reid@decwrl.UUCP (04/17/87)
As you can imagine, I have received hundreds of mail messages about the
planned demise of mod.recipes. I feel that I should explain some more. Many
say "thanks" and many say "don't be a grouch". 5 contained recipe
submissions which I will somehow manage to get out before May 1.
I am turning off mod.recipes as a newsgroup because USENET isn't fun any
more. It's too big and too bureaucratic. The whole point of things like
mod.recipes is that they are supposed to be fun. This isn't my job, this
isn't something that I'm obligated to do; I'm not a fixture of the network.
I just like to cook and eat and collect recipes.
There is no single issue that is making it be no longer fun; rather, it's a
larger and larger amount of wrestling for various kinds of control. Many
people seem to think that the issue is over the name of the newsgroup; that
is certainly the most public issue but in no sense is it the most important
issue. The disputes whose tirelessness have bled all of the fun out of
USENET have been over the issue of where the "worth" or "value added" in
USENET comes from. The issue is of course complex and somewhat pointless,
but the two sides are roughly this:
1) The worth of USENET comes from the data transport mechanism, i.e. from
the money that people spend to move data around.
2) The worth of USENET comes from editorial service and not from data
transport, i.e. in the selection process performed by a moderator
or in the rewriting services performed by a moderator or digester.
After taking a rest, I will almost certainly resume mod.recipes as a mailing
list and a regional newsgroup. For example, I will probably make
"ca.recipes" for a California recipe exchange. Or maybe I will make it be
"ca.greencheese" lest people think that the name is an issue. I will set up
a mailing list mechanism so that people can add themselves to the mailing
list automatically, using somewhat the same technology that the archive
server now uses. Since many of the people who have sent mail to the archive
server don't know their own return addresses accurately enough to be able to
communicate with it, I will have to do a certain amount of manual
intervention, but by and large it should be automatic.
Brian