Xref: utzoo news.admin:7768 news.groups:14982 comp.mail.uucp:3793 comp.os.vms:19934 Path: utzoo!utgpu!jarvis.csri.toronto.edu!mailrus!tut.cis.ohio-state.edu!snorkelwacker!spdcc!xylogics!world!bzs From: bzs@world.std.com (Barry Shein) Newsgroups: news.admin,news.groups,comp.mail.uucp,comp.os.vms Subject: Re: New newsgroup hierarchy Message-ID: <1989Nov23.221956.15681@world.std.com> Date: 23 Nov 89 22:19:56 GMT References: <1618.25614348@mccall.uucp> <49454@looking.on.ca> <11685@cbnews.ATT.COM> Organization: The World @ Software Tool & Die Lines: 99 In-Reply-To: mark@cblpf.ATT.COM's message of 22 Nov 89 20:21:19 GMT From: mark@cblpf.ATT.COM (Mark Horton) >There are two reasons why traffic is growing so rapidly. One is that >the number of people on the net is growing rapidly. The other is that >new newgroups are being created at an alarming rate. People, yes. But group creation? I still don't believe that the mere creation of a group affects traffic much (other than perhaps redirecting it.) I am sure there are exceptions (soc.culture.* might be one major area of exception, so your example is probably good even if as a general rule it's not so good.) The creation of groups is a *symptom* of the net populous growing rapidly much more than a *cause*. And holding back group creation is probably the worst way to try to slow down traffic growth. Once people get that idea they'll just start acting in uncontrollable ways to get their interest posted. And I wouldn't blame them. >VMSNET is not without precedent. There has been a unix-pc.* net for >years now. It's not bothering anybody. Neither will VMSNET. >Furthermore, objecting to the creation of VMSNET is blatant censorship: >you're telling somebody else what they can do with their own machines! >It's akin to forbidding a small group from publishing their own >magazine or newsletter. By the very nature of the alternate heirarchy, >you won't carry it unless you ask for it. *IT'S NOT CENSORSHIP*. Geee. Be careful with loaded words like that. IN THE FIRST PLACE (sorry for shouting), censorship is something the government does to people as an act of law and using their unique police powers. Anything else is at best metaphorically similar but...well, Freedom of the Press does not guarantee you space on the front page of the New York Times. Telling someone to shut up is not censorship, unless you happen to be a government. Most of us aren't. Secondly, most people objecting to VMSNET (myself included) only did so because they wanted to see the groups in the main hierarchies. To a one! If anything, I feel more like I reached out a hand and they bit it. It's hard to call that CENSORSHIP, even metaphorically. To follow your analogy, it's more like "don't create that little special interest magazine, here, we'll give you all the space you need to publish your material. You might find that offer unacceptable, but it's hardly censorship. As to unix-pc and other narrow interest top-levels. No, they don't bother anyone (we have over 50 top-levels on World here, mostly geographic.) I think the point was that it doesn't *help* anyone either. Most of the top-levels like unix-pc have almost no traffic, probably due to the fact that they're top-level and few distribute them. The rest of your point is valid I suppose but opens new cans of worms. If the justification for new hierarchies is so sites can easily choose NOT to carry something, than what method do we use (if any) to sensibly have those created? Any? Is the opposite true, should we just flatten the whole tree? We all know there are sites who want much of alt. but not, typically, alt.sex. Should we have a sex top-level? Should we take every topic for which there might be a significant number of sites disinterested and make them top-level? Abortion, politics, sex, religion, various OS's and machines (if AT&T wants to easily split out VMS because they're the Unix home, do they also want to split out MS/DOS, OS/2, Macintosh, Amiga etc for the same reason? Why not?) If we are to use the term "censorship" isn't making it easier to not carry groups based on various business and political policies a helluva lot more like censorship than trying to just carry the material in the mainstream where it belongs? *We're* ``censoring'' the VMSNET folks because *we're* not making it easy for you to refuse to distribute their material? Think about it. I think we have a slave serving two masters. What are the top-level hiearchies for? To sort out subjects sensibly or to make it easy to refuse to carry certain topics? Although there is some overlap in those aims I think we've long since hit the point where they're at odds. Perhaps it should simply be made easier to take whatever groups you do or don't want and let the hierarchies be used for broad top-level splits based on subject matter rather than some vague sense of marketing concerns (by "marketing" I mean that one has to somehow guess what the population out there wants and doesn't want, in broad swaths, to decide how to define the top-levels.) Otherwise it seems like we're headed for a lot of madness. Maybe we're already there. -- -Barry Shein Software Tool & Die, Purveyors to the Trade | bzs@world.std.com 1330 Beacon St, Brookline, MA 02146, (617) 739-0202 | {xylogics,uunet}world!bzs