soreff (12/22/82)
I'd like to clarify the motivation for my "seconding of articles" proposal. I intend it to be considered as an alternative to the proposal of having moderators. As the number of people on the net grows, it is going to be increasingly difficult for readers to sort out what they wish to read from what they do not wish to read. There are a number of limitations on doing automatic filtering based on what group an article appears in and on what title is in the header. Given the difficulties in a) Dispensing with moribund newsgroups b) Locating newsgroups of interest as the newsgroups proliferate c) Moving articles/discussions to proper newsgroups d) Getting initiators of discussions to start them in the proper newsgroups I see newsgroups as an insufficiently powerful filter to find/reject articles with/without interest to the reader. There are also some limitations on the use of the titles of articles as a filter. One problem that I find is that a lot of discussions tend to retain the same titles even though the subject has drifted far from the original one. I suspect that this is because the "f" command reuses the old title, even though incremental changes by each user to the title (to reflect changes in content) might be more helpful. Ideally I would like to be able to do keyword searches throughout the text of the morning's mail in order to find items of interest. Given the limits of the system that we have I suspect that some form of human editing will prove needed. I also suspect that this will happen because of the analog to printed media: I've never seen a widely distributed periodical consisting entirely of unedited letters to the edittor. This analogy may not hold in this medium, of course. Please note that in the preceeding comments I am assuming nothing about costs of bandwidth, CPU cycles, disk space, etc. I am treating the net purely in terms of how hard it is to find the stuff that one actually wants to read. If this does require human editing I would personally prefer that it be as widely distributed as possible. This would avoid dictatorial powers by a few editors, and would allow us to keep net dialog as free as possible for as long as possible. I admit that dialog on the net would be slowed down a bit by this measure. If seconding an article requires only one keystroke, however, many users will have the opportunity to second an article during the course of a day. Presumably the delay till an article is seconded will vary inversely with its popularity. -Jeffrey Soreff (hplabs!soreff)