Relay-Version: version B 2.10 5/3/83; site utzoo.UUCP Posting-Version: version B 2.10.2 9/5/84; site osu-eddie.UUCP Path: utzoo!watmath!clyde!cbosgd!osu-eddie!karl From: karl@osu-eddie.UUCP (Karl Kleinpaste) Newsgroups: net.news Subject: Re: mailing lists are no substitute for newsgroups; let idle ones be! Message-ID: <145@osu-eddie.UUCP> Date: Sun, 3-Mar-85 16:20:03 EST Article-I.D.: osu-eddi.145 Posted: Sun Mar 3 16:20:03 1985 Date-Received: Tue, 5-Mar-85 02:57:15 EST References: <4351@Glacier.ARPA> Distribution: net Organization: You really don't want to know Lines: 102 Keywords: Sometimes they *are* a substitute. The claim is made that mailing lists are not a good substitute for newsgroups. In large part, I don't even argue the point. I personally have no objection to a large number of newsgroups, as they are no particular burden on me personally. However, I have to object to some of the criteria suggested for evaluating good points and bad points about mailing lists and newsgroups. ---------- > 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. ---------- As moderator for a newly-formed mailing list (mail.firearms, as it's now known), I can speak from very recent experience that these complaints are quite groundless. Several points come to mind: (1) Mail.firearms has grown to some 35 people in less than a month. Technically, this is slower than growth in some newsgroups, as the readership is necessarily limited to those 35 people; but I have already distributed 2 group-originated digests. A third will go out Monday or Tuesday. The digests only started being posted 2.5 weeks ago. (2) The pain of subscribing or unsubscribing is really very little; all one need do is drop me a one-line note in the mail, and *presto* you're {on,off,pick one} the list. No sweat, if you ask me. I must admit that I managed to lose one such request for almost a week, but that was an isolated incident due to my inexperience and lack of organization about the task. (3) The claim is made that information about mailing lists is not distributed over any "regular channel." This is quite incorrect. The author of the above comments even acknowledges that a monthly list-of-mailing-lists is distributed, but then claims that nobody reads it. This is just plain wrong. I have read it every single month since it has been distributed. I have sent a one-paragraph blurb on mail.firearms to Chuq von Rospach for inclusion in his next posting, so I know that this new list will be known there as well. I don't remember just now in what newsgroup the list appears, but wherever it is, I'm subscribed to that group. I believe it's mod.newslists, and that's a "regular channel" if I ever saw one. ---------- > 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. ---------- I reject the notion that mailing lists are either owner-selected or writer-selected. I moderate one list and participate in another; neither is so constrained in usage. People wishing simply to *read* the lists are *perfectly welcome*. Again, all they need do is indicate *interest* by mailing a trivial note that anyone can bang out in about 30 seconds. Further, with respect to adaptability, the other list in which I participate (mail.christian, also known as MailJC) has gone through very substantive change in its short life. It started out as a very small collection of people with absolutely no guidelines and less organization. It has since changed character (due in large part to its growing size) to being moderated (thanx to Liz Allen) and having a set of guidelines which keep it running very, very well, so well in fact that I plagiarized them for the start-up guidelines for mail.firearms. I know of no one with objections to its operation, but yet its character has changed to make it progressively better for those interested in it. In starting mail.firearms, there was one individual with questions about the use of a moderator and guidelines; I gave this person the best answers I could as to why such a method was being used, and I have heard nothing more on the subject since. I can only assume that the person has agreed that this is a good way to go. ---------- > 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. ---------- So far, mail.firearms has had about 12 people contributing to it, and a few of those were responses to others' postings in the 1st or 2nd digest. The other two dozen or so people are, presumably, reading it for the fun of it, much as people read nesgroups. The information content is very high, that is, it's all very interesting, technical information which is being distributed. I look forward to receiving new contributions, because (so far, at least) they've all been very good. The article count is rather high, I think, since I am about to distribute the third digest of articles. (The first digest had 5 articles, the second had 8, the third will have about 5 or 6 again.) From my experience with this very new mailing list, I have to reject this claim that mailing lists don't have the "perfection property" of a newsgroup. -- Karl Kleinpaste @ Bell Labs, Columbus 614/860-5107 +==-> cbrma!kk @ Ohio State University 614/422-0915 osu-eddie!karl