From: anderson@macc.wisc.edu (Jess Anderson)
Subject: Delittering
Organization: Madison Academic Computing Center, UW-Madison
Date: Sat, 26 Sep 92 15:25:41 GMT


During the six years I've been reading soc.motss, there have
been periodic calls to try to do something about (a) the
increasing volume, (b) the perception of some that others
are uncivil, unkind, or otherwise unsmurfully, and (c) the
incursion of asocial or antisocial people.  Closely
associated with (c), especially, is (d), spurious
cross-posting.

Bob Donahue, Arnold Zwicky, and I'm sure others have lately
been talking about this, and I have some thoughts too.  I
think these problems are tractable in varying degrees, in
just the opposite order.  

I.

I don't think anything can be done about the volume, which
has increased by a factor of about 20.  Rather than
overestimating the number of readers (80,000 just now), I
think it likely the arbitron process underestimates it
significantly.  

Given the many uncertainties in such estimates and the
extremely rapid expansion of networks and gateways between
them, the situation is simply exploding.  I'm certain it
will continue to; there are about 850,000 computers on the
Internet these days (venus is the most popular hostname, by
the way, and earth is *way* down the list), and there are
many thousands more uucp connections, gatewayed mailing
lists, service bureaus, and god knows what-all.

The total traffic has been doubling in under a year for some
years now.  The situation is poised to improve (or
deteriorate, depending on your point of view) dramatically,
because the penetration of networking into the commercial,
academic, and private sectors is really still in its
infancy.

Something similar is happening with book, magazine, and
music publication.  In the heyday of the vinyl long-playing
record, it was a busy month if there were 30 new titles from
all sources.  New titles on CD are appearing now at the rate
of 500 a month.  Information resources, and access to them,
are burgeoning almost unbelievably.

Not being able to keep up is endemic to the situation and
the forces involved are virtually irresistible.  Obviously,
what must give in this situation is the consumer, here, the
reader.  Being unable to follow every thread, to know what's
been said and who has said it, is now a structural matter.
And changes in the hierarchy of newsgroups can solve only
some of the problems, while creating new problems of their
own.

I think all of this is actually good, though I find some of
it just as bewildering as anyone else would.  Some of the
answer is tools -- newsreaders, visual display systems, etc.
But the main thing, I think, is the choices and adjustments
each of us must necessarily make.  I used to read everything
in soc.motss; today I read less than half.  

I don't read anything involving Clayton Cramer, Phil
Ronzone, or Bob Sarver.  I don't mind nonsense, contributing
as I do a share of my own; but life's too short for *their*
kind of nonsense.  Once in a while I scan their stuff
quickly, looking for pearls of stupidity to decorate my
quotes file.  I don't ordinarily read anything cross-posted
(other than possibly to soc.bi), unless the topic has
somehow caught my fancy.  And so forth.

The point here is not that what *I* do is good, bad, or
indifferent, but that a person just about *has* to do
something.  Going for a swim does not mean crossing the
ocean.

II.

There are many styles and styles within styles.  I'm
loquacious; Henry Mensch is terse.  Some people are "nice,"
others pugnacious (it's obvious which I prefer).  Some
people hate puns; others can't resist any form of word-play.
Some people want logical connectedness; others mistrust
that.  Some people want respite from the cruelty and
stupidness of oppression; others spoil for the fight (the
relevance of this last to cross-posting is obvious).

Some people want badly to be understood clearly; others are
venting or self-expressing.  Some want to talk; others, to
be heard.  Some are very wrapped up in their own problems
but want others to know about it; others regard such
self-revelations with great suspicion.  Some people have a
sense of humor about themselves; others are far too insecure
for any kind of joking not to "hurt" them.  Some people will
consider criticism useful; others will recoil defensively.

And we haven't even gotten into politics yet.  Like the
volume problem, the enormous range and heterogeneity of
styles is not going away any time soon.  Rather than lament
(well, more than very briefly), it seems to me to make sense
to define this as a virtue, an enrichment, an opportunity to
learn, be amazed, or simply to wonder how people can be
"like *that*."  To the extent there's a remedy (or even that
"remedy" is a relevant concept), I think it's simply a
matter of choosing what you like and ignoring what you don't
like.  Some people put cream in their coffee, or still more
amazingly, sugar.  Strikes *me* as preposterous, but there
you have it.  For all I know, someone out there likes both
cream and sugar, and furthermore drinks it from a Melmac
cup.  Eeeuuuww, total hurlment, like.

III.

The asocial and antisocial types are all instances of
deformed egos; they feed on attention, as many have
observed.  Taking for instance Melmac (please!), it makes no
difference whether it's good or bad, as long as it's *some*.
As Bobby mentioned yesterday, these things pass, usually
(like Steven Heath or Admiral Dave), to be completely
forgotten.

The newsgroup is something more like a city now than like a
large auditorium or party.  Some of the inhabitants are
incredibly dense, some are barbarians or bumpkins, some are
obsessive neurotics, and so forth.  It all just comes with
the turf.  Here as elsewhere it seems inescapable, so it
makes little sense to lose a lot of sleep over it.

The truly pitiful and painfully present worst cases (Cramer,
the Phools, and Sarver), plus the lesser annoyances (lately
Melmac and Pinkie), could, if people made up their minds to
it, simply be starved out.  They consume enormous energy
resources and add nothing; not feeding them (otherwise: not
paying them off in the coin they most value, attention),
would, as the generals say, attrit them.

Well, there are obvious problems with this, to be sure, but
most of them are pseudo-issues, really.  It has nothing to
do, nothing at all, with suppressing viewpoints or stifling
discussions, still less with tolerance or freedom of speech.
And if something can be less than that, it has still less to
do with the lively interplay of ideas, even far-out or
hare-brained ideas.  These people have a track record, and a
mighty dismal one it is; there's nothing new to be
discovered there, they were born as fossilized grey matter.
To use Mark Morrissey's usenet.age concept, they are
net.rocks.  As such, they're heavy yet common as (you guessed
it) dirt.  Real rocks are more interesting.

There is a solution to them, but since they're such enduring
rocks, it takes fortitude to move them.  That fortitude
consists of resisting any and all urges to feed their
habits.  Thing is, we all have hot buttons and some spark of
sympathy for such creatures.  They know where the hot
buttons are, quite commonly, and they have spent a lifetime
practicing being pitiful, so they have it pretty much down.
Mark Ethan Smith (before the time of most here present)
could play upon these things as Ravi Shankar upon the sarod;
next to her, Cramer is crude, Sarver is sad, and Melmac is
just so much plastic.  Pinkie is, well, pink.

As has just been evidenced, I have as hard a time as anyone
passing up the obvious skewer for the obviously skewerable.
Hardly the perfect paradigm, I can suggest nothing other
than self-denial.  It's a dirty job, but if everyone did it,
the place would be cleaned up in no time.

Which brings me to

IV.

Bobby's main thrust has been redirection to appropriate
newsgroups (actually a generous idea, if you think about
it).  This ties in with cross-posting, which I personally
regard as the most remediable of all these problems.

Some of us have software limitations in this regard, though
the overwhelming majority do not.  Some commercial services,
for good reasons, do not allow editing of headers; they've
been burned too many times by other forms of miscreants.

I'm not too sure of all the variations, but I suspect that
most of these software-limited members of the cohort have
some facility for downloading an article, editing it, and
submitting it as a new original.  I'd much rather lose the
threading (the References: line) than have so much needless
cross-posting.

Another factor is that in an earlier time, the news.lists
FAQs specifically mentioned (still do, I think) that
cross-posting was preferable to submitting the same
article to more than one group.  But times have changed,
and this desideratum does not take the problem we have
in soc.motss with cross-posting into account.

Further, even where you have adequate control, you have
to remember to use it.  I responded by F-key yesterday
to something without paying attention to the Newsgroups:
line and inadvertently cross-posted.  Vigilance, obviously,
is called for.

Cross-posting is the main technique Cramer uses to hook
people in soc.motss, usually involving the high-noise talk*
and *politics* groups.  These things very quickly cascade,
and there's a flood of complete ninnies on hand in short
order.

The bottom line is: don't do it.

-- 
Jess Anderson <> Madison Academic Computing Center <> University of Wisconsin
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