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Path: utzoo!watmath!riferguson
From: riferguson@watmath.UUCP (Rob Ferguson [MFCF])
Newsgroups: net.news.group
Subject: Re: Overload
Message-ID: <16460@watmath.UUCP>
Date: Mon, 16-Sep-85 09:57:25 EDT
Article-I.D.: watmath.16460
Posted: Mon Sep 16 09:57:25 1985
Date-Received: Tue, 17-Sep-85 04:59:29 EDT
References: <494@klipper.UUCP> <3500008@ccvaxa> <2168@ukma.UUCP> <269@steinmetz.UUCP>
Reply-To: riferguson@watmath.UUCP (Rob Ferguson [MFCF])
Organization: U of Waterloo, Ontario
Lines: 68
Summary: Newsgroups Considered Harmful


>A discussion starts off in (say) net.news.group about the coming 
>net.apocalypse.  So, a new group is (automagically) created called
>net.news.group.apocalypse, when, after a while, it becomes unused and
>expire finally empties it, and perhaps waiting for a decent interval
>of mourning, it is removed from the newsgroup list, its directory is 
>deleted, and its gone.  This would make the news more like a directory
>tree.  

The real problem is that news groups are insufficently specific,
and that since news groups tend to have high overhead and long life-times,
people are unwilling to create groups which serve more specific
(and smaller) interests. Given this, there is no practical way
for a news reading program to filter out the articles which a particular
persons wants or does not want to read, simply because there is not 
enough information encoded in the header of the message to determine
with any great precision exactly what the article is about.

[ A side note: rn provides a mechanism whereby you can 'kill' discussions
on the basis of the article's header. This is a valient attempt at a solution,
but since it attempts to work within the current framework it is doomed
to failure. Discussions wander under 'Subject:' lines continually, and since
there is a program which relies on the 'Subject:' line for article ordering,
people are even less inclined to alter the 'Subject:' line to reflect the 
content of the article than they were previously. I'm not trying to knock
Larry Wall - I use rn and think it is a wonderful piece of work and a great
improvement over readnews.  I just don't think that the design criteria 
were right...]

What you suggest has the advantage of maintaining some of the structure of
the existing news system, but also has the disadvantage of not truly
addressing the fundamental problem. Your proposal reminds me a great
deal of the 'notes' system, where discussions are organized under
'basenotes'; but since you want to maintain the existing top level
structure of groups, I don't think you will be able to construct truly
intellegent news reading software - at some level we must put more information
in the header, and I don't think that automatic creation and deletion
of newsgroups is going to do the job.

I think newsgroups are wrong. I think we should throw them away.

What I propose is that we should replace newsgroups is a keyword based
news system, in which every article would have a 'subject' and a
'keywords' header line, but would NOT have a newsgroups line. There
would be several thousand keywords, and some software to help the user
choose appropiate sets of words to describe an article. If appropriate
words don't exist in the data base, the user could add them himself,
since one of the design criteria would have to be that individual keywords
would have very low overhead.

This has the advantage that discussions could be as specific as one wants,
and they won't disturb anyone else. Article selection criteria would resemble
regular expressions containing sets of keywords rather than lists of newsgroups.

I can't claim credit for this idea; I originally heard it from Brad Templeton
(brad@looking). He has thought through the idea in some detail and even
wrote up an implementation strategy which was posted to the net some time
ago. If you are interested, I'll ask him to repost the article; it goes
into much more detail than I can here. I don't agree with all of the
reasoning, but at least it is a step in the right direction.

One day I intend to implement a news system which is keyword based.
If we can get a consensus in time, perhaps we can even use keywords to
help save the net.

.......................

Rob Ferguson 	{allegra,clyde,decvax,ihnp4,linus,utzoo}!watmath!riferguson