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Path: utzoo!watmath!clyde!cbosgd!ulysses!gamma!epsilon!zeta!sabre!petrus!bellcore!decvax!decwrl!sun!l5!gnu
From: gnu@l5.uucp (John Gilmore)
Newsgroups: net.news.group
Subject: Re: Doomsday cometh?  Are you sure?
Message-ID: <85@l5.uucp>
Date: Mon, 9-Sep-85 14:21:32 EDT
Article-I.D.: l5.85
Posted: Mon Sep  9 14:21:32 1985
Date-Received: Wed, 11-Sep-85 08:23:19 EDT
References: <781@vortex.UUCP>
Organization: Ell-Five [Consultants], San Francisco
Lines: 34
Summary: There's a dance in the old dame yet...

In article <781@vortex.UUCP>, lauren@vortex.UUCP (Lauren Weinstein) writes:
> It occurs to me that we're trying to hold back an ocean with
> a sponge.  Gang, there ain't NO WAY we can make this work.  
> It's doomed.  ...though we may win occasional battles, I think we've already
> lost the war.  The patient is terminal and cannot be prolonged
> indefinitely.

I've seen this happen for four years running now...every time the
colleges start up and a lot of junk comes in until people learn the
ropes, we start hearing bells tolling for the Usenet.

I just set up my system here in San Francisco and am getting fed by
ptsfa.  Batched and compressed, at 1200 baud, it doesn't seem to be a
big load on the system, except for disk space.  Frankly, I notice the
mail traffic a lot more.

The volume is up, and the tools are evolving to deal with it.  In the
"good old days" when there were 40 sites, there was no compression.
There was no "rn".  There wasn't even a "vnews"!  Of course, the
evolution is piecemeal and fragmented -- that's a problem of volunteer
projects.  But in a thousand sites, it's also easier to find volunteers
and split up the work (eg, newsgroup moderators, code hackers, routing
designers, net mappers, group czars, satellite experimenters...).

> Plus we have the increasing number of small nodes which will
> eventually swamp the larger sites in terms of sheer numbers.

People are also assuming that the "deluge" of little sites will degrade
the quality of the net below that maintained by the existing "large"
sites.  This sounds like a latent prejudice against micro users; why is
a Vax wizard presumed to be more courteous than an Apple wizard, or a
computer salesman, or a kid hacker?  I think that the new users are
MORE amenable to forming good manners, if we will present them with
guidelines early enough in their exposure to the net.