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From: stodol@freja.diku.dk (David Stodolsky)
Newsgroups: news.admin,news.groups
Subject: Re: Mutual Moderation (was: Semi-moderated newsgroups)
Keywords: moderation newsgroups semi-moderated peer review quality
Message-ID: <5058@freja.diku.dk>
Date: 17 Dec 89 22:30:51 GMT
Organization: DIKU, U of Copenhagen, DK
Lines: 47


rayan@cs.toronto.edu (Rayan Zachariassen) writes in 
<89Dec13.033005est.2334@neat.cs.toronto.edu>

>I was also
>worried about the immense added volume in just passing "I like this
>article" type control messages around the net. 

This would be the first order effect. But consider the drop in volume that 
would occur when certain people found out that they were getting negative 
reputations from posting in certain groups. Or if they couldn't take the hint, 
that no one was reading their postings. The overall objective of the 
moderation is to give people enough feedback so that they will not post things 
that are not worth reading.

If mutual moderation was generally adopted, then review messages would get net 
wide distribution and referenced messages would be dynamically distributed. 
That is, if a message got good reviews, then a lot of systems would ask for 
it. Your software would always be looking at the review messages and when a 
referenced message passed your criteria, it would be requested. Sort of what 
happens manually with book reviews. Such a requested message could also go on 
to disk of each system it passed through, where it would be retained for a 
while. So if you were requesting a message that was already in demand, it 
would probably be on the next system (or your own) already.

In _Babar: An Electronic Mail Database_ (SSL Technical Report [P88-00015], 
Xerox PARC, April 1988) Steve Putz  said that mail management is faced with 
the problems of how to handle the categorizing and shared access. These 
problems also seem to be present in the Usenet news system. News and mail need 
to be integrated in some way for mediated communication to function 
effectively. Doing this would also probably eliminate the need for votes on 
newsgroup creation, since newsgroups would not function much differently than 
mailing lists.

I can see two extremes for document distribution, and both of these reduce 
traffic. The first concerns documents that almost no one reads. These can fly 
around on the author's disk as long as the electric bill is paid :-) in the 
hopes of being discovered. The second concerns eternal gems of wisdom that are 
constantly referred to. These would just sit permanently (except for the rare 
update :-) on every machine's disk waiting to be read. So what is needed, for 
an effective solution, is an integration of news, mail, and archives that 
balances transmission and storage costs given the mix of messages and readers.
-- 
David S. Stodolsky, PhD      Routing: <@uunet.uu.net:stodol@diku.dk>
Department of Psychology                  Internet: <stodol@diku.dk>
Copenhagen Univ., Njalsg. 88                  Voice + 45 31 58 48 86
DK-2300 Copenhagen S, Denmark                  Fax. + 45 31 54 32 11