robison@eosp1.UUCP (Tobias D. Robison) (06/11/84)
References: I'm responding to a suggestion that to reduce glut, new messages should be at most one screenful, and limited to one per day per user. I disagree. Many of the most informative messages on the net are 40 to 100 lines long, and contain careful explanations of topics of wide interest, solutions to problems, and summarizations of private correspondence. The trouble is to distinguish these from the longwinded trivia. One message per day is fine for a person who has only one (rather weak) interest. Much of the net glut consists of silly duplications of short messages, such as "I didn't get my January Byte either". A better solution may be to have site administrators policing the netnews mail that goes out of their sites, with authority to reease only the messages that seem truly of interest. Another solution may be to start making us pay reasonable fees to send out net news messages (say, 0.1 cents per character). Net news is a golden goose; "glut" (trying to make the goose lay more and more eggs per day) threatens to kill it. Keep thinking about radical solutions. - Toby Robison (not Robinson!) allegra!eosp1!robison decvax!ittvax!eosp1!robison princeton!eosp1!robison