Xref: utzoo news.groups:8036 news.admin:5124
Path: utzoo!utgpu!jarvis.csri.toronto.edu!mailrus!ncar!ames!oliveb!apple!chuq
From: chuq@Apple.COM (Chuq Von Rospach)
Newsgroups: news.groups,news.admin
Subject: Re: Results of survey on expansion of rec.humor.funny to other networks
Message-ID: <27356@apple.Apple.COM>
Date: 15 Mar 89 22:51:56 GMT
References: <2914@looking.UUCP> <1581@etive.ed.ac.uk>
Organization: Life is just a Fantasy novel played for keeps
Lines: 26

>     Oh come on, Brad.  Please admit that most of these votes
>came from the rec.humor.funny readership, which consists mostly
>of people that fell out on your side after the polarization of
>the net about the JEDR debate.

You're making a wild accusation here: that the people who read r.h.f are the
people who agree with Brad. That's a nasty generalization, and there's
absolutely no evidence for it. And I'll bet you could disprove the "fell
out" statement by looking at readership levels in the arbitron stats. I
don't believe there's been a significant drop-off in r.h.f readership at all -- 
and unless there *has* been, you're statement's been blown out of the water.

>     420 people is a majority of the net?

No. But 420 responses is an exceptionally large number of responses to an
opinion survey on the net. If you consider it against the average number of
responses a survey gets, it *is* a significant number of people.

>     Questions like this one should not be decided by opinion
>polls of the entire net readership, but by reasoned and fair
>debate (ie. not on the net at all!) by people who know a lot
>about the consequences of it (ie. not me).

This is impossible on USENET. USENET won't allow a reasoned and fair debate.
And if a group of people tried to go off and do it anyway, they'd get
screamed at for being fascist. Just ask the backbone cabal.