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