Xref: utzoo news.admin:7873 news.groups:15296
Path: utzoo!utgpu!watserv1!watmath!looking!brad
From: brad@looking.on.ca (Brad Templeton)
Newsgroups: news.admin,news.groups
Subject: Re: Fixing the unbroken
Message-ID: <55841@looking.on.ca>
Date: 3 Dec 89 03:17:28 GMT
References: <7139@ficc.uu.net> <11832@cbnews.ATT.COM> <623@banyan.UUCP> <55499@looking.on.ca> <1989Dec2.213242.12967@twwells.com>
Organization: Looking Glass Software Ltd.
Lines: 39
Class: discussion

In article <1989Dec2.213242.12967@twwells.com> bill@twwells.com (T. William Wells) writes:
>Brad, stop this nonsense; remember:
>
>	readership level != newsgroup quality.
>
>Before we can even debate whether the current system "works", we
>have to define what "works" means. And it certainly does *not*
>mean "creating newsgroups with wide readership".

No, readership level does not necessarily equal newsgroup quality.  But
the most common theme I hear people espouse here is that the "voting" system
is there to measure interest in a newsgroup.  Well readership level does ==
interest in the newsgroup.  If we could get an accurate measurement of
readership level (and improving the accuracy of the current efforts is
something that's underway) then we do measure what most people have said they
want to measure.

We aren't out to measure "quality" of groups here, anyway.  Quality is
some highly subjective thing that can't easily be quantified.  Nor is it
the right thing to measure.  There are some groups that I am sure have high
quality that I do not read or even feed to this site.

In order to decide the question "Should this group, be default, be distributed
over the whole net?" is to measure the utility of the group, not the quality.
I read the groups that have the highest utility -- I get more out of them
(for whatever reasons -- "quality", technical info, etc.) than they cost
to feed and read.

What other standard can there be?  Can anybody seriously suggest that
large numbers of groups be fed to sites where nobody wants to read them?

So readership level is == group quality, if you take quality to mean
value to the readers.

And it is the readers that count.  Each message is posted once, but scanned,
skipped or read by up to 20,000 readers.  The poster just doesn't even
enter into the equation.
-- 
Brad Templeton, ClariNet Communications Corp. -- Waterloo, Ontario 519/884-7473


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