Path: utzoo!utgpu!water!watmath!clyde!bellcore!rutgers!uwvax!oddjob!ncar!ames!pasteur!ucbvax!decwrl!labrea!polya!carcoar!andy
From: andy@carcoar.Stanford.EDU (Andy Freeman)
Newsgroups: news.misc
Subject: Re: "NNTP has had a number of very bad effects on the net..."
Message-ID: <3212@polya.Stanford.EDU>
Date: 11 Jul 88 23:00:30 GMT
References: <1830@looking.UUCP>  <4277@pasteur.Berkeley.Edu>  <4414@pasteur.Berkeley.Edu>
Sender: news@polya.Stanford.EDU
Reply-To: andy@carcoar.Stanford.EDU (Andy Freeman)
Organization: Stanford University
Lines: 19

In article <4414@pasteur.Berkeley.Edu> faustus@ic.Berkeley.EDU (Wayne A. Christopher) writes:
>It seems like NNTP has had two effects -- it has made news cheaper,
>because it's more effecient and it makes it easier for news to go over
>the internet, but on the other hand it's made news a lot quicker, thus
>increasing volume.

It isn't clear that faster propagation causes more volume.  For one,
it decreases the interval for redundant followups; this reduces their
number.  (Of course, faster propagation only affects followups from
people who read all of the news in a group before responding to a
message, but those people aren't as rare as they seem.)  Increasing
the propagation time guarantees that more people will followup because
they can't see followups that haven't reached them yet.

-andy
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