webber@klinzhai.RUTGERS.EDU (Webber) (05/04/87)
In article <789@looking.UUCP>, brad@looking.UUCP writes: > In article <676@van-bc.UUCP> sl@van-bc.UUCP (Stuart Lynne) writes: > > > >Last statistics I saw printed (Info World or similiar type weekly news rag, > >sometime late last fall) place register users of Compuserve EMail at about > >275,000 users. Telemail was in third place with about 80,000. > > And why do these large nets manage to work well? Because they are offering a different kind of service as has been testified to by various people who use both them and Usenet (see recent messages in news.stargate from: topaz!rutgers!lll-lcc!well!mjr and topaz!rutgers!mtune!codas!novavax!atlas!spietrow). > Perhaps it has something to do with the fact that people pay as they > use? There is no illusion of a free net on these networks, nor any There is no illusion of a free net. There is an illusion that there is an illusion of a free net among various people. Usenet is paid in full. The admission and carrying cost is the most simple and basic, i.e., you call up a newsfeed and proceed to download. Of course, any newsfeed that is friendly enough to take collect calls has no right to turn around and complain about people calling them. Usenet is like a technical conference. If all that was going on were technical sessions, there would be no point to going (you would just stay home and read the proceedings). However, people go to socialize with colleagues and exchange gossip -- companies even pay people to do this. A network of only moderated groups would be akin to a trade show in Albania. Many times we have heard that programmer time is more valuable than cpu time. Programmer moral is probably of more value than raw programmer time. Most people prefer to work on machines that have access to unmoderated net news. Clearly most places think it is worth the phone bills of transfer, the disk space of storage, the cpu time of poor software, and the connect time of people reading in order to keep their people happy. Indeed many people think it is so great that they even provide access to their copy as a service to neighboring machines (and users thereof). > talk about how people have a right to post what they want at other > peoples' expense. What is this talk about posting at other people's expense. I post as a charitable act. Surely I gain nothing from posting. I already know everything that is in my messages and gain no knowledge from the act of posting them. I do it only as a kindness to my colleagues (and because I benefit so much from reading other people's postings). Posting news is not a right -- it is a duty. --------------------- BOB (webber@aramis.rutgers.edu ; rutgers!topaz!webber)