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From: robison@eosp1.UUCP (Tobias D. Robison)
Newsgroups: net.news
Subject: The cost of moderating satellite News
Message-ID: <1314@eosp1.UUCP>
Date: Wed, 26-Dec-84 10:16:09 EST
Article-I.D.: eosp1.1314
Posted: Wed Dec 26 10:16:09 1984
Date-Received: Thu, 27-Dec-84 04:04:52 EST
Reply-To: robison@eosp1.UUCP (Tobias D. Robison)
Organization: Exxon Office Systems, Princeton
Lines: 61

This memo discusses the cost of moderating most news, and a
possible way (requiring "ai" software?) to avoid human moderation.

Assuming that sites receive news from satellite, and feed
news articles generated from their site via the existing news
network, there will be a great savings in use of that network if
we establish a system of "roots" feeding from small capilaries
up to trunk feeder lines to the site(s) that feed the satellite.

If it is necessary to moderate everything that goes via satellite,
there will be considerable extra costs:

(1) Just to overread everything.  Even if people donate their
services, that's a lot of donated services.

(2) Moderation will slow the timeliness of responses, damping many
useful discussions.

(3) The access of moderators to the net has cost implications:

  - If moderators are spread all over, then news must be fed to
    them, rather than to the trunk satellite feeder sites.  That
    type of feeding will be more complicated and costly.

  - If the moderators are physically spread out, but make long distance
    phone calls to moderate news at the satellite feeder sites,
    these phone calls will be expensive.

  - If moderators are required to live at the trunk feeder sites,
    so they can pre-check all news via local connections, the result
    could be elitist control of the news.

It is possible that federal laws will make moderation necessary.
But I think that most of it could be done via software!  Consider:

(0) We would continue to distinguish between groups that need a
moderator jsut to keep the net from sending illegal stuff, and groups
that are moderated in order to achieve filtered/summarized discussion.

(1) Human modertors will not be perfect;  they will occasionally let
something slip through that shouldn't.  Software need not be "perfect"
to replace or assist them, just very good.

(2) Software can scan for swearwords, suggestive language, expletives,
phone numbers and credit card numbers faster than humans.

(3) Software might be able to detect cases where hundreds of people
send similar short messages (such as "yes, my byte magazine was
delivered late too").

A reasonable procedure would be for human moderators to read anything
caught by software checkers, and to let the rest go through.
Obviously, while installing a procedure like this, Everything
would be overread for a while.

Analyzing news to detect inappropriate material is an interesting
challenge for the ai community, but I think not that difficult
to do fairly well.

  - Toby Robison (not Robinson!)
  {allegra, decvax!ittvax, fisher, princeton}!eosp1!robison