Path: utzoo!utgpu!jarvis.csri.toronto.edu!mailrus!purdue!tut.cis.ohio-state.edu!ucbvax!agate!bionet!csd4.milw.wisc.edu!uxc!iuvax!watmath!looking!brad From: brad@looking.UUCP (Brad Templeton) Newsgroups: news.misc Subject: Re: Just how big are some of these sites? Message-ID: <3216@looking.UUCP> Date: 9 May 89 02:09:28 GMT References: <3209@looking.UUCP> <8222@phoenix.Princeton.EDU> Reply-To: brad@looking.UUCP (Brad Templeton) Organization: Looking Glass Software Ltd. Lines: 33 Yes, I realized my mistake (that the counts in the summary posting are user counts and not reader counts) shortly after making my posting and cancelled it. (That doesn't stop the followups) I got confused by the fact that the numbers given for some local sites seemed like the reader counts and not the user counts. UW, for example, is 8000 'users' and 990 'readers.' and the counts seemed to be in the reader range. Several people have written to confirm my belief that at a typical large site, almost all the top groups are local groups. So most of the readership of Usenet is local subnets, and by a wide margin it seems. It does not surprise me a lot. In spite of the 'world community' aspect that computer nets drive towards, people are still most interested in things local. The local groups are popular because, in most of them, you can still carry on a real discussion. They are smaller (per group) but there are more of them. I also suspect that local groups have a few other factors in their favour. If you actually live in the same city as somebody, or work at the same site, or attend the same school, you are far less likely the flame them. The emotional distancing of netnews doesn't apply as much. I wish there were some way we could get the emotional distancing out of worldwide netnews. (Actually, in the future, I believe WorldNet postings will probably consist of compressed video. [If you have the time to process, you can compress video quite a lot.] I wonder what this will do...) Some local groups are exceptions. Stanford's 'su.etc' has a volume that rivals talk.bizarre, and has flamefests. The flamefests there don't quite match real net flamefests, though. -- Brad Templeton, Looking Glass Software Ltd. -- Waterloo, Ontario 519/884-7473