From: irilyth@fenris.claremont.edu (Josh Smith)
Newsgroups: news.groups,news.admin.policy
Subject: Discussion: Rewriting the newsgroup creation rules--drastically
Date: 17 Nov 92 00:03:30 GMT
Organization: HMC Academic Computing Services
Originator: irilyth@fenris

For those who joined this discussion late, I should note that this thread is
NOT related to my campaign to revise the new user docs for Usenet. This
thread is based on a suggest by Aftab Ahmad, which I quote below.

In a prior article, Aftab Ahmad (aftab@nsisrv.gsfc.nasa.gov) writes:
> Now here is my suggestion: the administration may make a quota about how
> many groups it wants to create each "term".  The groups should be created
> based only on the readership and not on the opposition. Software can be
> written to monitor which group is surviving and which not. Those who do
> not survive should be simply taken out. 

A few problems:

1) There is no "administration". Despite Dave Hayes's comments to the
contrary elsewhere, there is not even a conspiracy of powerful news admins,
secretly controlling everything from behind the scenes. Usenet is anarchy. I
suspect others may say this more harshly, but this is an important point:
there is no one in charge, who can take ultimate responsibility for what
groups are created and which are eliminated on a net-wide basis.

2) I'm not convinced that your proposal addresses the real problem, which is
that "spoilers" can have ill effects on Usenet. Under the current system, a
bunch of spoilers can, for whatever reason, shoot down an otherwise popular
vote. Their motivations may be religious, political, personal, or simply
spiteful, but the fact remains that as things stand now, a determined group
of people can ruin an otherwise good idea.

The problem is, under your proposed system, this could still happen. If only
ten groups were to be created this month, a bunch of spoilers could get
together to propose clearly useless groups, in order to prevent useful
groups from being proposed. To use the Ahmadiyaa example, a group calling
itself the No Ahmadis Coalition could propose soc.religion.no-ahmadis,
talk.politics.no-ahmadis, rec.crafts.no-ahmadis, misc.health.no-ahmadis,
sci.med.no-ahmadis, news.announce.no-ahmadis, and comp.unix.no-ahmadis. If
enough of them were vocal enough about wanting these groups created, they
might all meet the "readership" criteria, and thus might all pass, leaving
only three slots remaining for other groups. Even if the clever No Ahmadis
Coalition couldn't come up with another three groups to propose, the Ahmadi
group would still be competing with other valuable proposals for only three
slots, instead of ten, as a result of these spoilers' activities.

Now, perhaps one would say "But the administration would surely see through
such a thin ploy, and not allow those groups to pass." We're right back to
problem 1) : there is no administration. Usenet is a loose syndicate of
sites, who have generally agreed to work together to improve communication,
but none are willing to relinquish autonomy in exchange for central control.
Whether this is a good thing or not is open to debate (I'll argue that it
is--that central planning is subject to more abuse than anarchy), but the
fact remains that there is no one in charge.

That means that any sufficiently large and vocal group can have a fairly
significant impact on the net. As long as the decisions are made by some
sort of voting procedure, a group with sufficiently many members to
influence the vote can, well, influence the vote. This, like it or not, is a
consequence of our semi-democratic anarchy. And, I suspect that an attempt
to change the political nature of Usenet will be met with a lot of
resistance, though you're certainly free to propose.

3) I'm not going to address whether your proposal is a particularly good
idea or not. I think that as long as decisions are made in a vaguely
democratic way, the danger of a vocal group dominating the process will
remain, and that the only solution to this is one which radically alters the
nature of the process itself. When you open the decision-making to anyone
who can write, you run the risk that more of those people will be spoilers
than sensible; it's just a consequence of the nature of the Net.

Comments, opposing views, etc welcomed as usual.
-- 
Josh Smith, User Support Coordinator  ::  irilyth@fenris.claremont.edu
Harvey Mudd College, Claremont CA     ::  consult(std-disclaimer.pl).
"Dad always thought laughter was the best medicine, which I guess is why
several of us died of tuberculosis." -Jack Handey, Deep Thoughts
Newsgroups: news.groups