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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