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From: lauren@vortex.UUCP (Lauren Weinstein)
Newsgroups: net.news.group
Subject: Re: net.peace quandry - a proposal to settle it
Message-ID: <778@vortex.UUCP>
Date: Wed, 4-Sep-85 15:57:37 EDT
Article-I.D.: vortex.778
Posted: Wed Sep  4 15:57:37 1985
Date-Received: Thu, 5-Sep-85 20:23:12 EDT
References: <844@burl.UUCP>
Organization: Vortex Technology, Los Angeles
Lines: 32

Indeed, even I, a big fan of moderated groups, would never propose
trying to moderate everything in the current environment.  But we
can at least try moderation for new groups that have a high volume
potential if people are going to INSIST that such groups be created.
Ideally, we'd avoid the creation of new groups (high or low volume)
unless really necessary under some established criteria.

It occurs to me that one possibility to help decide whether or not
a group should be created (only one factor, there are many others to be
considered as well) might be the following:

Perhaps we shouldn't really care about how many absolute votes
a newsgroup creation proposal gets.  After all, as we've discovered,
SOMEBODY will vote for any topic -- getting 20 or 30 or 50 people
to say YES isn't hard.  But few people who don't care about the topic
will bother to vote NO -- they'll just ignore the whole discussion
instead.  So new groups keep getting created, even when inappropriate.
Perhaps one factor in deciding to create a new group should be 
whether or not the number of SITES (forget individual voters) who
had at least one person vote YES exceeds a certain percentage of the
total sites on the net.  Each site would only really get one vote
under this system, since each site only needs to get one copy
of any given article.

With some work, we might be able to determine thresholds above
which netnews distribution make sense, and below which mailing
lists make sense.  As the net grows, however, it is more and 
more obvious that we have to take the overall size of the net
into account when making these decisions.  50 people was a lot
in the early days of the net.  Now, it's just a drop in the bucket.

--Lauren--