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From: billd@fps.com (Bill Davids_on)
Newsgroups: news.groups
Subject: Re: The Namespace: A Serious Delusion for the Net
Summary: I can't believe I'm actually posting to news.groups again
Keywords: I promised myself I wouldn't do it anymore.
Message-ID: <4306@celit.fps.com>
Date: 27 Nov 89 04:43:29 GMT
References: <5513@cps3xx.UUCP>
Reply-To: billd@fps.com (Bill Davids_on)
Organization: FPS Computing Inc., San Diego CA
Lines: 127

In article <5513@cps3xx.UUCP> gcf@frith.egr.msu.edu (Gordon Fitch) writes:
>[...] The 
>function of the namespace is to help sysadmins filter out
>articles they don't want on their systems.  That is why 
>sci groups are better distributed than, say, soc groups.  

I'm with you so far.  This is the real reason but...

>In other words, far from providing assistance, the 
>namespace is used to _deny_ readers access to articles 
>they (might) want to read.

Do you mean to say that the fact that many admins want to cut
their transmission times or conserve disk space has nothing
to do with it?  I have never had any reason to keep my users
from reading any group.  In the past I have limited my feed.

>The system of values which explains the particular value
>of a newsgroup name and the hierarchy to which it belongs
>reflects, I think, the authoritarian environment of the
>average sysadmin (most sites are either academic or corp-
>orate; academic institutions and corporations are almost
>always organized on principles of hierarchic authority.)
>Persons who work at responsible levels in such organiza-
>tions must either internalize the official point of view 
>or give a good simulation of having done so.

This sounds pretty damned paranoid to me.  It may be true of many sites
but I think that it's probably untrue of many sites as well (mine
included).  Most academic institutions that I'm aware of try to get
as full a feed as possible.  The same goes for public access sites.
I can see how military sites and some corporations may do this (I
wonder how many military sites carry alt.drugs :-).  I see an large
number of 386 PC's in the maps.  I suspect that most of these sites
have serious disk space restrictions.

>The namespace prefixes, then, are actually grades of 
>validity or value with respect to an official point of 
>view.

You mean that not wanting the soc groups is a political statement?
Did it ever occur to you that a site may want the comp groups
because they help people get work done and they don't get the rec
groups because the cost is too high and they don't help get work
done?  If the cost became minimal then they might get it.  My site
didn't carry a lot of groups because we didn't have the resources.
Some excess resources showed up (old extra disks from a defunct
machine and a high speed modem :-) and we started carrying everything
we could get our hands on.  The reason we didn't carry things before
was cost and we got things based on value (rather than validity).
Now that the cost is small, we no longer attempt to make judgements.
(Now the only complaints I get are that there are too many new
groups all the time :-).  We have no "official point of view" to
impose on our users.  The utilitarian parts of usenet are more
likely to get justification for using our resources but we have
nothing against carrying the others.  Discussion of social issues
is important but having usenet to do it with does not rank as highly
as receiving comp.bugs.4bsd does to me.  UNIX is a big part of our
business here so knowing about the latest things involving it is very
important to us.  Each site will assign value according to it's
own criteria (UNIX and computer architecture groups having the highest
value at this site).

>This is why comp.women and sci.aquaria were given so much
>trouble: in the official view, one would have contained
>social issues and the other recreational material.  Speech
>about social issues or recreation has intrinsically _less_
>_value_ than speech about computers or science.  (Extrin-
>sically, it is hard to say why speech about, say, physics,
>is of more or less value to a software company than speech 
>about gender issues in employment.  Therefore, the dif-
>ference of value must be intrinsic.  I assume the basis
>of the difference in valuation is ultimately a religious 
>matter.)

Ah.  Now we are in agreement.  It is about value.

Who is anyone to say what should or shouldn't be valuable to someone
else?  By placing things in the wrong namespace you make filtering
inconvenient for sysadmins.  It takes extra work on the part of the
sending system to not send sci.aquaria to a site that gets sci.  It
makes the sys file larger for no good reason.  It's not really a big
deal but it is annoying.  If I didn't carry the rec groups, I wouldn't
carry sci.aquaria.  I don't know if I'd do the same for comp.women
but I might.  It's moot since I carry everything I can get.

>By using "improper"  names, the proponents of the 
>contested newsgroups would be changing the language; if 
>the language is changed, the system of organizational 
>control is weakened.  Those who identify with the system 
>thus feel that they have been attacked, and strike back, 
>generally (if things have gone as far as a vote) by 
>questioning the validity of the votes[1], the honesty of 
>the vote-gatherer, and finally the voting system itself.  
>If these fail, some of the sysadmins often try to 
>sabotage the results of the vote by refusing to carry the 
>newsgroup in question.  You can probably observe all of 
>these tactics in currently unexpired articles on your 
>system, in this newsgroup (news.groups), by looking at 
>those which refer to sci.aquaria.

Yep.  One of my major feeds has sci.aquaria aliased to alt.aquaria
and that's how I get it.  The backbone cabal sort of still exists.
It seems that many admins of major usenet sites on the internet are
not carrying it so it's not getting around very well or posts to it
end up circulating in alt.aquaria.  Some of the posts instead work
their way to me over other feeds (and quite slowly at that).

What annoys me the most is that people try to defeat the name
space for no good reason.  They try to give arguments that social
issues are just as important.  This is beside the point.  The
point is that admins want a convenient way to decide which groups
to get.  Defeating the namespace organization just to get your group
more widely distributed is childish.  The sysadmins who don't
carry sci.aquaria or play all those other games are simply responding
in kind.  It's amazing how quickly we all revert to acting like 12
years olds when someone treats us in an imature way (I must admit to
being guilty of this as well, lest I be flamed).  

BTW, I noticed an awful lot of admins in the NO category for
the sci.aquaria vote (including mine).  Just out of curiosity,
I wonder if there is a way to determine how many votes for each
side were by news admins.  I think that this admins tend to be
against it (the improper name) and users don't really care (they
just want the group).

--Bill (probably going down in flames) Davidson