phil@amd.UUCP (Phil Ngai) (03/10/85)
Around the time that I first joined USENET two years ago, a heated
battle was being fought to keep discussions of burgers out of
the network in general and net.general in particular. (sorry for
phrasing it that way, I couldn't help myself.) Talk about flame broiling!
It seemed clear that many people did not think burger discussions
were an appropriate topic for the network.
In the past few weeks, someone started a burger discussion in a
regional newsgroup: ca.general. This one has grown like concrete
in Silicon Valley. But I haven't seen a single article complaining
about the topic. Everyone seems to be having a good time talking about
the obscure holes in the wall they frequent. I know I've enjoyed it.
So what's the difference? The main one I can see is the relative size
of the audience for the two newsgroups and the associated effects.
ca.general has always felt like an intimate group to me. There are a
lot fewer people and I know most of the names. What they have to say
seems more valuable to me. We also have the advantage that the max
delay is less than in a net.* group.
The information is more likely to be useful to me than hearing of
a wonderful place in North Dakota, of course. But I think there is
a real qualitative difference due to the quantitative difference
between the groups.
So maybe net.* will never be as it was in "the good old days". That
is a loss but I do not think it is a major one. You can always create
subnets such as ca.general if you want. What is important is that
net.* is not the way it was and perhaps it's time to think about
ways to use the net which better fit its new, large size.
Here are two topics as examples.
1) Frivolous followups or articles are much less appropriate. If
everyone knows you and there are only a few a week there's no
problem. If most people don't know you and there are enough other
people like you to create 5 or 10 "junk" articles a day, people
start to get mad.
2) Time delay coupled with a large audience creates a flood of
followups containing nearly identical answers to questions. Moderation
is one answer but there seems to be a lot of resistance. But the
problem will not go away, just get worse with growth. We could
work on reducing the resistance to moderation or try to come up
with a new technology to reduce the extraneous followups. Reducing
the time delay can help but that seems unlikely. If anything, it
will probably get worse. I have already had to turn off news at one
site during the daytime because the load was too great. I know of several
other sites that have adopted the same policy. And I may be forced
to do it at my own site. This is something that gets worse as the
volume increases. I laugh at the people who propose 2400 or 9600
baud modems as though phone costs were the only problem. CPU load
is a big problem too.
We could make followups and articles hard to send. But that would be
a disincentive to install new releases of news.
STARGATE addresses many of these issues. Except for the resistance
to moderation problem. Moderation would help land-line USENET too
but doesn't seem to have caught on. I hope it doesn't stop STARGATE.
Sorry I don't have answers but I wanted to discuss some points I haven't
really seen brought up yet.
--
This may not even represent my opinion, much less AMD's.
Phil Ngai (408) 749-5720
UUCP: {decwrl,ihnp4,allegra}!amdcad!phil
ARPA: amdcad!phil@decwrl.ARPAgam@amdahl.UUCP (G A Moffett) (03/11/85)
I agree with Phil's view of how things have worked out on
the ca.* net. The political discussions in ca.politics
have also been far superior to net.politics in quality,
for similar reasons.
Once again I think the net will have to become more moderated,
or it will fracture into regional nets. Frankly, I prefer the
latter.
Maybe the only problem is: the net is just too big.
--
Gordon A. Moffett ...!{ihnp4,hplabs,sun}!amdahl!gam