From: utzoo!decvax!goutal
Newsgroups: net.news.b
Title: Re: Lets have Usenet grow up
Article-I.D.: decvax.292
Posted: Wed Sep 22 02:19:07 1982
Received: Wed Sep 22 07:08:32 1982
References: unc.3546

Ref:	Article 128

About flames...
Most of the flames I've seen have included a "flame on ... flame off"
notice.  Seems to me that a flame keyword could be among the most common.
Meantime, hubbout we institute a set of xxx.flame subgroups for most 
groups.

I think newsgroups DO work, to some extent.
They are much more interactive or responsive or whatever than 'digests'.
Note the quotes, by the way -- most of the so-called digests on the
ARPAnet are not generally digested, and only moderately moderated.
This is not to say that digests are dumb -- they're not -- 
they are a very useful tool.

Consider the following spectrum of newsy things:
    1.	KEYWORD NEWS
	Completely arbitrary, very dynamic, topics grow and die,
	extremely responsive, lots of junk, requires some librarian
	skills to make any sense of the results
    2.	NEWSGROUPS
	(like we have now) very responsive, very junky with no way to
	weed out the junk -- i.e. very responsive in terms of being
	able to POST news, but not very resonsive to the need to select
	just what you want to read
    3.	NOTESFILES
	Mostly like newsgroups, except that chronology makes more sense,
	easier to ignore whole subdiscussions stemming from original notes
    4.	MODERATED NEWS
	This appears to be like notesfiles, except that the editing is
	done by a human instead of mechanically by some chronology or
	whatever.  But the idea is that the moderator merely packages
	the articles so they can be read more sensibly, and can do things
	like strongly suggest that things are getting beyond the scope
	of the group.
    5.	DIGESTS
	Here I mean something other than the ARPAnet thingies --
	those are closer to what I call "moderated news".  The moderator
	of a true digest is more like a newspaper editor.  It is assumed
	that the moderator has the power to not repost (riposte?) articles
	according to his or her interpretation of some previously laid-down
	guidelines, in the interests of making the result more compact.
	In particular, the moderator is responsible for collecting multiple
	replies to specific questions, and posting the results as a single
	article.
Note the spread from the anarchic to the monarchic.
Note also that as anarchy goes up, the user must exert more effort
to get useful information out of the system.
Note MOSTLY that they are ALL useful!

Oh, well, food for thought.
-- Kenn (decvax!)goutal