Xref: utzoo news.admin:7840 news.groups:15220
Path: utzoo!attcan!utgpu!jarvis.csri.toronto.edu!mailrus!wuarchive!uwm.edu!psuvax1!rutgers!att!cbnews!wbt
From: wbt@cbnews.ATT.COM (William B. Thacker)
Newsgroups: news.admin,news.groups
Subject: Re: Fixing the unbroken
Message-ID: <11832@cbnews.ATT.COM>
Date: 30 Nov 89 14:34:01 GMT
References: <7139@ficc.uu.net>
Reply-To: wbt@cbnews.ATT.COM (William B. Thacker,00440,cb,1D211,6148604019)
Organization: AT&T Bell Laboratories
Lines: 39

In article <7139@ficc.uu.net> jeffd@ficc.uu.net (jeff daiell) writes:

>All of the proposals for new voting schemes -- and they seem
>to be getting hairier by the moment -- ignore one fact:
>the status quo works pretty well.  An occasional abuse,
>like con.aquaria, does happen, but I'd hate to see the
>current nature of the net abandoned in an overly-zealous
>reach to stamp out all possible problems.  

Hear ! Hear !

Is anyone else tempted to draw an analogy to the War on Drugs ?

"These are flames.   These are the Usenet guidelines on flames.  Any
questions ?"


Let's consider the actual cost of the sci.aquaria debate:

1) Bandwidth.  For the month and a half involved, the volume in news.groups
averaged well over 50 articles a day; some days, over 100.  Most of this
was redundant, and much of it was flaming.  

2) Personal. The honor and motives of numerous posters has been publically
tainted, either by word or deed.  I daresay that most of them would rather
have been having a root canal than put up with the harassment. 

3) Net.structure.  We now have alt.aquaria (some places), sci.aquaria (some
places), rec.pets.fish (some places), and a vote is in progress for
rec.aquaria, which will pass and be everywhere.  And I wouldn't be
surprised to find comp.birds.cockatoos out there somewhere.


Was it worth it ?  What was gained ?  


- - - - - - - - valuable coupon - - - - - - - clip and save - - - - - - - -
Bill Thacker	AT&T Network Systems - Columbus		wbt@cbnews.att.com
	    Black Holes are where God is dividing by zero


Brought to you by Super Global Mega Corp .com