Date: Tue, 10 Mar 1992 23:46:05 GMT
From: tom_limoncelli@WARREN.MENTORG.COM(Tom Limoncelli)
Subject: File 3--Readers Reply: Sidetracked--Yet Another Usenet Problem (4.09)

One of the big problems I've always found with Usenet is the fact
that a good, productive discussion can be side tracked by any user
that wants to.  Or, more usually, a person can unintentionally do so.

For example, the discussion of "Bury Usenet" has now been side-tracked
and is a debate over whether or not the Telcom Digest moderator is
biased.

For example, the countless discussions on many newsgroups where one or
two grammar (or spelling) queens will kill a productive thread by
pointing out typos.

[I'm trying not to add to the problem here, so let me bring it directly
back to "Bury Usenet"]

Solutions have been attempted:  Moderated newsgroups, which many people
have problems with; and "experts only" newsgroup, which doesn't stop
people from asking how to delete a file called "-f" on a Unix system.
Neither works as well as some would wish.

The one solution that works is to avoid (uhhh, should I say "bury")
Usenet and use a standard mailing list.  There are a few really high-
quality mailing lists out there that don't get advertised.  One is
for system administrators that use NNTP, rather than users.  It avoids
unwanted conversation because it's hidden from people that shouldn't
know about it.  Another example is the problem that all of the activism
forums on the net are bombarded with pro/con arguments rather than
discussions that aid the activist's work itself.  Recently there have
been two mailing lists created where the topic is not "Who's right?"
but "We're pooling resources, giving advice, and helping each other."

I hate to say it, but if the quality of either of those mailing lists
drops too much, I will create a new mailing list under a new and more
secret name and start over.


Given a topic you can create two forums.  One talks about the topic,
one has a goal of achieving that topic.  The problem with Usenet is
that all newsgroups are created to be the later, but turn into (or
users later assume it is) the former.  The written proposal for
soc.motss dictates that it is for gay, lesbian and bisexual Usenet
members to discuss gay, lesbian and bisexual life AND it explicitly
prohibits discussions about if homosexuality/bisexuality is right or
wrong.  Amazingly enough, homophobes post enough messages each day to
make the newsgroup useless to many people.


Future directions:
Sometimes I think that I'd be willing to pay for a service where I could
explain my likes and dislikes and they would pre-scan netnews for me
and mark anything I would find interesting; I could skip all the rest.
This might be worth-while for certain ultra-high volume newsgroups.

Then I think that it might be better to pay some highly trained
individual to go through my newsfeed as it arrives and add a new
header to each message that would list five to a hundred and five
keywords from the official Library of Congress keywords list [i.e.
synonyms are removed; you don't look in the card catalog under "Movies",
you look under "Films"] so that a killfile would have a better fighting
chance.

Then I start to think about the first mailing list I was ever on.  Our
VAX at school wasn't on any networks yet, but someone in a silly mood
created the "SMC" mailing list and started sending people joking
invitations saying that they were invited to her "Secret Mail Club."

Maybe the SMC was going in the right direction the whole time.

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