telecom. A hierarchy of redistribution points would reduce redundant distributions for those lists with enough volume to be worth the bother. Another problem would be to avoid multiple copies in mailfiles on leaf hosts. Surely it would be simple enough for the existing news code to catch incoming mail and accumulate it in directories. So the technical differences would be trivial. How about sociological differences? I claim that such a system might be nearly free of all our current hooting and hollering. * new lists: Anyone could announce a new list. If the keeper of the list-of-lists balked, the creator could still drum for subscribers in related existing lists. The creator is putting his/her resources where their mouth is by providing the reflector machine. In a sense, its an electronic free market -- readers and distributors would vote with their electronic feet. (cf comp.tcp-ip.eniac). * "freedom of speech:" if you didn't like a moderator, you could start a new list on the same topic, and attempt to convince the majority to join it. (cf the whining about soc.feminish or talk.politics.guns). ----- ANALYSIS ----- The news is supposed to be an anarchy. However, the existence of news.admin and news.groups, together with the memories of the now-defunct backbone cabal, mislead people into thinking that there is a higher authority to whom anything and everything can be appealed. People make claims on fairness, freedom of speech, and whatever. If there was a free market in newsgroups, then there would be no need for this pissing and moaning. If you didn't like the way a newsgroup was run, you could trivially create a new one. If people thought you had a point, they would join it. Otherwise not. In the current system, however, I have my doubts as to the efficacity of throwing open the doors of newgroup. Why? Because the investment in labor or resources needed to declare a newsgroup open for business is too low. Without some required investment in time or resources, the JRFlamer department would newgroup us into oblivion. In the current software, where each new group can cost an arbitrary number of machines an arbitrary amount of resources, there is great pressure to hold back the flood. If individual non-leaf machines voted more with their feet, then J Random Site would have a hard time finding a feed of what they wanted. So the ongoing broughaha tries to keep things under enough control that enough machines will still offer full feeds. I really don't want to join the greek chorus threatening the EOTNAWNI. I do suggest that moving the news transport mechanisms in a direction that would allow any site to get any group without requiring any other site to run a full feed is a good long-term resolution. If you think news.groups is a zoo now, imagine 10 times the number of sites. Whether or not this is a good suggestion technically, it suggests a philosophical conclusion: apply the maxim "that government is best that governs least" to usenet. If a reasonable bunch of people want a new group, give it to them. Don't whine about their choice of moderator. Don't even count NO votes. If you don't like their idea of what kind of forum they want, see if you can drum up 100 readers for your alternative. -- Benson I. Margulies
henry@utzoo.uucp (Henry Spencer) (05/30/89)
In article <371@odi.ODI.COM> Benson Margulies <benson@odi.com> writes: >Let's imagine a different technical base for the news. Assume, if you >will, that newsgroups were merely automated mailing lists, as on >BITNET. Each one would have a sponsor, who would provide the >computational resource for redistributing the mail... Who in his right mind is going to volunteer for that? Usenet is too big. Bitnet is back in the dark ages; even the Internet is starting to use Usenet's technology (in modified forms, e.g. NNTP) for distributing news. Decentralized distribution is an enormous win for material that is read by many people. Quite apart from not placing enormous loads on a single distribution point, it also decentralizes administration. One of the biggest pains of maintaining a mailing list is the constant flow of administrative duties, and the steady stream of "mail bounced, but I'm not going to tell you why" messages from idiot-savant mailers. -- Van Allen, adj: pertaining to | Henry Spencer at U of Toronto Zoology deadly hazards to spaceflight. | uunet!attcan!utzoo!henry henry@zoo.toronto.edu
brad@looking.on.ca (Brad Templeton) (05/30/89)
These suggestions are worthwhile, but in fact it's not that different today. Anybody can start a new group with any name on their own site. They can feed it to those that want it. Those that don't want it don't have to take it. So a change in structure wouldn't help. We have never gone to that sort of structure because of the camp that solidly believes in a concept called "namespace control." They believe (with some merit, though not as much as they sometimes expound) that the namespace of groups should be kept simple and controlled to avoid more net chaos. Other forces have stopped changes that might have been better for usenet in the past. They would work against such centralization of groups. For example, it's just plain stupid that usenet gets transmitted multiple times into the same city, as was the case for quite some time. Or multiple times at all, for that matter. So some folks said, "USENET is really broadcast, let's transmit it by satellite." So they did. To pay for the transmission, however, it was clear that all the people who benefited from this clear improvement in efficiency should share the cost. So the "Stargate" folks said that they would have to control re-feeding of what people got from the downlink, so that each downlink recipient would share the cost evenly. Otherwise they would have had to charge a fortune for one downlink and expect the single site to feed everybody and charge them. If they charged a moderate price for a downlink that reflected everybody sharing the cost, then 100 sites would get together, get one downlink and not pay their share. The result? People objecting to any sort of scheme like this started objecting vehemently, and putting copyrights on their messages forbidding any controlled distribution scheme that might allow the sharing of costs. They thought they were fighting for free flow of information. Instead they hurt the project, and just made everybody pay a lot more for their datacom. The only benefit was to the phone company. Today satellite technology is much cheaper, and a site in Vancouver is feeding usenet into a data channel with no restrictions just to help sell satellite decoder boards. As well, the internet now carries much of the inter-city usenet traffic, eliminating the wasteful links. But the reason I tell this story is to remind people that on usenet, it seems impossible to do anything constructive if it might involve any level of control. People on usenet seem to completely misunderstand anarchy. Anarchy is the absence of government and (usually) law. It is not the absence of order, systems and standards. -- Brad Templeton, Looking Glass Software Ltd. -- Waterloo, Ontario 519/884-7473
jbuck@epimass.EPI.COM (Joe Buck) (05/31/89)
In article <3400@looking.on.ca> brad@looking.UUCP (Brad Templeton) discusses his interpretation of the history of Stargate. Check it out. The real problem with Stargate was that it simply was not economically feasible. The costs announced for a Stargate feed were very high, it was to be moderated groups only, and the announced restrictions on outgoing feeds made the financing look even worse. Some of the justifications given for the refeeding restrictions looked like "we own the material", when in fact they did not, at least, not without the permission of the posters. But for all the legality, morality, and technical issues that people can come up with, Stargate flopped because it simply cost too much. The availability of UUNET sunk the project completely, since UUNET gives its customers far more services than Stargate ever could, for a lot less money. Thanks to UUNET, the costs of Usenet are now being borne much more evenly in the US than they ever were before. Wider use of NNTP means the Internet is also used more heavily, but we're all paying for that through our taxes. Anyone who runs phone bills like decvax did in the old days to support the net has rocks in his or her head; it's simply not necessary. AT&T has gone from net benefactor to the world's biggest leaf node. There are sites in people's basements in California that get mail and news from uunet, paying their own way all the way. We don't need no steenking backbone. That's why it is no more. About Stargate and the "You may only distribute this article if your recipients may" gang, Brad writes: >They thought they were fighting for free flow of information. Instead >they hurt the project, and just made everybody pay a lot more for their >datacom. The only benefit was to the phone company. Wrong. We are, today, paying substantially less money for our datacom. Stargate deserved to die; being techically interesting isn't good enough. You run a business, Brad, and you know that. If you're competing with someone who delivers more service, more flexibly, for less cost, you fold up and go out of business. >Today satellite technology is much cheaper, and a site in Vancouver is >feeding usenet into a data channel with no restrictions just to help >sell satellite decoder boards. As well, the internet now carries much >of the inter-city usenet traffic, eliminating the wasteful links. Exactly. People on Usenet are willing to pay for data-moving capacity, and people will pay money if they can save money in the long run. You seem to want to turn Usenet into Compuserve, and if we wanted that, we'd drop our Usenet feed and sign up for Compuserve. >But the reason I tell this story is to remind people that on usenet, >it seems impossible to do anything constructive if it might involve >any level of control. No. Stargate simply wasn't constructive. It was a technically interesting project run by well-intentioned people that failed. UUNET was extremely constructive, and made possible things that were never possible before. -- -- Joe Buck jbuck@epimass.epi.com, uunet!epimass.epi.com!jbuck
benson@odi.com (Benson Margulies) (05/31/89)
This is intended as a reply to Mr. Spencer and Mr. Templeton. Mr. Spencer appears to confuses my thought-experiment with a serious proposal. I reply only to make it clear that I intended no serious technical proposal to make Usenet mail-based. <though I do believe that it could be made so convienient as to be indistinguishable from the current state.> Mr. Templeton states that the current group creation restrictions are nominally justified in terms of namespace clarity. If that were so in action as well as in theory, we wouldn't have quite the current level of whining. Any newsgroup should be creatable so long as its name is suitably descriptive. There could be soc.feminism.moderated and soc.feminism.un-moderated. There could be talk.politics.misc, talk.politics.guns, and talk.politics.misc_and_guns. There could, in the extreme case, be rec.humor.funny_according_to_templeton and rec.humor.funny_according_to_jedr. One might need a little more explanation associated with each group than the current sentence. One might as well require 100 YES votes to make it worth the bother of propagating the group creation. So far, though, the idea of abolishing NO votes seems more and more sensible (to me). NO votes serve, in my obviously insufficiently humble opinion, only to legitimize the kind of whining that demands that talk.politics.guns be abolished so that talk.politics readers are FORCED to read gun transactions, or that bemoans the moderation of some groups. Without NO votes, it would be put-up or shut up -- either you have 99 other people who want a group with your guidlines, or you can go start a mailing list. I probably won't post anything else about this for a while, if at all, so don't expect short turn-around follups from me. Benson I. Margulies
brad@looking.on.ca (Brad Templeton) (05/31/89)
Stargate was expensive, and perhaps too expensive. Emerging technologies usually are. But the principle was sound. Usenet is essentially broadcast. A satellite that can send from one point to every single place on the continent is clearly far more efficient than any other route. The only thing that's wrong with it is requiring everybody to have a dish (something Stargate didn't do.) But it makes perfect sense to have one person in each local calling region have a dish and feed out to the rest using cheap local lines. 5 years ago, you couldn't do that without sharing the cost of the dish, receiver and uplink time. Today uplink time is cheap, dishes are cheap, receivers are cheap, so you can do it. I was just pointing out that it was sad that an idea that did make sense at the time was stifled not just for technical reasons but for odd political reasons as well. Satellite is still clearly the cheapest method for a net like usenet, even today. Everybody who does any kind of large volume multi-point broadcast is going satellite, unless they are completely security conscious or too small. And no, I don't want to turn Usenet into CompuServe! Hardly. I like anarchy (which includes the commercial and the non-commercial.) There are some things usenet does best -- far better than the CompuServes and Genies of the world. There are things that usenet doesn't do as well as those services that could be improved on usenet. Finally there are things that usenet can't do at all, some for technical reasons (live chat, database lookup etc.) and some for political reasons (electronic publishing). I do wish to see things like the latter work in *addition* to usenet, rather than instead of it, and I have been working on that recently. Stay tuned for an impending announcement. -- Brad Templeton, Looking Glass Software Ltd. -- Waterloo, Ontario 519/884-7473
karl@ddsw1.MCS.COM (Karl Denninger) (05/31/89)
In article <3400@looking.on.ca> brad@looking.UUCP (Brad Templeton) writes: >These suggestions are worthwhile, but in fact it's not that >different today. Anybody can start a new group with any name on >their own site. They can feed it to those that want it. Those that >don't want it don't have to take it. Right on. So what's terrible about this? >So a change in structure wouldn't help. We have never gone to that >sort of structure because of the camp that solidly believes in a concept >called "namespace control." They believe (with some merit, though not >as much as they sometimes expound) that the namespace of groups should >be kept simple and controlled to avoid more net chaos. ....And to keep the net accessible to those who have machines that will not work when you go beyond some arbitrary number of groups (512, for example). Of course, some people would just disenfranchise those folks, rather than cut them a little slack. So it goes. >So some folks said, "USENET is really broadcast, let's transmit it by >satellite." So they did. To pay for the transmission, however, it was >clear that all the people who benefited from this clear improvement >in efficiency should share the cost. So the "Stargate" folks said that >they would have to control re-feeding of what people got from the >downlink, so that each downlink recipient would share the cost evenly. You mean so they could continue to perpetuate the monopoly they held, and reap the revenue from same. >Otherwise they would have had to charge a fortune for one downlink >and expect the single site to feed everybody and charge them. If they >charged a moderate price for a downlink that reflected everybody sharing >the cost, then 100 sites would get together, get one downlink and not pay >their share. Would they? If the service was TRULY broadcast at a reasonable price, it wouldn't pay to "bypass". Remember, the telephone costs money to use, and companies and individuals are sensitive to price. If 100 sites got a feed from a downlinked machine, it would be due to the telephone costs being lower than the cost of using the downlink, no? And if that is the case, then the downlink method of transmission is _clearly_ the loser; it's more expensive, and by definition (monetary) less efficient. >The result? People objecting to any sort of scheme like this started >objecting vehemently, and putting copyrights on their messages forbidding >any controlled distribution scheme that might allow the sharing of costs. No, they objected to controlled distribution that _enforced_ sharing of the costs, which is proper given the type of network we have here. Usenet is a cooperative experience. UUNET, for example, charges for their feeds, but you are free to charge someone else for their feed (once you have it) if you want. >They thought they were fighting for free flow of information. Instead >they hurt the project, and just made everybody pay a lot more for their >datacom. The only benefit was to the phone company. Nope, again. The benefit was to the phone company, and not to "Stargate", but that was solely because Stargate was priced unreasonably. This is a highly competitive market (newsfeeds); you have many sources, and a choice that you make according to how you perceive your monetary and other considerations. That is what a competitive, free, open market is about. >Today satellite technology is much cheaper, and a site in Vancouver is >feeding usenet into a data channel with no restrictions just to help >sell satellite decoder boards. As well, the internet now carries much >of the inter-city usenet traffic, eliminating the wasteful links. Actually, I worked in that industry, and I can't see how satellite technology is any cheaper to use now than it was two or so years back. Please, enlighten the net! What I do see is a company that is making enough money (hopefully) selling decoder boards that they can afford to GIVE away the programming. I wonder if the people who complained about Stargate (and put those "silly" restrictions on their postings) perhaps, just perhaps, saw some firm out there making (what would be) a killing compared to costs, and didn't like it, and actively made it impossible or very difficult for that group to succeed. In other words, they exercised their right to "go elsewhere" and keep their programming (their postings) from being exploited by a third party for profit. What's wrong with that? Usenet feeds ARE a free market, you know. UUNET seems to be doing ok -- even though it's not the cheapest way to get the news for some people. For others, the service, connectivity, and ease of use make it the obvious choice. Leave the free market alone in Usenet feeds; it's working just fine. We have an active example of what happens to those who try to exploit the feed process for their own enrichment -- the net reacts, and the would-be exploiter loses. >But the reason I tell this story is to remind people that on usenet, >it seems impossible to do anything constructive if it might involve >any level of control. People on usenet seem to completely >misunderstand anarchy. Anarchy is the absence of government and >(usually) law. It is not the absence of order, systems and standards. No, people on Usenet tend to violently disagree with someone else misappropriating their work for profit, just like they do in any other part of the business (and recreational) world. I believe you misunderstand the problems that Stargate faced. Note that Stargate isn't around anymore, while the traditional methods of transmission, and UUNET (which can be darn expensive if you use it a lot!) both are. I wonder why....... -- Karl Denninger (karl@ddsw1.MCS.COM, <well-connected>!ddsw1!karl) Public Access Data Line: [+1 312 566-8911], Voice: [+1 312 566-8910] Macro Computer Solutions, Inc. "Quality Solutions at a Fair Price"
rsalz@bbn.com (Rich Salz) (05/31/89)
In <3407@looking.on.ca> brad@looking.UUCP (Brad Templeton) writes: > Stay tuned for >an impending announcement. Anyone else got an impending sense of doom? Love all them great jokes we get from Genie. /rich $alz -- Please send comp.sources.unix-related mail to rsalz@uunet.uu.net. Use a domain-based address or give alternate paths, or you may lose out.
woods@ncar.ucar.edu (Greg Woods) (06/01/89)
In article <372@odi.ODI.COM> benson@odi.com (Benson Margulies) writes: >NO votes serve, in my obviously insufficiently humble opinion, only to >legitimize the kind of whining that demands that talk.politics.guns be >abolished so that talk.politics readers are FORCED to read gun >transactions, or that bemoans the moderation of some groups. One man's "whining" is another's critical point. Fortunately for us all, Mr. Margulies does not know everything there is to know about USENET, nor is he single-handedly qualified to determine what a proper name for a new group is (although he sure seems to think he is). Without NO votes, how do you propose to decide whether a group is "properly" named? And are you really so naive as to think that getting rid of NO votes will stop the whining? We had whining long before we had votes. --Greg
vnend@phoenix.Princeton.EDU (D. W. James) (06/01/89)
In article <3254@epimass.EPI.COM> jbuck@epimass.EPI.COM (Joe Buck) writes:
)We don't need no steenking backbone. That's why it is no more.
)-- Joe Buck jbuck@epimass.epi.com, uunet!epimass.epi.com!jbuck
A minor kwibble... The backbone as a group running the net
(a gross overstatement) no longer exists... But there still exists a
group of experienced sysadmins talking to each other (Occationally.)
And in sense of traffic flow...
I'm looking at a map of the US with data charted from Brian's
inpaths program. I don't know if it is the version with just the test
sites or data from all over the network, but it shows a backbone with
the major nodes being (approx. from east to west), mcvax, rutgers, uunet,
ohio state, Utexas,ucbvax and something I can't read (ill-winke ??), with
a scattering of 'minor' sites (ncar, husc6, purdue, mailrus, etc.) I'd
say that the backbone is alive and well, it just isn't trying to run
things anymore...
--
Later Y'all, Vnend Ignorance is the mother of adventure.
SCA event list? Mail? Send to:vnend@phoenix.princeton.edu or vnend@pucc.bitnet
Anonymous posting service (NO FLAMES!) at vnend@ms.uky.edu
"The plot thicks..."matt@oddjob.uchicago.edu (Matt Crawford) (06/01/89)
In article <3407@looking.on.ca>, brad@looking (Brad Templeton) writes:
) Stargate was expensive, and perhaps too expensive. ...
) But the principle was sound. Usenet is essentially broadcast. A satellite
) that can send from one point to every single place on the continent is
) clearly far more efficient than any other route. ...
) Satellite is still clearly the cheapest method for a net like usenet, even
) today.
It's not necessarily so, and certainly not "clearly". A piece of the EM
spectrum over the area of a continent is a scarce resource and a power
supply and transmitter in synchronous orbit are costly bits of capital.
And if it's not economically sound for the mass-consumption medium of
network television, it seems very unlikely that it will be for the
obscure medium we call usenet.
(Same old rant follows, rot 13. The weary should skip it.)
) Fgnl gharq sbe na vzcraqvat naabhaprzrag.
Vs vg'f na naabhaprzrag bs fbzrguvat sbe serr, V'yy rng guvf zrffntr.
Mattmcb@ncis.tis.llnl.gov (Michael C. Berch) (06/01/89)
In article <1756@fig.bbn.com> rsalz@bbn.com (Rich Salz) writes: > In <3407@looking.on.ca> brad@looking.UUCP (Brad Templeton) writes: > > Stay tuned for > >an impending announcement. > > Anyone else got an impending sense of doom? Imminent death of the net predicted! -- Michael C. Berch mcb@ncis.tis.llnl.gov / uunet!ncis.tis.llnl.gov!mcb
benson@odi.com (Benson Margulies) (06/01/89)
In article <3315@ncar.ucar.edu> woods@handies.UCAR.EDU (Greg Woods) writes: > Fortunately for us all, >Mr. Margulies does not know everything there is to know about USENET, nor is >he single-handedly qualified to determine what a proper name for a new group >is (although he sure seems to think he is). Well, aren't we feeling nasty? Look, I used to be in the debate business. You can't scare me by snapping a rhetorical towel at my shorts. If you haven't noticed, I have nothing to gain by this. I'm not promoting myself or anyone else as a czar. I set out to making a constructive contribution to the net. If so-called leaders of the net post (and not mail) this sort of thing, its no wonder the net is generally so wonderfully polite. > Without NO votes, how do you propose to decide whether a group is "properly" >named? Very simply. If 100 people (or 200, or whatever) agree on the name, it is presumptively pretty good. As Mr. Templeton pointed out, there are hardly any NO votes anyway. Since there are so few, they clearly don't serve the purpose Mr. Woods claims for them. Perhaps they serve the anti-purpose of egging on certain kinds of useless flaming. > And are you really so naive as to think that getting rid of NO votes >will stop the whining? We had whining long before we had votes. I don't know how naive I am. (s/naive/idealistic/) Benson I. Margulies
edguer@charlie.CES.CWRU.Edu (Aydin Edguer) (06/02/89)
In article <3407@looking.on.ca> brad@looking.UUCP (Brad Templeton) writes: > Usenet is essentially broadcast. The key word here is essentially. USENET is not a however a true broadcast media. All jokes aside, the source of 5 MB of data a day is not some big artificial intellence project. It is thousands of little sites around the country who contribute to the flow of news the way small creeks contribute to the big flow of rivers. Broadcasts imply that there is a one way link, from a single source. >A satellite that can send from one point to every single place >on the continent is clearly far more efficient than any other route. Yes, if you never want to interact with the broadcast. But think of a major broadcasting firm. They have to pay for more than just a transmitter and satellite. They also have to pay for the newswires to bring the news in. Stargate [as far as I know] never did this. They wanted the net to "pay" for the newswire that they were broadcasting. If they only broadcast information local to the sites directly connected to them, they would not have seen as many objections. >I was just pointing out that it was sad that an idea that did make sense >at the time was stifled not just for technical reasons but for odd political >reasons as well. The copyrights placed in articles were in my opinion not stifling in number or difficulty to obey. A quick and dirty filter should have been sufficient. But, I don't know why Stargate failed. Why not ask the Stargate Project people? They are still on the net. All this speculation gets us nowhere. >Satellite is still clearly the cheapest method for a net like usenet, even >today. Everybody who does any kind of large volume multi-point broadcast >is going satellite, unless they are completely security conscious or too >small. I do not think it is clear. I used to live in Missouri, SHOW ME! Just for thought: Why are people bothering to invest in fiber-optic land lines? Aydin Edguer +1 216 368 6123 edguer@alpha.ces.cwru.edu Department of Computer Engineering, Crawford Hall, Case Western Reserve Univ.
woods@ncar.ucar.edu (Greg Woods) (06/02/89)
In article <375@odi.ODI.COM> benson@odi.com (Benson Margulies) writes: >In article <3315@ncar.ucar.edu> woods@handies.UCAR.EDU (Greg Woods) writes: >> Without NO votes, how do you propose to decide whether a group is "properly" >>named? > >Very simply. If 100 people (or 200, or whatever) agree on the name, it >is presumptively pretty good. I don't think that is good enough, because these 100 or 200 people are probably those who want the group created and don't care what it is named. I don't think these people should get any more of a voice than those who are concerned about namespace pollution. >As Mr. Templeton pointed out, there are >hardly any NO votes anyway. That is true most of the time, but not all of the time. It is false in exactly those cases when there is controversy over the name of the group. Such controversies are NOT always trivial, and they OFTEN generate a lot of heat on both sides. (remember soc.culture.{china,chinese} or comp.women?) >Perhaps they serve the >anti-purpose of egging on certain kinds of useless flaming. I claim that the flames will occur whether or not the flamers are allowed to vote against the group. This is a vacuous argument, apparently intended solely to disenfranchise the "namespace control" camp by taking away their right to vote against a group they feel is improperly named. --Greg
davidbe@sco.COM (The Cat in the Hat) (06/03/89)
benson@odi.com (Benson Margulies) said:
-In article <3315@ncar.ucar.edu> woods@handies.UCAR.EDU (Greg Woods) writes:
-
-> Without NO votes, how do you propose to decide whether a group is "properly"
->named?
-
-Very simply. If 100 people (or 200, or whatever) agree on the name, it
-is presumptively pretty good.
Right. And 5 million Elvis fans can't be wrong.
Just because there are so many of them *never* makes the majority right.
It only makes them the majority.
-As Mr. Templeton pointed out, there are
-hardly any NO votes anyway. Since there are so few, they clearly don't
-serve the purpose Mr. Woods claims for them. Perhaps they serve the
-anti-purpose of egging on certain kinds of useless flaming.
They do serve a purpose. Since there are hardly any NO votes, when there
are a bunch of them it shows that something is wrong with the proposal.
I may agree with someone in their reasoning that a new newsgroup is necessary.
However, because I don't care about that group (soc.culture.asian-american is
an example) I won't vote on it.
But, in some cases, I disagree with someone's reasoning on a new newsgroup
(sometimes almost violently). Soc.personals is a good example of this. And
the fact that over 100 people thought it was a bad idea should give some
idea that, perhaps, it is a bad idea.
When you call for votes there's more than just a YES or NO involved. There's
a third category: I Don't Care (IDC). And unless you can convince all these
people who are voting IDC (by not voting at all) to vote, you *need* both
YES and NO votes. Otherwise you can justifying only counting NO votes instead
of YES votes.
(Note: a flame of this article appears in alt.flame, for those who care.)
--
David Bedno, Systems Administrator, The Santa Cruz Operation, Inc.
Email: davidbe@sco.COM / ..!{uunet,sun,ucbvax!ucscc,gorn}!sco!davidbe
Phone: 408-425-7222 x5123 Disclaimer: Speaking from SCO but not for SCO.
"I'd like to remind you that when you're too well-entertained to move,
screaming is good exercise."
- World Entertainment Warulmo@seal.ucsc.edu (Brad Allen) (06/05/89)
I agree with you. However, I think most of what you want is already doable: most people >can< make their own list, and offer subscription to it. This can be gatewayed to USENET bidirectionally, and the resultant groups can be NNTP'd anywhere you want. Fluff: What you want is a standard for making this work better (more automated, easier to use, and many things fixed in USENET). Well, I agree. A few months ago I started using much less USENET and have since advocated and attempted subscription to mailing lists, since these mailing lists fix so many things. Bandwidth be damned: It sits on the disk until >I< read it; people are polite, informative, and address eachother without fear; lists have specified known purposes where the topic is known and yet not too narrow; answers get POSTED TO THE LIST; etc. etc. etc. etc. etc. Well, ever since I found other NNTP site servers with full news feeds on them and longer disk caching, I've been liking USENET software so much more ... One of the best setups I see out there is: Gateway just about everything via both mailing lists and USENET software, and you will have a good currently-achievable nicely interoperating system. I see this at Standford, where they have about 30 local newsgroups (with various ranges -- departmental, campus wide, smaller, larger, etc. probably all with various distributions), which are all gatewayed well enough between USENET and mailing lists that in one week I see NO questions about how to use this system posted in their su.computers news group (which is actually fun to read!). It just works. I see similar response from the mail gateways on UCBVAX.