------------------------------ Date: Fri, 7 Jan 94 05:56:42 EST From: Mitchell L. Silverman Subject: File 4--Re: Ratings Servers and the Diversity of USENET (#1) (I'm mailing this to Tokind and Mr. Williams to get their comments, and to the CuD moderatorship as a possible submission. I have no real public role on the Net--just an ordinary net.citizen--but free speech, on the Net and in the physical world, is something that interests and moves me profoundly.) In CuD #6.03, File 7, Stephen Williams (sdw@MEADDATA.COM) wrote: >One senario is that teachers or organizations worldwide could >'register' to each other and share the responsibility of endorsing >messages in certain groups. If there needed to be culpability, the >endorsers could be tracked down if needed. > >This would be totally optional on an adult's account and mandatory on >a minor's account, unless proper permission was obtained. It might, >in certain situations, also reduce the signal-to-noise ratio. Another >interesting use is to change the nature of moderated groups: the group >could be unmoderated in the current sense, but users could choose >moderators who would agree to endorse messages that had good content. >You could have several 'competing' moderators in the same group, >almost like news organizations. Well done, sir! You're on to something, I think. But the possibilities inherent in your second suggestion interest me more than the first. I have a number of friends on the Net, and there are others on the Net whose opinions I trust. It's currently possible, even easy, for me to read a particular newsgroup scanning for a particular name. I could even put all the names of each person whose judgment I trusted in a sort of reverse killfile, if I so wished, I think. (Knowing *how* to do this is another story!) But what of your endorsements? If the people whose opinions I value aren't set up as these critical organizations--perhaps I'm a fan of DR. B1FF THA PSYNCE D00D, or I'm one of those SubGenius weirdos--and I'd like to see what dogma the Church's "members" are spewing today. What am I to do? When you're designing your endorsement service, can you think of a way to do it that allows for: o finding articles endorsed by people on the Net across the continent from me--and without them necessarily having to register for an endorsement key (or some such) o in some cases, more endorsement text (per message, user, etc.) than message text o different classes or "alignments" of endorsements? Readers of alt.fan.rush-limbaugh should have as much 'right' to tag someone a pinko Feminazi as I do to tag someone as terminally Pink--and to publish that assessment, that 'endorsement.' o conflicting and even competing endorsements of content and character It may well be that having each message carry all that information will prove over-burdensome. Perhaps an Internet server, something like Gopher or WWW, which *can* carry information specific to a particular message's content (pornographic, racist, ill-informed, or otherwise--I'm sure even our esteemed moderators on the CuD have their lapses when posting news), but which also have ratings for individuals, newsgroups, sites FTP and otherwise, and organizations. (And perhaps each of the regional service providers, or other backbone sites, may have copies of several ratings servers--as with netfind and some larger FTP sites, mirroring helps reduce the load in one place.) And rest assured, there will (and should be) several ratings servers--at a minimum. If I'm interested in finding a good cop show on TV, ABC's "ratings server" might tell me to watch "NYPD Blue," CBS will tell me to watch "Homicide," and the AFA will tell me to watch "Dragnet"--or "The Old Time Gospel Hour." (Well, I never agree with the AFA anyway.) In practice, of course, the networks don't seem to push their TV critics to push their own shows, but I've not looked at interlocking directorates usw.--this is just an example. I want to have some choice of opinions to listen to. But how would we on the net structure a ratings service? And who will rate the raters? Some rating services aren't going to get listened to, some are. If the EFF started a ratings server, for example, or CPSR, their ratings servers would be taken pretty seriously. But is corporate good name the only coin these ratings servers would proffer as an earnest? I should point out that I think a non-monopoly ratings server or system would be a Good Thing, especially in that it would allow middle school and high school students better and freer Net access (or rather, it would allow middle school and high school administrators--and prudish parents--to feel that their charges were safe.) But my major concern is in making sure that meeting this goal, and possibly the others Mr. Williams mentions, doesn't produce a system that cannot address the concerns I raise. Likely whatever system gets produced first--unless it's crufty and unusable software--will be the ratings system of the (foreseeable) future--and who in 1979 at Duke would have imagined where things would be by 1994? True, the netnews formats have been revamped, but not as drastically, I think, as the changes between what Mr. Williams suggests and what I think such a system needs to allow for. =+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+ + END THIS FILE + +=+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+===+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+=