rcd@nbires.UUCP (Dick Dunn) (10/15/85)
The immediate parent of this article is Chuq's 150+ line flame at the net in general and Lauren in particular. Although I'm not much of a fan of moderation (take that as tentative and subject to many qualifying comments), I found myself reviewing Chuq's article in light of the Chuq/ Lauren discussion of the merits of keywords and moderation: - Almost certainly any moderator with a gram of judgment would have rejected Chuq's article as 90% flame and personal attack, having little or nothing to do with the subject matter of net.news. - In spite of Chuq's advocacy of keywords, note what he chose for his in this article: > Keywords: blurfl, foobar, snafu, lauren, sillythighs Chuq has illustrated, in one swell foop (or braaaap) that either system is subject to abuse by anyone who chooses to do so. Some other comments on Chuq's article: > My hope on going public with my NNTN project was to try to get some > reasonable feedback. As seems to be typical of most of the network, and of > Lauren in particular, all I've gotten are rather childish attempts at > minimizing any attempt to do something positive for this beast we > laughingly call a network. Lauren presented some particular problems with keyword-based systems, as I recall. He asked about how to solve these problems. Chuq has chosen to attack Lauren personally rather than respond to Lauren's problems. To Chuq: How do we tell you that we don't think your ideas are good ones, without having you act like you've been personally attacked and exploding in a royal goddam tantrum? This isn't exactly the first time we've seen this behavior pattern. Will you please try to separate your ideas from yourself enough that you can accept criticism of the ideas without feeling personal injury? You may, in all good conscience, be attempting to do something positive for the net...but suppose that we don't think it's positive? We know (some part of) what you think of people who disagree with you-- epithets selected from the remainder of the article: > ...braying idiots who think that facts are superfluous to their > religious beliefs...throwers of rotten tomatoes...a tree stump...idiots... > petty character assasinations...*PPHHHHHHHHHTTTTTTTT*...enjoy raw > emotional outbursts...old and senile hackers...stomp out anything that > they don't personally agree with...a room full of pigs In light of which, consider: > Well, I'm now VERY sorry I made any public comment at all, because all > it has done is give Lauren another topic to practice his petty > character assasinations on me. Given five or six more years, he might I wonder who's assassinating whose character... And finally, Chuq's remarkable new views on Stargate: > Well, I have supported Stargate from day one, because I felt that it was > something who's usefulness could only be proven by implementation and test. > That was despite that fact that I personally (and until now, silently) feel > that Stargate is dead wrong, and the chance of taking it into a full and > useful production scheme the size of our current network is impossible. > Even though I'm completely against Stargate, I believe that we can learn > from our failures (or be pleased by our successes) and that we should carry > forward and see what happens... It takes a special sort of person to admit that he's been totally hypocritical in his views--or, perhaps, to PRETEND that he's been totally hypocritical in order to reverse his position and take a jab at his opponent. The difference between Lauren's approach with Stargate and Chuq's approach with the keyword-based idea is revealing, and might tell us something about experiments in new news software/media/etc. If we will remember, Lauren faced a lot of opposition over the Stargate experiment and had to answer a lot of pointed-to-unkind questions. He did so--occasionally getting testy about some of them (like the ones accusing him of being in it for the bucks, which deserved testy replies). He only talked about pulling out and abandoning the experiment when faced with personal threats and threats to bring the existing network in general (and his machine in particular) to its knees. I believe that he correctly saw the worst of this as the aberrations of a few, and persevered. Chuq, on the other hand, has already resorted to incredibly vituperative attacks in response to the pointed/ unkind criticism, and has threatened to stop his work. If you can't stand the heat... I don't care that much one way or the other whether Chuq continues his experiment, but--to Chuq in particular and to those who are interested in trying new modes for netnews--If you don't want to risk criticism of your ideas, even perhaps risk having some opinionated but well-informed and well-motivated people say they don't think your idea is worth pursuing, then just don't tell us about it...'cause you're gonna get a lot of shit about it. If it were a universally good, obvious idea, somebody would have implemented it already. With Chuq going to Sun in his current mood, SOMEbody's gonna have his hands full. -- Dick Dunn {hao,ucbvax,allegra}!nbires!rcd (303)444-5710 x3086 ...Simpler is better.