cjp@vax135.UUCP (Charles Poirier) (07/08/85)
I would like to add my thoughts to the current discussion on how to save the net by kicking out net.flame. I am opposed to that idea. My experience covers the entire net history since its inception at Duke and UNC. Please excuse the length of this article. This covers only the need for a net.flame. I plan to post a second article covering the proper uses of net.flame. [alice!jj]: > >... that nut.flame is an "anything goes" newsgroup in which questions >of legality and net survival are not to be considered... Legality is not considered? This must be a reference to possible libel. See my "LIBEL" section below. Net survival? I contend that net.flame contributes to net survival rather than detracts from it. See "SURVIVAL". [Chuq]: >I look at this as a maturation point. The net has simply grown too >large to be everything to everybody, and we are going to have to >figure out what the network ought to be and take it there. The net can only be as mature as the people who contribute to it. History has shown that there will always be a few immature contributors. If by "mature" is rather meant "size", then yes it is large. But what I hear Chuq saying is that censorship is effective and necessary, to make space for the "important" groups. If and when it becomes necessary, the choice of discardable groups can be made. But this should be done by considering all groups at once in a global optimization, not as a divide-and-conquer hatchet job. >The reality of the situation is that if enough sites do remove >net.flame ... net.flame will die regardless of the bitching and >moaning. If that is the case, we probably ought to just ratify the >reality and do away with it. Paraphrasing: "If net.flame gets sick, it will probably die. So let us poison it now, so it will get sick. Then I can morally help shoot it dead, and by the way I didn't like it anyway." Nice. The same logic could be used against any of Chuq's (or your) favorite newsgroups. The reality is that if net.flame per se is killed, it will redistribute itself among the other groups where it came from in the first place. >net.flame ... condones flaming and personal abuse, and I don't think >the network can survive that long term. See "SURVIVAL" below. >I think that what ultimately has to happen is for the net to shrink >and to refocus itself on the priorities. I see these priorities as >being the systems it supports (Unix and the other stuff like >net.micro) and the people (net.singles, net.motss, net.religion, and >the other groups). Sigh. Everyone has a set of newsgroups they consider worthless or damaging. I know I have my (un)favorites. But the net has to serve all tastes! If the people who pay for the net ever take a good look at what they are getting for their money, and are so short-sighted as to judge that by THEIR personal set of tastes, then we can probably kiss goodbye singles, motss (!), religion (!!!), and lots of others of your favorite groups. Yes, that would be unfortunate. Maybe (MAYBE) cutting down traffic will help hide the wastage of resources. But the choice of the first target as net.flame is wholly misguided. It would NOT have the effect of cutting down traffic! >...and I guarantee you that they WOULD take [flames] out of context. This type of "maybe" can only affect the few sites with short-sighted purse-holders. Chuq et al. seek to penalize ALL sites for the sake of the POTENTIAL short-sightedness and prudery of these few sites. Is this fair? The alternative of letting flames go where they will (and they definitely will) would have the certain effect, on ALL sites, of degrading the quality of all newsgroups. >...it generates an atmosphere that says "hey, you can say anything you >want"; that flaming is okay; that anything goes. ...net.religion or >net.music... NO!! I have read the net for a long time, and I strongly believe that flaming is mainly a response to contrary opinions, regardless of whether those opinions are expressed as flames. To eliminate flames one would have to ban opinions. Chuq mentions religion. Now religion is just one big opinion. Net.religion was nothing but a flame bath from its beginning, and the addition of net.flame did not change that; the religion flames are an inherent property of the subject; please don't pin that rap on net.flame! Yes, I agree that some people pick up an "anything goes" attitude from net.flame, FOR A WHILE. See my comments on Scott below. The advantages (due to concentration) of net.flame greatly outweigh the disadvantages (due to creating an "atmosphere" that people might imitate elsewhere). >...if we make flaming unacceptable... This can't even in principle be done, due to the large TURNOVER of people on the net, especially of student types, who (I apologize to those mature students out there, but trends are trends) tend to be less mature and less subject to "professional standards." Every newcomer to the net must traverse the learning curve. Nettiquette notwithstanding, people learn what is or is not acceptable only from first-hand experience. Printed words often come across other than how they were intended. The impact of a flame is often stronger than intended. Are we to provide no forum for experimentation? Can everyone tell the difference between expressing an opinion (too) strongly and expressing a strong opinion? >If [Scott] had ... been nice and contrite, it would have blown over >in a couple of days. Everyone learns by experience, it just takes a little longer for some. So now it has been a couple of weeks instead of days; big deal. I think it *has* finally blown over, except for the echoing attempts to cure permanently a problem which is cyclical and fundamentally incurable. Scott's and Alex's attitudes have changed significantly by now as I see it. Chuq, alice!jj, et al. 's idea of drop-kicking net.flame is no more appropriate and no less an overreaction than that of people who drop-kicked Scott and Alex (thereby compounding the related net-volume fivefold). [lost author reference]: >>To tell the truth, I like to flame. [Chuq]: >I consider flames lazy writing. Great, now we can have a nice Gigabyte-scale discussion of whether flaming is "good". Flaming is a fact. People generally can't resist, even Chuq admits to doing it. If its existence were just accepted, for good or ill, fewer empty words would be spent ABOUT flaming. Since the net must accommodate both these attitudes, doesn't it make sense to continue to provide a means to keep the two from each other's throats? [Jeff Lichtman]: >How would you feel if, for some reason, your local government erected >a building next to your house, and passed a law allowing any sort of >behavior inside the building? You would most likely feel endangered, >because almost certainly the bad behavior wouldn't stay inside the >building. Inappropriate analogy. The net has no government, no police, no buildings. It only has these little kiosks telling people that, if they are interested, they can gather here. Isn't it better to give misbehavers a place to congregate with their own kind, rather than make them wander all over? >..[net.flame] sanctions bad manners and behavior. Illiteracy promotes sloppy thinking. Look, there is a difference between the words "sanction" and "condone". (Thanks, Chuq, for using the right term.) Please post to net.philosophy if you think there is no difference. Net.flame does NOT sanction (approve of) bad manners and behavior. It DOES condone (forgive) bad manners and behavior; also anger, stupidity, arrogance, abuse, long-windedness, megabyte-long quotes terminated by "How true!", and obscenity. The reason is NOT to be someone's primal scream therapist. The very practical reason is that this material CAN NOT be eliminated altogether, so it must be given a relatively innocuous place to go. No other newsgroup enjoys this immunity; and I SUPPORT installation of a software prohibition against cross-postings from net.flame. Perhaps some of the *flamers* sanction indiscriminate abuse of other netters. But it is not proper unless it is clearly in jest AND clearly asked for by the abusee. Example: "Rosen-hole." (I hope! He's always asking for it.) Non-example: "Fat girls with bangs and pimples who paint their toenails. Just kidding, ha ha, :-)" (Not nice, despite the haha, because they didn't ask for it.) [D. Gary Grady]: >...(1) [net.flame] takes up gobs of disk space, communications time, >and the like, and (2) it might at least theoretically leave a site >passing it open to libel suits. First (2): LIBEL: This is a smokescreen. This is fantasy. This is even paranoia. I can understand a site administrator having to mouth these things to his/her bosses, but I can not take it seriously. (a) IF someone said something so horrible about someone that they took legal action, would it not be directed at the author? Or at worst, at the originating site? How would the sites who actually transmitted such an offending article be identified beyond reasonable doubt, given the tortuous topology of the net? (b) No one, in all the history of flamage to date, has been so stupid as to actually say anything that could be considered legitimately libelous. Indeed, the presence of such material in net.flame rather than in some other, more serious group is a good defense against a charge of libel. (c) Be less hypocritical. A truly valuable group, net.sources, was recently hit with the ACCOMPLISHED FACT of malicious copyright violation. I have heard no call for abolition of this group due to fear of legal action. (For those who missed this, a forged "author" line was attached to a program in an apparent attempt to besmirch the "author"'s reputation.) Finally, SURVIVAL: Net.flame was not created as a means to SUPPORT people publishing more and more outrageous, abusive, obscene, and just plain angry material. It was created as a means of GETTING RID of this material, plus some other stuff I call meta-material. As I indicated, I have been on the net continuously since its creation. It started out containing material related only to computer science at Duke and UNC, then spread out into other things and other sites as people found out how much fun it is to talk to people you don't even know are listening. When acceptable subjects started including things that were matters of opinion rather than fact, the flaming immediately started. It seems to be an inescapable fact of human nature that people can't let an opinion contrary to their own go unchallenged. Nothing is ever settled by the resulting arguments; they just serve to drown out any discussion of new topics. The annoyance of having to wade through tons of repetitive, stupid argument and name-calling causes other people to be sucked into the storm in the form of articles asking for the flaming to stop. These are the meta-flames. Then the flamers re-respond, claiming that they have as much right to the net as anyone; that everyone has an "n" key; that the meta-flamers are <abuse deleted>. These are meta-meta-flames. Then someone suggests that a new group be created just for resolving one particular dumb argument or another. Someone else goes ahead and creates the group before anyone has a chance to discuss it. Then someone flames *them* for trying to proliferate newsgroups. The volume of meta-flaming usually exceeds the subject- related flaming by a factor of several. What's worse, the meta-flaming has even LESS information content (i.e., ZERO) than the flames which elicited them! Eventually everyone with anything reasonable to say is too afraid of being flamed at to even attempt to say it: the group consists of NOTHING but flame. At this point the net DIES. So net.flame was created as a place you could ask people to go, (other than "Go to H***") so that people who WERE NOT interested wouldn't have to hear the endless arguments, while people who WERE interested could not complain of censorship. This had the welcome side-effect of virtually eliminating meta-material. Note: without net.flame, the flames would continue in less appropriate forums, and the meta-flaming would return. The result would be an INCREASE in net traffic: the flames would just be spread out more, there would be no one place you could point to and say "Look at all that waste." The entire net would however be a wasteland. There has been remarkably little such pointing at net.flame up to now (Chuq, jj, Gary Grady excepted). Such is the real success of net.flame. Without it, there would be a huge flood of articles carrying the message "Get off the net, we don't need that garbage!", and "I will not!", and "You will too!". Need we really return to those dark days???????????? In short, we ABSOLUTELY NEED a place where garbage, yes, GARBAGE can appear. Otherwise, the very same garbage, PLUS lots more of WORSE garbage, will return the net to its former state of quagmire rather than its current, relatively clean state. And as someone said recently, I actually know some people who DON'T EVEN READ net.flame. So what's the big deal what is or isn't in it? All versions of net software give the user the choice to UNSUBSCRIBE. Charles Poirier (decvax, ucbvax, allegra, ihnp4)!vax135!cjp The opinions above are my own, but others are welcome to borrow them.
chuqui@nsc.UUCP (Chuq Von Rospach) (07/09/85)
cjp make some assumptions on my thoughts that I don't agree with, so I thought I would clarify my position -- In article <1119@vax135.UUCP> cjp@vax135.UUCP (Charles Poirier) writes: >The net can only be as mature as the people who contribute to it. >History has shown that there will always be a few immature >contributors. The volume of immature postings has grown. It is easier to ignore 2 articles out of 10 than it is 25 out of a hundred. Size and maturity are interrelated because the tolerance for immaturity goes away as the volume increases. > But what I hear Chuq saying is that censorship is effective and >necessary, to make space for the "important" groups. If and when it >becomes necessary, the choice of discardable groups can be made. But >this should be done by considering all groups at once in a global >optimization, not as a divide-and-conquer hatchet job. I don't consider making space available for important groups censorship. The content of net.flame is immaterial. My opinion is that the 'If and when it becomes neccessary' is NOW, and that is why I'm taking the stand I'm taking. What I'm attempting to do is a global optimization. I've got a list of prioritized newsgroups for my sites and my downstream neighbors, and we're eating away at the bottom of the list while protecting as much of the net as possible. I'm also trying to do that on a global, net-wide basis, and it seems obvious that net.flame is at the bottom of most lists. >Paraphrasing: "If net.flame gets sick, it will probably die. So let us >poison it now, so it will get sick. Then I can morally help shoot it >dead, and by the way I didn't like it anyway." Nice. Your paraphrase is wrong -- please don't put words in my mouth. My version would be: "Net.flame IS sick. Let's admit the fact and take actions before it infects the rest of the net." > The same logic >could be used against any of Chuq's (or your) favorite newsgroups. True. I'm trying to avoid having people who don't understand the net make those decisions for us. I'm willing to get rid of net.flame to help try to save groups I consider more important from the same fate later. I'd be just as willing to get rid of things like net.singles and net.religion if I felt they were endangering groups that are more important like net.unix-wizards. >The reality is that if net.flame per se is killed, it will redistribute >itself among the other groups where it came from in the first place. This is your opinion. Mine is directly opposite. I've posted it recently so I won't repeat myself, but unless you have some proof disagreeing with me won't disprove my opinion (and the other way around, of course). The groups outside of flame simply won't tolerate the kind of nonsense that net.flame currently generates. >Sigh. Everyone has a set of newsgroups they consider worthless or >damaging. I know I have my (un)favorites. But the net has to serve >all tastes! Says who? I have a question: would you be willing to serve the tastes of the pornographer, the pedophile, the Klan, the Nazi's? > If the people who pay for the net ever take a good look at >what they are getting for their money, and are so short-sighted as to >judge that by THEIR personal set of tastes, then we can probably kiss >goodbye singles, motss (!), religion (!!!), and lots of others of your >favorite groups. Yes, that would be unfortunate. Right. It HAS happened, and it is happening with a greater frequency. I'm on record with what I feel would happen if we lost the 'non-technical' groups so I won't repeat myself. Unfortunate is too mild a word. Disasterous is better. I don't want a bean counter telling my what I can or can't read. If we don't take the responsibility ourselves, though, they'll do it for us. >LIBEL: > >This is a smokescreen. This is fantasy. This is even paranoia. I can >understand a site administrator having to mouth these things to his/her >bosses, but I can not take it seriously. Ask Susan Nycum, of Gaston Snow and Ely Bartlett. She is one of the premier lawyers in computer law and did some research on this subject for Usenix. There was a talk given at Dallas and SHE was worried. My company lawyer is worried. You can feel free to not take it seriously, but the people who are trained in this field ARE worried, and that worries me. >(a) IF someone said something so horrible about someone that they took >legal action, would it not be directed at the author? Or at worst, at >the originating site? Nobody knows. If someone is looking for an apology, they might go after the author or the site. If someone is looking for money they can hire a lawyer for a percentage of the take, and that lawyer is likely to go after as many companies as he can and hope they settle out of court. Think of all of the fortune 500 companies on the net, and what they would be likely to do is someone sued all of them for being accessories to a libel case and asked for a couple of million dollars. >(c) Be less hypocritical. A truly valuable group, net.sources, was >recently hit with the ACCOMPLISHED FACT of malicious copyright >violation. I have heard no call for abolition of this group due to >fear of legal action. (For those who missed this, a forged "author" >line was attached to a program in an apparent attempt to besmirch the >"author"'s reputation.) The site involved has pulled itself off of the net until it can find (if ever) the vandal involved. Perhaps it IS time to re-examine the problem of proprietary code and net.sources, because there have been continuing problems with the release of proprietary code, especially with AT&T proprietary stuff thrown around with relative abandon. I'd like to deal with one problem at a time right now. -- :From the misfiring synapses of: Chuq Von Rospach {cbosgd,fortune,hplabs,ihnp4,seismo}!nsc!chuqui nsc!chuqui@decwrl.ARPA Admirals, extoll'd for standing still, Or doing nothing with a deal of skill. -- William Cowper
gam@amdahl.UUCP (G A Moffett) (07/10/85)
Once again, here is perhaps the ``typical'' disk usage of various
newsgroups (from 'du -s /usr/spool/news/net/* | sort +0nr'):
8488 sources
7592 micro
3448 sf-lovers
2768 movies
2568 news < -- You are here
2304 nlang
2224 politics*
1784 lang
1640 unix-wizards
1584 auto
1560 women*
1504 music*
1480 wanted
1456 flame* < -- net.flame is here
1400 unix
1360 singles*
The '*'ed newsgroups are expired after 10 days, the others after 20.
I just thought you might want some real-world data to work with.
--
Gordon A. Moffett ...!{ihnp4,cbosgd,sun}!amdahl!gamdave@uwvax.UUCP (Dave Cohrs) (07/11/85)
> 2568 news < -- You are here > 1456 flame* < -- net.flame is here > > The '*'ed newsgroups are expired after 10 days, the others after 20. Let's see, 1456 * 2 = 2912. I'm not saying that the other newsgroups are small. Every time I see net.sources.mac up on top I cring. Obviously your site has faced the problem that many times in the past net.flame has been the #1 disk user and cut back on it's retention time. -- dave cohrs ...!{allegra,harvard,ihnp4,seismo}!uwvax!dave dave@wisc-romano.arpa (bug? what bug? that's a feature!)
jeff@rtech.UUCP (Jeff Lichtman) (07/11/85)
> > [Jeff Lichtman]: > > >..[net.flame] sanctions bad manners and behavior. > > Illiteracy promotes sloppy thinking. Look, there is a difference > between the words "sanction" and "condone". (Thanks, Chuq, for using > the right term.) Please post to net.philosophy if you think there is no > difference. Net.flame does NOT sanction (approve of) bad manners and > behavior. It DOES condone (forgive) bad manners and behavior... I meant "sanction", not "condone". The point of my article was that there is a message contained in the mere existence of net.flame: that irresponsibility is OK on USENET. Net.flame sanctions (gives official approval of) bad manners and behavior. I believe this is true even if it is not the intended effect. I didn't mean "condone" because it doesn't make sense for the existence of net.flame to forgive the behavior it approves of. Why did you assume that I chose the wrong word for what I wanted to say, and imply that I am illiterate? Is this another example of the bad manners learned in net.flame being carried into other newsgroups? -- Jeff Lichtman at rtech (Relational Technology, Inc.) aka Swazoo Koolak {amdahl, sun}!rtech!jeff {ucbvax, decvax}!mtxinu!rtech!jeff