gnu@hoptoad.uucp (John Gilmore) (07/25/86)
In article <6970@utzoo.UUCP>, henry@utzoo.UUCP (Henry Spencer) writes: > ...on a moderated channel like Stargate, > we won't have to do it over again two years later when our 9600-baud modems > are saturated and we need to upgrade to 19.2. Gee, that doesn't take a Stargate or a Starhub or anything. Just remove "net,world,comp,..." from your sys file and leave in "mod". Boy that was simple and it doesn't even need next year's technology! Oh, I see...stargate will somehow moderate things that the current Usenet would not? With paid staff or what? We seem to have all the volunteer moderators busy already; at least I don't see anybody screaming for the job of mod.unix-wizards or mod.lang.c moderator. (Let alone the flame groups.) These days I am not so sure that moderation (editorial functions) would reduce the traffic significantly. Use a big figure and say that 50% of the current traffic is trash that an editor would weed out. Now we're back to last year's traffic level. We've bought ourselves a year. Why won't the traffic grow back to today's level again as more machines and users and gateways and interesting topics join the net? Or are the moderators going to disallow new topics, new gateways, new users? I think Usenet traffic is like files on disk: it grows to fill all the available space and then you have to prune periodically. But there's no way that today's actions will keep it from filling up next month or next year. -- John Gilmore {sun,ptsfa,lll-crg,ihnp4}!hoptoad!gnu jgilmore@lll-crg.arpa May the Source be with you!
henry@utzoo.UUCP (Henry Spencer) (08/01/86)
> Gee, that doesn't take a Stargate or a Starhub or anything. > Just remove "net,world,comp,..." from your sys file and leave in "mod". > Boy that was simple and it doesn't even need next year's technology! Unfortunately, it cuts one off from the rest of the community to a large extent unless everybody does the same thing at the same time. The chances of getting unanimity on this are nil. The result is a considerable penalty for doing it first, which is why there is a slight shortage of people volunteering to do it. Stargate's virtue here is that everyone starts out equal. > Oh, I see...stargate will somehow moderate things that the current > Usenet would not? Yes, easily. The current Usenet has a major chicken-and-egg problem: *most* of the groups could be and should be moderated, but as witness mod.unix, it's often hard to get a moderated group started when there is an unmoderated alternative. Much of the readership would probably prefer a moderated version of (say) net.lang.c, but nobody will post to it if all the readers are still over in the unmoderated group. > With paid staff or what? We seem to have all the > volunteer moderators busy already; at least I don't see anybody > screaming for the job of mod.unix-wizards or mod.lang.c moderator. My understanding is that Stargate quite definitely intends to pay its moderators. It's too much work for volunteer labor, which is the reason why we're a little short of volunteer moderators. > These days I am not so sure that moderation (editorial functions) would > reduce the traffic significantly. Use a big figure and say that 50% > of the current traffic is trash that an editor would weed out... Personally, I'd put the percentage a lot higher than that. Furthermore, the percentage is growing. The signal/noise ratio is visibly dropping in most of the unmoderated groups. > Now we're back to > last year's traffic level. We've bought ourselves a year. Why won't > the traffic grow back to today's level again as more machines and users > and gateways and interesting topics join the net? Or are the moderators > going to disallow new topics, new gateways, new users? Even stipulating for a moment that the signal/noise ratio remains steady, there are *three* things you can do when the pool of contributions grows: (a) Leave the rejection threshold where it is and let the volume grow. (b) Exclude new material and new people, holding volume constant by simply stifling growth. (c) Raise the rejection threshold, holding volume constant by demanding higher quality. Choice (a) is roughly what we've got now, with threshold at zero. Choice (b) isn't an answer at all. Choice (c) is clearly the one most readers would like, if for no other reason than that it gives them better value for the time they spend reading. In a network of finite bandwidth, sooner or later there has to come a limit. If traffic is exceeding the limit, the moderators have to raise their threshold of what's interesting to the readership. This does *not* mean disallowing new topics, new gateways, or new users; it means that even the old contributors, using old gateways to discuss old topics, will get their contributions bounced when they are boring, irrelevant, repetitive, or stupid. Sounds good to me. -- EDEC: Stupidly non-standard brain-damaged incompatible Henry Spencer @ U of Toronto Zoology proprietary protocol used. {allegra,ihnp4,decvax,pyramid}!utzoo!henry