mangoe@umcp-cs.UUCP (Charley Wingate) (09/16/85)
As a moderately heavy user of some of the so-called garbage groups, let me toss out some ideas about the future of the net. First, I think that Lauren is right when it comes to the expansion of the net. People who are on ARPA or lie next to the backbone seem to forget that there are often tremendous delays in transmission. The space to simply hold the news is so great that here at UOM we've lost news twice this year because it tried to overflow the file partition. Traffic in some groups is on the order of 30-40 articles a DAY; I find it hard to believe that anyone can accomplish much and keep up with double or triple that. Eventually, the traffic is going to have to be limited, or the newsgroup structure is going to have to be subdivided in a massive way. The current software state causes a lot of problems, and it is quite clear that they will never be resolved. At the moment, for instance, an argument is being thrashed out in net.news about the merits of digests. Digests make a lot of sense in readnews. For rn users, though, a moderated group gives you almost all of the desirable properties, some of which are defeated by the use of digests. This is one argument that will never be resolved, unless there is suddenly a mass rejection of rn (highly unlikely) or a mass conversion to it (not as unlikely, but still improbable). There are constant fights over the incompatibility of notes with the other programs. From my point of view, the most serious problem we have today is that there is nothing which enforces the newsgroup structure. Given how poorly moderation is supported, there is nothing to prevent someone from posting and article anywhere they want. The newsgroups which were created either to quarantine or protect certain traffic have almost universally failed, at least partially. net.origins traffic is cross-posted to net.religion, the various religion groups are typically cross-posted, and net.women.only completely collapsed. On top of this, the current referencing structure encourages people to copy vast tracts of previous postings, especially given the speed at which old articles expire. This causes a lot of feedback, with more citations causes faster expirations causing more citations. None of the existing reading programs actively supports backward referencing. The current system encourages garbage. People have gotten used to treating the net like a soapbox in Hyde Park. Until rn came along, there was no way to plug your ears to someone or some topic which you simply didn't care to hear. One valuable thing which has come out of this discussion (and even more so, out of the "net.peace" discussion) is more airtime to the notion that the people who pay for the net deserve to have some control over it. Solutions? I have none. The only ones that can really solve the problem all involve massive rewriting of current software. This will only happen on a net-wide basis if the net as we know it now comes to an end. Otherwise, the old problematic system and software will continue to be widely used. Charley Wingate (the last mangoe in umcp-cs)