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From: gam@amdahl.UUCP (Gordon A. Moffett)
Newsgroups: net.news.group,net.flame
Subject: Re: mod.all and net.fascism
Message-ID: <379@amdahl.UUCP>
Date: Wed, 17-Oct-84 14:44:22 EDT
Article-I.D.: amdahl.379
Posted: Wed Oct 17 14:44:22 1984
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> Chuq von Rospach
> nsc!chuqui
>
>                              Look at the recent problems in net.motss and
> the ongoing problems with net.music.classical for examples where a minority
> party has made a group pretty painful for the interested majority.

Sorry but I don't see it that way.  Net.motss was suffering from extreme
divergence of viewpoint, not garbage generated by assholes.
Net.music.classical has been languishing, if anything, because its
purpose has never been clearly defined (because ``classical music''
apparently means different things to different people).

The very fact that we disagree on the issue of moderated newsgroups
suggests that something is wrong here.

>                                                                   You can
> call moderation censorship, but that is taking a very narrow view of the
> whole situation. Large numbers of messages is censorship, innappropriate or
> duplicated messages are censorship, offensive messages are censorship,
> anything that forces people to unsubscribe to a group that they would like
> to read is censorship.

It amazes me how you redefine free speech (with all its problems)
as censorship.

WHO is defining "inappropriate"?  WHAT do you mean by "offensive"?
As for "anything that forces people to unsubscribe to a group", that
seems to include "anything that I don't want to read because I disagree
with it."  This is exactly what was/is happening in net.motss.

>                        To me, moderation means removing as many of the
> NEGATIVE forms of censorship as possible to try to make reading the group
> as useful as possible to as wide an audience as possible. This does NOT
> mean limiting content, topics, or whatever-- it just means keeping the
> noise factor to a minimum.

We obviously disagree about what "noise" is.  Again, going back to
net.motss, it wasn't suffering from noise, it was suffering from
a great intolerance of Ken Ardnt.  Can you tell me that if Ken Ardnt
had never posted to net.motss that it would still have wrought mod.motss?

Can Ken Ardnt post to mod.motss?  Will he want to?

>                                [as a moderator] I don't expect myself to
> be perfect, and I expect my readers will happily jump on my face when I
> make a mistake. I also expect that as time goes on the mistakes I make will
> become less frequent as I learn what my readers expect of me-- it basically
> comes down to the fact that I'm trying to save them time and trouble at my
> own expense. I don't think things will ever be perfect (and I dare anyone
> to claim that the status quo is) but I do think they will be better.

I don't want a moderator to select just what I want to read.  I want
to read things that perhaps I don't want to read (if you get my drift)
because I like to be exposed to opinions different from my own.
(I have no quarrel with your moderation of mod.singles, btw, as I
don't read net.singles anyway).

>                             I don't see how an exchange of ideas can be any
> less lively under mod. simply because someone tries to keep the
> discussion within the frame of reference it should never left in the first
> place. A recent case in net.singles was a discussion of singles and
> Christianity that quickly devolved into a discussion of Christianity that
> had nothing to do singles and should have moved to net.religion.

A good point, except that where YOU draw the line might be different
than where I would, which is my point.  Leave the editing of newsgroups
to me and my 'n' key, and I'll be happy.

>                                          Is it censorship to ask a splinter
> discussion to move to a more appropriate place (such as mail)? Maybe. But I
> also propose that having splinter subjects in inappropriate places that
> keep the topic in general from functioning as they are supposed to (and
> frustrating the majority of readers as it does so) is also censorship of a
> more negative kind.

I don't think asking a discussion to be moved to a more appropriate place
is the issue here.  The issue is WHO should decide when that move should
take place, and WHO will be the one to say, "sorry, you can't post that
here," and enforce that decision?

It seems the net is exchanging social controls (peer pressure, if you will),
for centralized controls (moderators).

>       Everyone has to listen to everything if they want to listen at all,
> and the only saviour is the 'n' key. The one thing my results have shown is
> that there are many people out there that simply don't have the time or
> patience to 'n' through 20 messages a day to find the three or four in a
> group they WANT to see. The noise overwhelms the signal. And that is
> censorship of the worst kind.

That is probably a good case for mod.singles, when net.singles seemed
to consist entirely of articles like "How come I'm so lonely?" and
"Should I be using Dentyne or Binaca?"  But this logic does not apply
to net.motss.

Again, my complaint is not with mod.singles but with mod.motss.  I think
the reasons for their existence are quite different from one another.
-- 
"Welcome to the Future -- it's just starting now..."

Gordon A. Moffett			...!{ihnp4,hplabs,amd,nsc}!amdahl!gam

[ This is just me talking. ]