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Path: utzoo!linus!philabs!cmcl2!seismo!umcp-cs!mangoe
From: mangoe@umcp-cs.UUCP (Charley Wingate)
Newsgroups: net.politics,net.news
Subject: Re: Silence on the net
Message-ID: <5723@umcp-cs.UUCP>
Date: Mon, 13-May-85 23:55:17 EDT
Article-I.D.: umcp-cs.5723
Posted: Mon May 13 23:55:17 1985
Date-Received: Thu, 16-May-85 04:29:38 EDT
References: <1167@ratex.UUCP>
Distribution: net
Organization: U of Maryland, Computer Science Dept., College Park, MD
Lines: 39
Xref: linus net.politics:8346 net.news:2653

In article <1167@ratex.UUCP> mck@ratex.UUCP (Daniel Kian Mc Kiernan) writes:

>>You can't draw any conclusions from silence on the net.  Most of us
>>have little time for the netnews, especially if the topics being
>>discussed are not directly related to our studies or profession.  (A
>>good thing, too -- otherwise there would be 500 articles/day in
>>net.politics alone.)
>
>You can't draw conclusion from an instance of silence, but you can draw
>conclusions from a pattern of silence.

I'm sorry, but that just ain't true.  When you consider flaming at someone
for his lack of response, remember: net communications are almost always
worse than they appear to be.

Many sites expire the heavy traffic non-technical groups quite quickly.
When propagation times get very long, or a site goes down for a while, or one
of many causes, messages often fail to reach many sites.  In the
net.religion groups it is COMMON for me to see replies without ever seeing
the referenced articles.  If you are going to flame someone for failing to
respond, at least have the courtesy to ask him if he saw the article.

At this time I also want to state an important usenet right:

	The Right to be Bored

Everyone who reads news has the right to be bored by what he reads, and, by
implication, the rights to a) quit reading and b) not to respond.  If your
message is not responded to, it may not be a concession of defeat; it may be
that your reader has decided it isn't worth the trouble anymore!  I have
used rn's kill files to avoid reading articles posted by certain people (no,
it wasn't you, Rich), and I see no reason not to do so in the future.  Flame
away, folks; I'll just put

   /Silence on the net/j

in my kill file, and  Presto!  Flames to /dev/nul.

Charley Wingate   umcp-cs!mangoe