jjhnsn@ut-ngp.UTEXAS (J. Lee Johnson) (08/13/85)
Gene Spafford (spaf@gatech) writes: > (in fact, for most of those groups, I > received more letters than there have been articles posted in the last > 6 months...interpret that as you will). > If these groups work best with a small readership, and since > they seem to enjoy such a small posting audience, it might be > better to have them as moderated groups or mailing lists...or so I > might argue. Comments? But later in the same article <813@gatech.CSNET> he quotes Brian Reid (reid@glacier), who gives an excellent explanation of what's happening: >> Type-1 groups (information exchange) will have many more readers than >> writers. For example, there are a large number of readers of net.movies >> at Stanford, but almost none of them ever posts anything. Nearly every >> user on Glacier reads net.lang.mod2, but we rarely post anything. >> Someone who was measuring newsgroup worth by looking at writer count >> instead of reader count would get a very distorted view of the worth of >> these things. Consider net.rec.birds, a model newsgroup. It has a high signal/noise ratio and almost no abuses or rudeness. Net.rec.birds has an exact purpose that would not be appropriately accomplished in another group. There have been 35 articles in the last 2 weeks. This is just about perfect as far as I am concerned; after all, I have other interests and responsibilities. Of the 35 articles, only 3 were cross posted to other groups. Two of these were the net.news.group postings by spaf@gatech. The other was a summary article on binoculars (very appropriate). I wish net.unix, net.unix-wizards, and net.lang.c were more like this. I believe they are becoming Type-3 groups (vanity press). I applaud the efforts of people like Gene to keep USENET from collapsing under its own weight, but in this particular case I believe the approach was wrong. P.S. Although I have read almost every article posted to net.rec.birds, this article will be the first one I ever posted to it. -- James Lee Johnson, U.T. Computation Center, Austin, Texas 78712 ARPA: jjhnsn@ut-ngp UUCP: ihnp4!ut-ngp!jjhnsn allegra!ut-ngp!jjhnsn gatech!ut-ngp!jjhnsn seismo!ut-sally!jjhnsn harvard!ut-sally!jjhnsn