Path: utzoo!utgpu!watmath!looking!brad
From: brad@looking.UUCP (Brad Templeton)
Newsgroups: news.admin
Subject: Re: Article Classification is the key to solving USENET problems.
Message-ID: <3345@looking.UUCP>
Date: 19 May 89 21:45:05 GMT
References: <3222@looking.UUCP> <643@stag.math.lsa.umich.edu>
Reply-To: brad@looking.UUCP (Brad Templeton)
Organization: Looking Glass Software Ltd.
Lines: 46

In article <643@stag.math.lsa.umich.edu> emv@math.lsa.umich.edu (Edward Vielmetti) writes:
>A few individuals can by their persistence,
>great skill, and timeliness can do a lot to add to the
>content of the group; but I assure you that they do so not
>by having articles with perfect References: lines and
>carefully chosen keywords.  

I assure you that I agree with many of the sentiments here.  But I
believe that we are not attaining these goals.

For me at least, the only possible action in many groups has been
the 'u' key.  These individuals of great skill are there, but they are
lost in a noisy room.  How many of you have unsubscribed to a group you
would like to read simply because it contained too much stuff you
didn't want to read, and there was no way to split things up?

My life on USENET spans 8 years.  For the past several years, I have
unsubscribed to far more groups than I have joined.  It seems as usenet
grows, and the number of groups grows, I read *fewer* groups, not more.

So yes, perhaps usenet should be unstructured and we should not try to
put classifications on our articles in an abstract sense.  But we
have to be practical.   I could not survive without the 'k' key, and
sometimes without the '=' and 'c' keys of RN.  Soon it will be beyond
that.

Is there another answer?  Can we continue to have huge sprawling groups
that have no classification within them?

This is part of the great 'imminent death of the net' syndrome which I
codified some time ago.  When usenet faces a pressure, it doesn't
die.  Instead, it does one of two things:

	a) It changes, adapting to pressures and needs of the users
	b) It doesn't change, and those who get fed up with it leave,
		to be replaced by those who don't mind it.

Most of the old time usenetters are gone.  I only know of a small handful
of us who still take an active role in making the net run.  Of the rest,
many have just plain gone, and many lurk, or read just a few groups.

Sometimes action (b) above is not bad, but sometimes it's the bad driving
out the good.  How many times have you seen a newsgroup where the sane
and interesting people all leave because it becomes too noisy?
-- 
Brad Templeton, Looking Glass Software Ltd.  --  Waterloo, Ontario 519/884-7473