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From: karl@osu-eddie.UUCP (Karl Kleinpaste)
Newsgroups: net.news
Subject: Re: mailing lists are no substitute for newsgroups; let idle ones be!
Message-ID: <145@osu-eddie.UUCP>
Date: Sun, 3-Mar-85 16:20:03 EST
Article-I.D.: osu-eddi.145
Posted: Sun Mar  3 16:20:03 1985
Date-Received: Tue, 5-Mar-85 02:57:15 EST
References: <4351@Glacier.ARPA>
Distribution: net
Organization: You really don't want to know
Lines: 102
Keywords:  Sometimes they *are* a substitute.

The claim  is  made  that  mailing  lists are  not  a  good  substitute  for
newsgroups.  In large part, I don't even argue the point.  I personally have
no objection to a large  number  of  newsgroups,  as  they are no particular
burden on me personally.  However, I have to object to some of the  criteria
suggested for evaluating good  points and bad points about mailing lists and
newsgroups.

----------
> By contrast, when a mailing list is started up, it grows much more slowly.
> It is a big pain to unsubscribe from a mailing list, so people are reluctant
> to subscribe in the first place. The information about the very existence of
> the mailing list is not distributed over any regular channel, and so people
> do not have any mechanism for learning that there are mailing lists of
> interest to them. Essentially the only way to learn about a mailing
> list is to be told about it by a person who is already on it, or by a person
> who knows about it. Yes I know that the list of lists is circulated from
> time to time, but nobody reads it. I am not quite sure why nobody reads it. 
----------
As moderator for a  newly-formed  mailing  list  (mail.firearms, as it's now
known),  I can speak from very recent experience that these  complaints  are
quite groundless.  Several points come to mind:

(1) Mail.firearms  has  grown  to  some  35  people  in  less  than a month.
Technically,  this  is  slower  than  growth  in  some  newsgroups,  as  the
readership is necessarily  limited  to those  35  people; but I have already
distributed  2  group-originated  digests.  A third will go  out  Monday  or
Tuesday.  The digests only started being posted 2.5 weeks ago.

(2) The pain of subscribing or  unsubscribing is really very little; all one
need  do  is  drop  me a one-line note in  the  mail,  and  *presto*  you're
{on,off,pick one} the list.  No sweat, if  you  ask me.  I must admit that I
managed to lose one such request for almost a week, but that was an isolated
incident due to my inexperience and lack of organization about the task.

(3)  The  claim  is  made  that  information  about  mailing  lists  is  not
distributed over any "regular channel." This is quite incorrect.  The author
of the above comments even acknowledges that a monthly list-of-mailing-lists
is  distributed, but then claims that nobody reads it.  This is  just  plain
wrong.  I have read it every single  month since it has been distributed.  I
have  sent  a one-paragraph blurb on mail.firearms to Chuq von  Rospach  for
inclusion in his next posting, so  I  know  that this new list will be known
there  as  well.   I  don't remember just now in  what  newsgroup  the  list
appears, but wherever it is, I'm  subscribed  to that group.  I believe it's
mod.newslists, and that's a "regular channel" if I ever saw one.

----------
> I would like to claim that the "essence of usenet", the property that makes
> it a different communications medium from anything that has ever existed
> before (for better or for worse) is that it is simultaneously topical and
> reader-selected. Mailing lists are owner-selected or writer-selected. Usenet
> groups are reader-selected. I am at a loss to characterize the essential
> psychological difference between them, but I have been an ARPAnet user for
> 14 years and a USENET user for almost 4 years, and there is a fundamental
> psychological difference between the two. Usenet is less intrusive on my
> life, it is more controlled by me the reader than by the writer, and it
> seems to be more adaptible to change than ARPAnet mailing list schemes.
----------
I reject  the  notion  that  mailing  lists  are  either  owner-selected  or
writer-selected.  I moderate one list and participate in another; neither is
so constrained in  usage.   People  wishing  simply  to *read* the lists are
*perfectly  welcome*.   Again,  all they need do is indicate  *interest*  by
mailing a trivial note that anyone can bang out in about 30 seconds.

Further, with respect to adaptability, the other list in which I participate
(mail.christian,  also  known as MailJC) has gone through  very  substantive
change in its short  life.   It  started out  as  a very small collection of
people  with absolutely no guidelines and less organization.  It  has  since
changed character (due in large part to its growing size) to being moderated
(thanx  to Liz Allen) and having a set of guidelines which keep  it  running
very, very well, so well in  fact  that I  plagiarized them for the start-up
guidelines  for  mail.firearms.   I know of no one with  objections  to  its
operation, but yet its character has changed to make it progressively better
for those  interested  in  it.  In starting  mail.firearms,  there  was  one
individual with questions about  the  use  of  a moderator and guidelines; I
gave this person the best answers I could as to why such a method was  being
used, and I have heard nothing more on the subject since.  I can only assume
that the person has agreed that this is a good way to go.

----------
> From where I sit (at the moment a red Balans chair) it seems that the
> "perfection" property of a netnews group is that it have a high ratio of
> readers to writers, a steady but low article count,and enough writers to
> keep people from wanting to nuke it. A newsgroup becomes objectionable when
> its reader-to-writer ratio approaches (or even falls below) 1.0. By
> contrast, an ARPAnet-style mailing list seems to keep people the happiest
> when its information content is lowest.
----------
So far, mail.firearms has had about  12 people contributing to it, and a few
of  those were responses to others' postings in the 1st or 2nd digest.   The
other two dozen or so people are,  presumably, reading it for the fun of it,
much  as people read nesgroups.  The information content is very high,  that
is,  it's  all  very  interesting,  technical  information  which  is  being
distributed.   I  look forward to receiving new contributions,  because  (so
far, at least) they've  all  been  very good.   The  article count is rather
high, I think, since I am about to distribute the third digest of  articles.
(The first digest had  5  articles,  the second  had  8, the third will have
about  5 or 6 again.)  From my experience with this very new mailing list, I
have to reject this  claim  that  mailing  lists  don't have the "perfection
property" of a newsgroup.
-- 
Karl Kleinpaste @ Bell Labs, Columbus    614/860-5107  +==-> cbrma!kk
                @ Ohio State University  614/422-0915  osu-eddie!karl