From: jdawson@cs.utexas.edu (John Dawson)
Newsgroups: news.misc,alt.config,alt.drugs,alt.postmodern,alt.angst
Subject: Re: Newsgroup Vandalism
Date: 13 Apr 1992 02:34:17 -0500
Organization: None; my apartment is a big damn mess
NNTP-Posting-Host: langtry.cs.utexas.edu

gcf@panix.com (Gordon Fitch) writes:
> I thought it would be interesting to ask why alt.postmodern and
> certain other groups are vandalized by having hundreds of
> "cascade" articles posted in them and others -- like, say,
> comp.protocols.tcp-ip -- are not.  Effacing a newsgroup is a
> political act; the effacers deprive others of the use of the
> newsgroup, in effect taking power over them in that particular
> area.  Evidently some newsgroups, or rather, the people who want
> to use them, have valid rights, and others don't.

Effacing a newsgroup is

    A)  not necessarily a political act;

    B)  not necessarily intentional;

    C)  in the mind of the newsgroup reader.

I doubt that more than a small fraction of those people who join
together to perpetuate the cascade plague are deliberately trying
to be annoying.  (Though all of them are certainly succeeding.)
I tend to think that people who cascade do so because they simply
like cascading, for whatever incomprehensible reason, and don't
consider or don't care how much annoyance their cascading causes
the thousands of readers out there.

I will grant you that SOME people are almost assuredly doing it
to be "saboteurs"; I could imagine myself, for example, reading
some newsgroup like alt.jesus.is.life or somesuch, and saying to
myself, "This is the most worthless newsgroup I've ever encount-
ered; these people are boneheads.  Their posts are totally il-
logical," and cascading.  This would indeed be a political act,
although I'd say a boneheaded one.  But I don't this is what's
going on in alt.angst, and I don't think that is generally the
source of cascading in other newsgroups either.

As for why certain newsgroups get cascaded, and others don't:
Certain newsgroups aren't read by as many people as others, and
some newsgroups just aren't light reading.  Most people aren't
going to waste their timee reading comp.protocols.tcp-ip because
the discussions are serious and technical.  (I assume, that is.
I don't read this one myself ...)

In some newsgroups, cascading is "more appropriate" than in
others.  (I'd be happier of the only newsgroup that had cascades
were alt.dev.null, but that's just me.)  Consider who is reading
alt.angst, and the nature of the postings.  The people who are
probably interested enough in alt.angst to read it are people
themselves posessed of angst; they're going to be demented weirdos
with peculiar ideas about reality and humor, just like me.  The
posts in this group are comedic (sometimes in the classic Greek
sense of the term, even).  Things just aren't that serious here.

So basically, I don't think that cascading is generally a del-
iberate "effacing" of a newsgroup.  Somebody a couple of posts
back (sorry, I don't feel up to the task of fishing for who it
was) said it nicely:  there is no big Orwellian plot here.  There
is simply a lack of courtesy and etiquette.

One of the things that *I* consider to efface the value of a
newsgroup is poor quoting.  People quote other people and don't
trim down what they're quoting; they leave in multi-line signatures
and dozens of lines of unrelated quote material.  They let line
lengths flow way past 80 columns and make things messy and hard
to read.  I consider this to be much worse than cascading.  Yet
I'd have to be certifiably paranoid to believe that messy quoting
is a subtle politcal act designed to gum up newsreading across the
world.  I haven't done any studies on this, but I suspect you'd
find newsgroups where people tend to quote more neatly than in
other newsgroups, and the ones where they quote more neatly would
be the ones where you had more technically competent newsreaders.
People that are very technically competent tend to have much bet-
ter senses of netiquette than non-technical ones, so they probably
have better quoting practices.  (This is probably due to the fact
that they can competently operate some kind of text editor and
edit the message before they post, as much as it is to a good
sense of netiquette.)

-- 
jdawson@ccwf.cc.utexas.edu (John Dawson)
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