Xref: utzoo news.admin:7850 news.groups:15241 Path: utzoo!utgpu!jarvis.csri.toronto.edu!mailrus!iuvax!cogsci!dave From: dave@cogsci.indiana.edu (David Chalmers) Newsgroups: news.admin,news.groups Subject: Re: New newsgroup hierarchy Message-ID: <30596@iuvax.cs.indiana.edu> Date: 1 Dec 89 03:50:17 GMT References: <1618.25614348@mccall.uucp> <49454@looking.on.ca> <11685@cbnews.ATT.COM> <9195@microsoft.UUCP> <54528@looking.on.ca> Sender: root@iuvax.cs.indiana.edu Reply-To: dave@cogsci.indiana.edu (David Chalmers) Organization: Indiana University, Bloomington Lines: 16 In article <54528@looking.on.ca> brad@looking.on.ca (Brad Templeton) writes: >On the other hand, add 40% more sites to the group and I suspect many >of the existing readers would drop out. Unmoderated groups seem to reach >a critical mass where as participation increases, noise increases, driving >out many of the participants, often including the most valued. This is so true. I've always thought it a nice little self-perpetuating paradox that one of the groups with the most consistently high-quality postings is "junk". (Once the groups are widely distributed enough that I can read them directly, the quality begins to go down.) -- Dave Chalmers (dave@cogsci.indiana.edu) Concepts and Cognition, Indiana University. "To live outside the law you must be honest..." Brought to you by Super Global Mega Corp .com