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From: hsd@uvacs.UUCP (Harry S. Delugach)
Newsgroups: net.news.group
Subject: Re: Doomsday cometh?  Are you sure?
Message-ID: <2394@uvacs.UUCP>
Date: Wed, 18-Sep-85 22:52:14 EDT
Article-I.D.: uvacs.2394
Posted: Wed Sep 18 22:52:14 1985
Date-Received: Fri, 20-Sep-85 06:06:09 EDT
References: <781@vortex.UUCP> <85@l5.uucp>
Reply-To: hsd@uvacs.UUCP (Harry S. Delugach)
Organization: U.Va. CS dept.  Charlottesville, VA
Lines: 28

I am a fairly new USENET news reader (approximately one year).  While I have
no solution to newsgroup proliferation, I want to make the following points:

First, I don't believe the problem would disappear if ONLY we had the *right* 
software. There are lots of programs for reading news, and that won't change
in the forseeable future. New software might ease the problem for *some* sites,
in *some* situations, but isn't this avoiding the real issues of just what 
should be on the net in the first place?

Secondly, adopting a more finely grained newsgroup structure may tend to
discourage me from browsing in new groups, because I must pinpoint my personal
interests down to a detailed level, to the exclusion of all others. By analogy,
when browsing through the Sunday newspaper, I sometimes read articles whose 
subjects are normally outside my usual interests if something about the headline
or caption grabs me. This is often how my interests are broadened.

Lastly, with regard to all the "noise" on the net, I offer this: When I was
first given an account, our system administrator gave newcomers an 
orientation. Part of his spiel was an introduction to USENET. He gave us
a short and simple admonition -- 

	READ a newsgroup for a while before POSTING to it.

Wouldn't this simple rule go a long way in cutting down the "noise"?

-- 
Harry S. Delugach   University of Virginia, Dept. of Computer Science
                    UUCP: cbosgd!uvacs!hsd  CSNET: hsd@virginia