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From: lauren@vortex.UUCP (Lauren Weinstein)
Newsgroups: net.news.group
Subject: Re: Doomsday cometh?  Are you sure?
Message-ID: <799@vortex.UUCP>
Date: Tue, 10-Sep-85 13:37:49 EDT
Article-I.D.: vortex.799
Posted: Tue Sep 10 13:37:49 1985
Date-Received: Fri, 13-Sep-85 04:52:50 EDT
References: <85@l5.uucp>
Organization: Vortex Technology, Los Angeles
Lines: 42

The reason I presume the influx of small machines will degrade
netnews is quite clear.  They could easily outnumber all of the
big machines in a very short order and represent many thousands
of new users.  So the total number of users on the net grows
immensely.  As the number of users grow, we will get more and more
people (absolute quantity) who don't give one damn about following
the rules and who even enjoy causing trouble.  If 1% of the
population falls into one of those categories (and it's bound to
be more than that) that's still enough people (in a numerical
sense) to flood us with garbage.  If 1% of the people on the network
are "jerks" or even if they don't follow the rules by accident (and
there will always be new people who will have the same "accidents")
it still adds up to a large of amount of nonsense traffic in 
an *absolute* sense.  Remember, even ONE PERSON, if they set their
mind to it, could bring netnews to its knees and be extremely
difficult to track down if they were clever enough.  As we grow,
we're going to start finding people (just like hardcore phone phreaks)
who ENJOY causing that sort of trouble.

When we have 500K or 600K people on this net, how is ANYONE going
to afford (money or time!) to wade through even the GOOD stuff?
How will anyone be able to ask a question in an unmoderated
environment?

So there are really two different issues here:

1) The small percentage of jerks that could cause us real trouble
   on purpose, who will grow in absolute numbers and take advantage
   of our "open door free-for-all" policy.

2) The systemic problems associated with sending EVERYTHING that
   ANYONE posts to EVERYWHERE (in most cases) regardless of the fact
   that many messages simply duplicate others, consist largely
   of copies of other messages, etc.  This latter problem won't
   be solved by better transmission techniques, in fact it might
   only make things worse by encouraging MORE traffic!  Only some
   fundamental change in the way we view the material can help
   in the long run.

My opinion, anyway.

--Lauren--