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From: cjp@vax135.UUCP (Charles Poirier)
Newsgroups: net.news.group
Subject: Save net.flame!
Message-ID: <1119@vax135.UUCP>
Date: Sun, 7-Jul-85 17:43:43 EDT
Article-I.D.: vax135.1119
Posted: Sun Jul  7 17:43:43 1985
Date-Received: Mon, 8-Jul-85 01:00:17 EDT
Organization: AT&T Bell Labs, Holmdel, NJ
Lines: 262

I would like to add my thoughts to the current discussion on how to
save the net by kicking out net.flame.  I am opposed to that idea.  My
experience covers the entire net history since its inception at Duke
and UNC.

Please excuse the length of this article.  This covers only the need
for a net.flame.  I plan to post a second article covering the proper
uses of net.flame.

[alice!jj]:
>
>... that nut.flame is an "anything goes" newsgroup in which questions
>of legality and net survival are not to be considered...

Legality is not considered?  This must be a reference to possible
libel.  See my "LIBEL" section below.  Net survival?  I contend that
net.flame contributes to net survival rather than detracts from it.
See "SURVIVAL".

[Chuq]:
>I look at this as a maturation point. The net has simply grown too
>large to be everything to everybody, and we are going to have to
>figure out what the network ought to be and take it there.

The net can only be as mature as the people who contribute to it.
History has shown that there will always be a few immature
contributors.  If by "mature" is rather meant "size", then yes it is
large.  But what I hear Chuq saying is that censorship is effective and
necessary, to make space for the "important" groups.  If and when it
becomes necessary, the choice of discardable groups can be made.  But
this should be done by considering all groups at once in a global
optimization, not as a divide-and-conquer hatchet job.

>The reality of the situation is that if enough sites do remove
>net.flame ... net.flame will die regardless of the bitching and
>moaning. If that is the case, we probably ought to just ratify the
>reality and do away with it.

Paraphrasing: "If net.flame gets sick, it will probably die.  So let us
poison it now, so it will get sick.  Then I can morally help shoot it
dead, and by the way I didn't like it anyway."  Nice.  The same logic
could be used against any of Chuq's (or your) favorite newsgroups.
The reality is that if net.flame per se is killed, it will redistribute
itself among the other groups where it came from in the first place.

>net.flame ... condones flaming and personal abuse, and I don't think
>the network can survive that long term.

See "SURVIVAL" below.

>I think that what ultimately has to happen is for the net to shrink
>and to refocus itself on the priorities. I see these priorities as
>being the systems it supports (Unix and the other stuff like
>net.micro) and the people (net.singles, net.motss, net.religion, and
>the other groups).

Sigh.  Everyone has a set of newsgroups they consider worthless or
damaging.  I know I have my (un)favorites.  But the net has to serve
all tastes!  If the people who pay for the net ever take a good look at
what they are getting for their money, and are so short-sighted as to
judge that by THEIR personal set of tastes, then we can probably kiss
goodbye singles, motss (!), religion (!!!), and lots of others of your
favorite groups.  Yes, that would be unfortunate.  Maybe (MAYBE)
cutting down traffic will help hide the wastage of resources.  But the
choice of the first target as net.flame is wholly misguided.  It would
NOT have the effect of cutting down traffic!

>...and I guarantee you that they WOULD take [flames] out of context.

This type of "maybe" can only affect the few sites with short-sighted
purse-holders.  Chuq et al. seek to penalize ALL sites for the sake of
the POTENTIAL short-sightedness and prudery of these few sites.  Is this
fair?  The alternative of letting flames go where they will (and they
definitely will) would have the certain effect, on ALL sites, of
degrading the quality of all newsgroups.

>...it generates an atmosphere that says "hey, you can say anything you
>want"; that flaming is okay; that anything goes.  ...net.religion or
>net.music...

NO!!  I have read the net for a long time, and I strongly believe that
flaming is mainly a response to contrary opinions, regardless of
whether those opinions are expressed as flames.  To eliminate flames
one would have to ban opinions.  Chuq mentions religion.  Now religion
is just one big opinion.  Net.religion was nothing but a flame bath
from its beginning, and the addition of net.flame did not change that;
the religion flames are an inherent property of the subject; please
don't pin that rap on net.flame!  Yes, I agree that some people pick up
an "anything goes" attitude from net.flame, FOR A WHILE.  See my
comments on Scott below.  The advantages (due to concentration) of
net.flame greatly outweigh the disadvantages (due to creating an
"atmosphere" that people might imitate elsewhere).

>...if we make flaming unacceptable...

This can't even in principle be done, due to the large TURNOVER of
people on the net, especially of student types, who (I apologize to
those mature students out there, but trends are trends) tend to be less
mature and less subject to "professional standards."  Every newcomer to
the net must traverse the learning curve.  Nettiquette notwithstanding,
people learn what is or is not acceptable only from first-hand
experience.  Printed words often come across other than how they were
intended.  The impact of a flame is often stronger than intended.  Are
we to provide no forum for experimentation?  Can everyone tell the
difference between expressing an opinion (too) strongly and expressing
a strong opinion?

>If [Scott] had ... been nice and contrite, it would have blown over
>in a couple of days.

Everyone learns by experience, it just takes a little longer for some.
So now it has been a couple of weeks instead of days; big deal.  I
think it *has* finally blown over, except for the echoing attempts to
cure permanently a problem which is cyclical and fundamentally
incurable.  Scott's and Alex's attitudes have changed significantly by
now as I see it.  Chuq, alice!jj, et al. 's idea of drop-kicking
net.flame is no more appropriate and no less an overreaction than that
of people who drop-kicked Scott and Alex (thereby compounding the
related net-volume fivefold).

[lost author reference]:
>>To tell the truth, I like to flame. 
[Chuq]:
>I consider flames lazy writing.

Great, now we can have a nice Gigabyte-scale discussion of whether
flaming is "good".  Flaming is a fact.  People generally can't resist,
even Chuq admits to doing it.  If its existence were just accepted, for
good or ill, fewer empty words would be spent ABOUT flaming.  Since the
net must accommodate both these attitudes, doesn't it make sense to
continue to provide a means to keep the two from each other's throats?

[Jeff Lichtman]:
>How would you feel if, for some reason, your local government erected
>a building next to your house, and passed a law allowing any sort of
>behavior inside the building?  You would most likely feel endangered,
>because almost certainly the bad behavior wouldn't stay inside the
>building.

Inappropriate analogy.  The net has no government, no police, no buildings.
It only has these little kiosks telling people that, if they are interested,
they can gather here.  Isn't it better to give misbehavers a place to
congregate with their own kind, rather than make them wander all over?

>..[net.flame] sanctions bad manners and behavior.

Illiteracy promotes sloppy thinking.  Look, there is a difference
between the words "sanction" and "condone".  (Thanks, Chuq, for using
the right term.) Please post to net.philosophy if you think there is no
difference.  Net.flame does NOT sanction (approve of) bad manners and
behavior.  It DOES condone (forgive) bad manners and behavior; also
anger, stupidity, arrogance, abuse, long-windedness, megabyte-long
quotes terminated by "How true!", and obscenity.  The reason is NOT to
be someone's primal scream therapist.  The very practical reason is
that this material CAN NOT be eliminated altogether, so it must be
given a relatively innocuous place to go.  No other newsgroup enjoys
this immunity; and I SUPPORT installation of a software prohibition
against cross-postings from net.flame.  Perhaps some of the *flamers*
sanction indiscriminate abuse of other netters.  But it is not proper
unless it is clearly in jest AND clearly asked for by the abusee.
Example: "Rosen-hole."  (I hope! He's always asking for it.)
Non-example: "Fat girls with bangs and pimples who paint their toenails.
Just kidding, ha ha, :-)"
(Not nice, despite the haha, because they didn't ask for it.)

[D. Gary Grady]:
>...(1) [net.flame] takes up gobs of disk space, communications time,
>and the like, and (2) it might at least theoretically leave a site
>passing it open to libel suits.

First (2):

LIBEL:

This is a smokescreen.  This is fantasy.  This is even paranoia.  I can
understand a site administrator having to mouth these things to his/her
bosses, but I can not take it seriously.

(a) IF someone said something so horrible about someone that they took
legal action, would it not be directed at the author?  Or at worst, at
the originating site?  How would the sites who actually transmitted
such an offending article be identified beyond reasonable doubt, given
the tortuous topology of the net?
(b) No one, in all the history of flamage to date, has been so stupid
as to actually say anything that could be considered legitimately
libelous.  Indeed, the presence of such material in net.flame rather
than in some other, more serious group is a good defense against a
charge of libel.
(c) Be less hypocritical.  A truly valuable group, net.sources, was
recently hit with the ACCOMPLISHED FACT of malicious copyright
violation.  I have heard no call for abolition of this group due to
fear of legal action.  (For those who missed this, a forged "author"
line was attached to a program in an apparent attempt to besmirch the
"author"'s reputation.)

Finally,

SURVIVAL:

Net.flame was not created as a means to SUPPORT people publishing more and
more outrageous, abusive, obscene, and just plain angry material.  It was
created as a means of GETTING RID of this material, plus some other
stuff I call meta-material.

As I indicated, I have been on the net continuously since its creation.
It started out containing material related only to computer science at
Duke and UNC, then spread out into other things and other sites as people
found out how much fun it is to talk to people you don't even know are
listening.

When acceptable subjects started including things that were matters of
opinion rather than fact, the flaming immediately started.  It seems
to be an inescapable fact of human nature that people can't let an
opinion contrary to their own go unchallenged.  Nothing is ever
settled by the resulting arguments; they just serve to drown out
any discussion of new topics.  The annoyance of having to wade through
tons of repetitive, stupid argument and name-calling causes other
people to be sucked into the storm in the form of articles asking for
the flaming to stop.  These are the meta-flames.  Then the flamers
re-respond, claiming that they have as much right to the net as anyone;
that everyone has an "n" key; that the meta-flamers are .
These are meta-meta-flames.  Then someone suggests that a new group be
created just for resolving one particular dumb argument or another.
Someone else goes ahead and creates the group before anyone has a chance
to discuss it.  Then someone flames *them* for trying to proliferate
newsgroups.  The volume of meta-flaming usually exceeds the subject-
related flaming by a factor of several.  What's worse, the meta-flaming
has even LESS information content (i.e., ZERO) than the flames which
elicited them!

Eventually everyone with anything reasonable to say is too afraid of
being flamed at to even attempt to say it: the group consists of
NOTHING but flame.  At this point the net DIES.

So net.flame was created as a place you could ask people to go, (other
than "Go to H***") so that people who WERE NOT interested wouldn't have
to hear the endless arguments, while people who WERE interested could
not complain of censorship.  This had the welcome side-effect of
virtually eliminating meta-material.  Note: without net.flame, the
flames would continue in less appropriate forums, and the meta-flaming
would return.  The result would be an INCREASE in net traffic: the
flames would just be spread out more, there would be no one place you
could point to and say "Look at all that waste."  The entire net would
however be a wasteland.  There has been remarkably little such pointing
at net.flame up to now (Chuq, jj, Gary Grady excepted).  Such is the
real success of net.flame.  Without it, there would be a huge flood of
articles carrying the message "Get off the net, we don't need that
garbage!", and "I will not!", and "You will too!".  Need we really
return to those dark days????????????

In short, we ABSOLUTELY NEED a place where garbage, yes, GARBAGE
can appear.  Otherwise, the very same garbage, PLUS lots more of WORSE
garbage, will return the net to its former state of quagmire rather
than its current, relatively clean state.

And as someone said recently, I actually know some people who DON'T
EVEN READ net.flame.  So what's the big deal what is or isn't in it?
All versions of net software give the user the choice to UNSUBSCRIBE.

	Charles Poirier (decvax, ucbvax, allegra, ihnp4)!vax135!cjp

    The opinions above are my own, but others are welcome to borrow them.