Relay-Version: version B 2.10 5/3/83; site utzoo.UUCP Posting-Version: version B 2.10.2 9/18/84; site Glacier.ARPA Path: utzoo!watmath!clyde!burl!ulysses!allegra!mit-eddie!genrad!decvax!decwrl!Glacier!reid From: reid@Glacier.ARPA (Brian Reid) Newsgroups: net.news Subject: mailing lists are no substitute for newsgroups; let idle ones be! Message-ID: <4351@Glacier.ARPA> Date: Thu, 28-Feb-85 02:00:26 EST Article-I.D.: Glacier.4351 Posted: Thu Feb 28 02:00:26 1985 Date-Received: Fri, 1-Mar-85 09:26:36 EST Distribution: net Organization: Stanford University, Computer Systems Lab Lines: 131 I have been trying to find a way to say this in a logical and persuasive manner for about 2 weeks now; I am unable to make it either logical or persuasive. I nevertheless beg for your attention because I believe that the thought that I am trying to figure out how to explain is important. I am not one of the Usenet ruling council, but I have been a heavy user of computer mailing lists and bulletin boards and netnews schemes longer than some of them have been alive; what I am trying to do is distill my experience in 20 years of using computer message systems into something concrete enough that it can be discussed. The proposition that is currently being discussed is the proposition that a proliferation of newsgroups is bad. There are some valid arguments, based on the difficulty of deciding what group to post a message in, that support that view, but most of the recent arguments that I have seen are based on the "too much traffic" claim and not the "too many decisions to make" claim. First let me offer some substantive evidence that small special-purpose newsgroups are not an overwhelming source of traffic. Here is the most recent set of Rick Adams' numbers that has reached Glacier; I have placed an * in the leftmost column of the line for each newsgroup that I judge to be "special-purpose": No. of $ Cost % of Cumulative Rank Kbytes Articles per Site Total % of Total Group (Articles/contributor) 1 752.1 73 23.50 9.0% 9.0% net.sources (1.6) 2 543.9 321 17.00 6.5% 15.5% net.politics (3.1) * 3 377.5 202 11.80 4.5% 20.1% net.politics.theory (4.5) 4 372.2 257 11.63 4.5% 24.5% net.flame (1.8) 5 354.5 178 11.08 4.3% 28.8% net.religion (2.9) 6 301.9 29 9.44 3.6% 32.4% net.sources.mac (2.2) * 7 222.7 118 6.96 2.7% 35.1% net.religion.christian (2.9) 8 218.5 309 6.83 2.6% 37.7% net.jokes (1.6) 9 193.6 350 6.05 2.3% 40.0% net.sf-lovers (2.8) * 10 184.8 133 5.78 2.2% 42.2% net.religion.jewish (2.8) 11 178.5 235 5.58 2.1% 44.4% net.lang.c (2.5) 12 166.9 143 5.22 2.0% 46.4% net.singles (1.6) 13 163.6 43 5.11 2.0% 48.3% net.origins (1.8) 14 152.3 152 4.76 1.8% 50.2% net.movies (1.7) 15 151.7 159 4.74 1.8% 52.0% net.auto (1.7) 16 151.3 212 4.73 1.8% 53.8% net.unix-wizards (1.9) 17 148.2 115 4.63 1.8% 55.6% net.women (1.7) 18 141.6 208 4.42 1.7% 57.3% net.music (2.3) 19 125.4 146 3.92 1.5% 58.8% net.micro (2.2) 20 117.3 140 3.67 1.4% 60.2% net.audio (1.8) 21 106.8 95 3.34 1.3% 61.5% net.micro.mac (1.6) 22 104.8 76 3.27 1.3% 62.7% net.abortion (1.8) * 23 103.6 81 3.24 1.2% 64.0% net.nlang.india (1.9) 24 100.0 116 3.13 1.2% 65.2% net.unix (1.9) 25 98.6 29 3.08 1.2% 66.4% net.philosophy (1.3) Basically what these numbers say is that 2/3 of the total net traffic is used up by 25 groups, and that less than 10% of the total net traffic is used up by groups that Brian Reid judges to be "special purpose". Turning it around, this means that about a third of the traffic is used up by the "minor" groups. I personally do not find that to be a burdensome load, though I am sure that some sites might. It is not the dominant factor in network costs. So let us consider what a "minor" group is, and look at the lifecycle of a new group. Basically what happens when somebody starts a new group is that most people don't care, and unsubscribe as soon as the first message arrives. Some small number of people read the group. If the topic "clicks", then the readership slowly grows, both as new netnews readers join the net and as unsophisticated readers hear about the existence of the group and are taught how to subscribe to it. Sometimes these groups die slowly; sometimes they continue on at a low level. Sometimes (net.politics.theory) they go completely wild. By contrast, when a mailing list is started up, it grows much more slowly. It is a big pain to unsubscribe from a mailing list, so people are reluctant to subscribe in the first place. The information about the very existence of the mailing list is not distributed over any regular channel, and so people do not have any mechanism for learning that there are mailing lists of interest to them. Essentially the only way to learn about a mailing list is to be told about it by a person who is already on it, or by a person who knows about it. Yes I know that the list of lists is circulated from time to time, but nobody reads it. I am not quite sure why nobody reads it. I would like to claim that the "essence of usenet", the property that makes it a different communications medium from anything that has ever existed before (for better or for worse) is that it is simultaneously topical and reader-selected. Mailing lists are owner-selected or writer-selected. Usenet groups are reader-selected. I am at a loss to characterize the essential psychological difference between them, but I have been an ARPAnet user for 14 years and a USENET user for almost 4 years, and there is a fundamental psychological difference between the two. Usenet is less intrusive on my life, it is more controlled by me the reader than by the writer, and it seems to be more adaptible to change than ARPAnet mailing list schemes. From where I sit (at the moment a red Balans chair) it seems that the "perfection" property of a netnews group is that it have a high ratio of readers to writers, a steady but low article count,and enough writers to keep people from wanting to nuke it. A newsgroup becomes objectionable when its reader-to-writer ratio approaches (or even falls below) 1.0. By contrast, an ARPAnet-style mailing list seems to keep people the happiest when its information content is lowest. I read about 20 newsgroups; I am on about 50 mailing lists. It would be remarkably nice if all of the contents of most of those mailing lists could be converted into some form of newsgroup. In my opinion this continues to argue for better technology. I realize that there are sites around the network still running "notes", and running creaking old versions of netnews, and unwilling to change; nevertheless, if Usenet is going to continue to be an exciting experiment in communication technology and not become calcified in a middle-age rut, I claim that continuing technological advances are worthwhile. Besides Stargate, which is a wonderful experiment, we should be looking at various kinds of readership measurement, flow control (only send groups where they are being read), source quench (dynamically prune distribution trees back to nodes from which there are distributions being read), interactive probe ("trial subscription" schemes), and so forth. One possible way of achieving this is to set up parallel universes. So far we have had this notion that there is one single Usenet, and that everybody who is connected to it is connected to the same Usenet. This is a very democratic notion; has anyone explored the sociological and technological consequences of doing it another way? What would happen if a bunch of us, maybe no more than 10 sites initially, were to set up a "C news" or a "D news" or a "Supernews" network, using new and incompatible software that tried to accomplish some load management or that tried to have different editorial policies? Of course that is terribly elitist, but anybody could join if they ran the new software. There must be other ideas. The thing that is going wrong with Usenet is not that it is dying in its own weight or that it is being used by a new class of infidels who don't have the true faith. The thing that is going wrong with Usenet is that it is going technologically stale; it is becoming a service instead of an adventure. There's nothing wrong with a service--I, for one, would continue to read it--but there is no reason why we have to limit ourselves to that. -- Brian Reid decwrl!glacier!reid Stanford reid@SU-Glacier.ARPA