Path: utzoo!attcan!utgpu!jarvis.csri.toronto.edu!rutgers!apple!epimass!jbuck
From: jbuck@epimass.EPI.COM (Joe Buck)
Newsgroups: news.misc
Subject: Re: In Moderation
Message-ID: <3388@epimass.EPI.COM>
Date: 13 Jul 89 18:25:19 GMT
References: <3300@epimass.EPI.COM> <197600001@inmet> <14403@bfmny0.UUCP> <3749@viscous.sco.COM> <24A91A67.28396@ateng.com> <3579@looking.on.ca> <24B4CCD7.5183@ateng.com> <3600@looking.on.ca> <24B8CEB3.19453@ateng.com> <295@ecijmm.UUCP> <8033@mtune.ATT.COM> <14465@bfm
Reply-To: jbuck@epimass.EPI.COM (Joe Buck)
Organization: Entropic Processing, Inc., Cupertino, CA
Lines: 27

In article <14465@bfmny0.UUCP> tneff@bfmny0.UUCP (Tom Neff) writes:
>The problem with a pay service that "throws out the trash" from Usenet
>is that it violates the spirit of the Net.  The implied assumption that
>the Net is mostly trash is anathema.

Come on, Tom.  To say that the Net is mostly trash is to state the
obvious.  But, to paraphrase Sturgeon, 90% of everything is trash,
so what do you expect?

I freely admit that in the 5 or so years I've participated in Usenet,
and in the 2 years I participated in many Arpanet mailing lists before
that, I've posted more than a couple of articles that weren't worth the
bandwidth.  I've also posted a few that were real contributions to the
community (IMHO); most were somewhere in between.  So what?

I can subscribe to a clipping service that sends me articles collected
from various well-known newspapers based on subject, value, or whatever.
Is doing so a gross insult to the publications that they survey (because
they aren't sending me whole newspapers, just articles)?  Of course not.

Geoff's original message (calling the net a sewer) was inflammatory, but
surely you're not going to tell me that all 4Mb a day are high quality
stuff?


-- 
-- Joe Buck	jbuck@epimass.epi.com, uunet!epimass.epi.com!jbuck