lauren@vortex.UUCP (Lauren Weinstein) (11/16/85)
Ha! If it cost NOTHING to send netnews around the world the problems would be even worse. You think we get inane, repetitious, bogus, silly, and infantile messages now? Imagine the flow that would occur if the phone calls cost nothing *in fact* (rather than the current situation, where many sites ACT like they were free, even though the backbones pay the real bucks and have to take steps to keep costs under control). The people who are equating message length with quality are completely missing the boat. Truncating messages or chopping out the middle of messages are not useful solutions. Not only would such techniques allow the flood of short but useless messages to continue, and damage useful articles, but such "filters" would also be trivial to bypass by even semi-clever news posters. The lack of moderation is the key problem. Even useful groups (like net.news.group) can be flooded in an unmoderated environment. I used to like reading some of the non-technical groups, like net.movies for example. But now that group has come to be dominated by endless listings of good and bad movies and similar trivia. I finally had to drop that group, even though there were occasionally useful articles in there and I have substantial amounts of film knowledge that I could contribute to that group. Net.jokes was once "interesting," but has become incredibly degraded. Obscenity and total tastelessness aren't (alone) sufficient cause for condemnation, but I wonder how many companies paying to send that crud around the net would find their stockholders happy to see how their company's money was being spent? If you want to go out and buy a copy of Hustler that's your business. If you want to discuss Cartoon Quotes ad nauseum that's OK too, but maybe you should be paying for it! I don't see why the entire network needs to support total crap on an endless basis with absolutely NO accountability of any kind. People are free to discuss anything they wish; I'm NOT in favor of censorship, but why are we virtually ALL paying for this stuff that is mainly for the benefit of a relatively few people who get their jollies from sending out such materials to the entire world? How about some SELF-control? Just a little? And one other thing. I'm getting REALLY tired of people throwing the word "censorship" around inappropriately. Dictionary definitions aside, the popular conception of censorship is the use of controls to BLOCK PARTICULAR POINTS OF VIEW OR PARTICULAR PEOPLE DUE TO THEIR VIEWS. It is NOT an appropriate term to use when discussing reasoned and balanced editorial controls and/or moderation. It's one thing to decide not to send out 200 articles that all answer the same question in about the same way, or an article that consists of 100 lines of text from previous messages followed by "I agree." That's being a responsible editor at the most basic level. If a group wants to maintain a high technical level, even more editorial "control," much like that used for technical journals and conferences, is appropriate. If every technical journal, or even popular national magazines, published EVERY article that was submitted... well the sizes of such publications would mushroom and the overall quality would vary inversely with the size. A censor is someone who says, "I don't want anyone to see information that I don't agree with. So I'm going to do what I can to make sure that such information is not published or otherwise available." There's a GIGANTIC difference between censorship and balanced editorial control. The key is to make sure that you trust your editors (moderators) to be reasonable and balanced in their work. The people who seem to think there is nothing in between fascist editors and "we must see EVERYTHING that ANYBODY says!" are missing a massive middle ground. And to the person who suggested turning off the network for a week.... Oddly enough, I privately (jokingly) suggested something like that quite some time ago to a number of people. I figured that people would discover that most of the stuff on the net is like the noise of most commercial network television. It fills spare time that could be used for other things. Skip it for awhile and you find that life DOES go on. But I don't think it will ever happen--there's no way to simply "turn off" the net. Nor do I think it would serve much useful purpose in the long run... too many people are just too addicted. But I'll tell ya' one thing. I'm one of those "old timers" who has been involved in the newsgroups and mailing lists (both ARPA and Usenet) since the beginning. I've been radically cutting back on the materials that I'm receiving. And so far, I've found the cutbacks to be a definite positive move. I was virtually cutoff from netnews recently for two weeks, for the first time in memory. You know what? I'm still here. And probably feeling better for those two weeks away from the cesspool. I'm finding it increasingly difficult to get too worked up about the arguing going on in this forum. It's all starting to look a bit like an immense joke. An "outsider" would probably find it to be positively ridiculous. Man, is there ever a sociology thesis buried in the net somewhere! That's it for now. I'm still reading net.news[.group], and will continue to do so at least until the volume gets too much higher. C'mon people! Step back and look at all this a bit more broadly! This network is becoming the laughingstock of the computer world. Isn't it just a wee bit embarrassing? --Lauren--