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From: reid@Glacier.ARPA (Brian Reid)
Newsgroups: net.news.group
Subject: the trouble with all these rules is...
Message-ID: <10609@Glacier.ARPA>
Date: Sun, 11-Aug-85 20:20:04 EDT
Article-I.D.: Glacier.10609
Posted: Sun Aug 11 20:20:04 1985
Date-Received: Wed, 14-Aug-85 00:32:44 EDT
Reply-To: reid@Glacier.UUCP (Brian Reid)
Organization: Stanford University, Computer Systems Lab
Lines: 52

There is a fatal flaw in the current set of rules, enumerated by Gene, about
how a new group is created. That flaw is that virtually nobody reads
net.news.group, and the set of people who read it are not at all
representative of the netwide readership.

In the beginning netnews was like ham radio--in order to participate you had
to be a technologist yourself. I used to be a radio ham (WA3AEJ) many years
ago (1962-1965). What I found was that all people ever talked about was ham
radio equipment. It was a completely self-referential medium.

USENET is only about 2% self-referential. By this I mean that only about
2% of the traffic on USENET is spent talking about USENET. This is really
good. But if you want to make USENET into a true democracy--"Radio Free
Usenet" as John Gilmore likes to call it--then you have to involve that
fraction of the other 98% who actually care.

I like what has just happend with net.bizarre. It is a "people's group".
I think there is worthless bad craziness flowing on it, but then most of
the "people's newspapers" of the 1960's had bad craziness in them too.

Counter to the official USENET policy, I assert that the only true reason
to prohibit every clown SA who know how to type "inews -C" from creating an
"official" newsgroup is the name space pollution that Chuqui constantly
worries about. This is a real problem, and basically nothing except
authoritarianism can fix it.

I would also like to assert that the way a person beccomes a USENET bigwig
is to start acting like one. One of the ways he can start acting like one is
to say important things and act official. Another way he can do it is to
start creating newsgroups, and run the risk of Gene hating him forever, of
being put in the same booth in computer purgatory that contains Frank Adrian.

I'm in the mood to run that risk. I'd like to feel important. Sort of like
the Rambo of USENET. In a few weeks I will most likely create a
new newsgroup. I am going to call it "net.whimsy", and its purpose is to
hold things that are whimsical. The official description that I will send
around with it will look something like this:
	net.whimsy	Whimsical things. This newsgroup is for posting
			things that you would love to show your mother,
			if only she read USENET. No followups permitted,
			no cross-postings permitted. If you post something
			here that would embarass you if your mother saw it,
			then you are a bad person.
There has been a "whimsy" mailing list at Xerox PARC for about 5 years, and
it is very very successful. Because it is a mailing list, its moderator can
actually remove from it anybody who violates the rules.

p.s. My mother reads USENET. She is {yale,princeton}!spock!breid. I'm sure
she doesn't read net.news.group.
-- 
	Brian Reid	decwrl!glacier!reid
	Stanford	reid@SU-Glacier.ARPA