Relay-Version: version B 2.10 5/3/83; site utzoo.UUCP Posting-Version: version B 2.10.2 9/18/84; site Glacier.ARPA Path: utzoo!watmath!clyde!burl!ulysses!mhuxr!ihnp4!zehntel!dual!amdcad!decwrl!Glacier!reid From: reid@Glacier.ARPA Newsgroups: net.news Subject: Re: Need for Stargate screening? Message-ID: <2309@Glacier.ARPA> Date: Thu, 10-Jan-85 00:36:11 EST Article-I.D.: Glacier.2309 Posted: Thu Jan 10 00:36:11 1985 Date-Received: Sat, 12-Jan-85 05:50:22 EST References: <494@vortex.UUCP> <1917@sun.uucp> <366@hercules.UUCP> Organization: Stanford University, Computer Systems Lab Lines: 51 As usual, Lauren is right, and one of the reasons I think that Lauren is such a major league dude is that he has enough sense and self-confidence and vision of the future to ignore all of the people who are flaming at him while still getting work done, and yet have the patience to keep trying to talk sense into the heads of the flamers. Wow. In the long run, unmoderated channels produce swill. Anybody who hasn't reached that conclusion by watching the growth of Usenet must have overdosed on reruns of "Gilligan's Island" in his early teens. I read a lot. I read magazines, newspapers, a few academic journals, an occasional book, and a few Usenet groups. I really appreciate the role that editors play in making my reading palatable. In fact, I choose my reading material partly on the basis of who the editor is and what his editorial policy is: how he chooses what to publish. Lewis Lapham is a fine magazine editor, for example. So was Norman Cousins for many years. There are also certain authors, such as John McPhee, whose work I will read regardless of where it appears. Unregulated Usenet is drivel. Amusing drivel, perhaps, but drivel. There are factions that claim unregulated publication to be politically correct. For example, when I lived in Pittsburgh there was a biweekly magazine called the Mill Hunk Times, published by a bunch of socialists, whose editorial policy was that anybody who showed up at their editorial offices with some typed copy could get it published, FIFO. It was awful; nobody read it, and it went out of "business". Usenet is different, though. I'm glad it exists, even though I read about 2% of the messages in it. It's a marvelously democratic, unregulated, unregulatable, by-the-people-for-the-people, drivel mill. Makes me proud to be a humanoid. Nevertheless, we need moderated, selected, preened Usenet-style communication, and Stargate is a great way to get it. The reason moderated groups almost always die out for lack of traffic is that they don't offer the author any more reward, any wider audience, any greater thrill of publication, than the unmoderated groups. There is no motivation for a young net flamer to calm himself down and write a professional-quality piece, because he can dump his guts to net.flame or net.religion or net.politics just as easily, and experience the joy of annoying 100 people in 12 hours. Stargate offers something new, and I think we have almost a moral obligation to exploit it appropriately. This new distribution medium will for the first time offer something different in a moderated group, and provide an impetus for all of you budding Menckens to get your work published in a respectable forum. It will be the first real electronic magazine using our beloved netnews technology, and I can't WAIT to see how it turns out. I might even calm down my own flaming for that wider and more selective audience. -- Brian Reid decwrl!glacier!reid Stanford reid@SU-Glacier.ARPA