Path: utzoo!utgpu!jarvis.csri.toronto.edu!mailrus!shadooby!samsung!usc!snorkelwacker!spdcc!xylogics!world!bzs
From: bzs@world.std.com (Barry Shein)
Newsgroups: news.software.b
Subject: Re: Just how useful is crossposting?
Message-ID: <1989Nov17.054240.18898@world.std.com>
Date: 17 Nov 89 05:42:40 GMT
References: <47326@looking.on.ca>
Organization: The World @ Software Tool & Die
Lines: 38
In-Reply-To: brad@looking.on.ca's message of 14 Nov 89 07:17:31 GMT


>I have come to wonder if crossposting is all that useful in discussion
>groups.  On ClariNet, I use it a lot for news articles, where wire items
>that cover multiple topics are posted to multiple groups.
>
>But for discussion, I have begun to doubt the value.  Even if a base
>article does cover multiple group topics, the whole discussion almost never
>does.   And nobody bothers with followup-to headers.

[you should have probably cross-posted this to news.misc :-]

Are you working from an assumption that there's too much noise,
volume, stuff and therefore "let's take a hard look at the value of
cross-posting" or are you working from the assumption that
cross-posting, in the abstract, has no real value in a discussion
forum no matter how well the mechanisms work to support it?

In practice, well, it may be a symptom more than a disease. I suppose
one can point at the ills it causes but I'm not sure that's not like
saying that there should only be one newspaper because once you have a
bunch it's too much to read, and people just get confused anyhow, etc.

In the abstract it seems to make good sense, someone wants to know
something about, oh, what are people's experiences with some stereo
system. So they cross-post to rec.audio and misc.consumers. A bad
idea? I don't see why (again, in the abstract.) I doubt the
cross-section completely overlaps and, most likely, you'll get the
audiophiles' views from rec.audio and John (Jane) Doe's views from
misc.consumers. It can be valuable.

I guess my point is, is the evil cross-posting or is it something else
and stopping cross-posting might help *that*, but possibly at some
valuable cost?
-- 
        -Barry Shein

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