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From: eric@osiris.UUCP (Eric Bergan)
Newsgroups: net.news,net.news.group
Subject: Re: Which newsgroups are "useless", and what is a soapbox.
Message-ID: <811@osiris.UUCP>
Date: Sun, 25-May-86 10:23:51 EDT
Article-I.D.: osiris.811
Posted: Sun May 25 10:23:51 1986
Date-Received: Tue, 27-May-86 06:46:49 EDT
References: <222@epimass.UUCP> <3679@sun.uucp> <226@epimass.UUCP>
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Organization: Johns Hopkins Hospital
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Xref: watmath net.news:4916 net.news.group:5728

> Some people just miss the point entirely. If we do away with "soapbox"
> groups, whatever they are, all (most of?)  the traffic currently channeled 
> into these "useless" groups will end up in other ("usefull") groups.
> 
> So instead of being able to unsubscribe to what I consider garbage, I will
> get to do even more manual "n" key filtering. Did the abolition of net.flame
> reduce aggregate network traffic? 

	Unfortunately, this is probably true. Now that net.flame and net.bizarre
are gone, you see more "questionable" entries in net.rumor, net.misc, and all
the other groups that would be considered useful in a "technical only" scheme.
The only way around this would be to have moderated groups only, which a)
leads to claims of censorship, b) is difficult to implement, due to the demands
on the moderators, and c) would only lead to an increase in "mailing lists",
which doesn't cut down on the traffic flowing through the backbones.

	To be honest, I really don't see a solution to the problem, at least 
the current distributed environment. If there was central control, billing
a poster for his/her article, this might cut down on traffic, but I suspect
it would also cut down a lot of the replies from the wizards to honest
questions (i.e. the scheme would have to include some concept of a self
addressed stamped envelope, so the person posting the query would pay for
the replies, as well). Anyway, this is all pipe dream - I don't see any
likelihood of a pay as you go scheme.

	The only outcome that I can see is that despite what may be tried,
traffic will continue to increase (if nothing else, just because the
number of machines continues to increase) to the point where backbone sites
will be forced to start shutting down, due to economic reasons. At that point
the net (as we currently know it) will start to fragment, more stress will
be put on the remaining backbones, until they to start dropping out, and
the remains will probably be isolated pockets of networks.

	Out of curiosity, I know about a year ago I was told that decvax
was spending about $10K per month on phone bills to support usenet. Since
traffic has just about doubled since then, does anyone know what the
monthly bill is these days?

-- 

					eric
					...!seismo!umcp-cs!aplcen!osiris!eric