Path: utzoo!utgpu!attcan!telly!evan
From: evan@telly.on.ca (Evan Leibovitch)
Newsgroups: news.misc
Subject: Re: IN MODERATION NETWORK and Communication Services Announcement.
Message-ID: <1989Jun7.235255.9312@telly.on.ca>
Date: 7 Jun 89 23:52:55 GMT
References: <1097@fernwood.MPK.CA.US> <1989Jun6.111130.20332@ateng.ateng.com>
Organization: The Open Vapourware Foundation (join now!)
Lines: 55

In article <1989Jun6.111130.20332@ateng.ateng.com>,
chip@ateng.ateng.com (Chip Salzenberg) writes:

>According to geoff@Fernwood.MPK.CA.US (Geoff Goodfellow):
>>ANTERIOR TECHNOLOGY TO OFFER NEW COMMUNICATIONS AND INFORMATION SERVICES

>>     MENLO PARK, Calif. -- June 5, 1989 -- Anterior Technology today 
>>introduced the IN MODERATION NETWORK(TM) and related communications services.  
>>The IN MODERATION NETWORK offers a moderated, filtered, and cleaned-up 
>>information flow of USENET netnews groups and Internet mailing lists.

>Looks like it's time to drag out the old Stargate copyright signatures.

And it's possible that they'll have no effect on the proposed service. I
saw nothing in the original announcement that said you couldn't spread
around their 'digest' of articles once you got them.

As I saw it, the service they're proposing essentially entrusts Anterior,
for a fee, to supply a feed with fewer articles but higher S/N. The fee
I would suppose, would pay for the time of those who sift through it all.

Some people are simply prepared to pay someone else to condense their news
for them into small, easy to digest chunks. At its lowest level, this is
done by most tabloids and USA Today. In our own environment, there are
those who will pay obscene rates to get Patricia Seybold's "Reader's
Digest" approach to Unix news, rather than waddle through Unix Today and
Unix Review, both of which they can get for nothing in the US.

In some ways, one could consider it "super-moderation", in that it
provides moderation on groups which aren't normally moderated, and
extra moderation on top of groups which already are.

(For instance, a joke may make it through Brad, but may not make it past
the Anterior official joke person.)

In all, I don't see this as a Bad Thing, considering that it's just one
of many options. I see this as bringing in readers who have not read
Usenet because they see it as being just too much S/N.

"What about kill files," I can hear some of you ask. Well, there are
those who will gladly pay someone else to take out the garbage.
Like GEnie. And Anterior. And their subscribers.

To me, whether this works or not depends only on the judgement of
Anterior's 'super-moderators'.

And, hey, when the dust all settles, it's only an option. I'm sure
that (almost) nobody already on Usenet will use it, but maybe it'll
provide an alternative to Compu$erve et al. I personally don't think
it'll succeed long term, but so what? I wish them luck.
-- 

Evan Leibovitch, SA, Telly Online, located in beautiful Brampton, Ontario
   evan@telly.on.ca / {uunet!attcan,utzoo}!telly!evan / (416) 452-0504
    Computer salesman's credo:  There's an end-user born every minute