Path: utzoo!attcan!utgpu!jarvis.csri.toronto.edu!mailrus!wuarchive!gem.mps.ohio-state.edu!apple!chuq
From: chuq@Apple.COM (Chuq Von Rospach)
Newsgroups: news.admin
Subject: Re: Yet another network tragedy (was Re: A Network Tragedy)
Message-ID: <35031@apple.Apple.COM>
Date: 26 Sep 89 18:47:11 GMT
References: <22469@cup.portal.com> <34991@apple.Apple.COM> <4971@omepd.UUCP>
Organization: Life is just a Fantasy novel played for keeps
Lines: 48

>|							        It's sad that
>| USENET is based so heavily on negative vibes and 'surviving' the idiots. If
>| anyone wants to know why I'm spending more and more time on CI$ and less and
>| less here....

>The headlines read:
>  "Chuq Leaves USENET... Imminent Death Of The Net Predicted."

No headlines. Despite what I am personally doing, USENET is far, far from
dead or even dying. The *worst* that can be claimed is that USENET's
interests and my own are growing down separate paths. That doesn't mean what
USENET is doing is good, bad or anything -- just that what I'm looking for
and what USENET is interested in aren't meshing as closely as they used to.

Which happens. It's easy to equate "I don't like" with "this is bad" -- many
people (even those who should know better) do it all the time. USENET isn't
being run for my benefit, and it hasn't for a long, long time. My attitude
is pretty simple. Use the parts I like, ignore the parts I don't, and try to
help out where I can while avoiding making things worse. I wish that
attitude were more prevalent on the networks, frankly.

And, to make matters even more interesting (sort of) a flame-war erupted on
CompuServe over the weekend that rivaled the nastiest cr*p I've ever seen
here on USENET. Which points out two basic facts of computer networks:

o Once a network reaches a given size, conflicts and flame fests are inevitable.
  USENET, Internet, CIS, GEnie, Delphi, Fidonet -- I've seen the same thing
  happen to each in almost identical ways. A small population is generally
  friendly and cooperative. It hits a certain critical mass, though, and
  it's likely to go *poof* over relatively trivial issues [and it generally
  *is* trivial issues rather than important ones...]. On the plus side, on a
  flamewar/population ratio, USENET seems to be better at avoiding things
  (that may sound counter-intuitive, but USENET has *much* larger user
  populations -- the other folks get just as nasty, just as often with many
  fewer people to fan the flames...)

o If you track flame-wars back to the source, you will generally find one or
 two real twits at the source. In the case of recurring flames, you'll
 usually find the same crew of recurring twits (On CIS, it was three, maybe
 four people making life miserable for the other few thousand...).

The problem, of course, is getting rid of those three or four people....

-- 

Chuq Von Rospach <+> Editor,OtherRealms <+> Member SFWA/ASFA
chuq@apple.com <+> CI$: 73317,635 <+> [This is myself speaking. I am not Appl
Segmentation Fault. Core dumped.