From: anderson@macc.wisc.edu (Jess Anderson)
Subject: Re: Soc.Motss.*
Organization: Madison Academic Computing Center, UW-Madison
Date: Fri, 18 Dec 92 03:29:18 GMT


In article <1got3bINNo9j@alice.cs.purdue.edu>
berninge@cs.purdue.edu (James Berninger) writes:

>In
>particular, the volume alone has turned off a lot of people
>-- people who have Net access, and who would enjoy this
>group, but don't read it because they have better things to
>do than page through 200+ articles every day.

There are ways to get through more easily and more quickly.
Those ways are not available to everyone, granted, and some
number of people have the means without knowing it or
knowing how to use it.  There are problems there that
soc.motss as a group could address if it cared to.

But there are many other high-volume groups on the net, and
people do manage.  Noting that you're in general in favor of
a split, splitting offers additional options.  In general it
does some good and it does almost no harm; on that basis
alone it seems worth considering.

However, you've also pointed to some other problems that
exist and need to be addressed.

>Not enough of the articles in soc.motss have the same
>subject, and not enough posters use the "keywords" line, so
>KILL files become almost as time-consuming as reading all of
>the articles anyway.

This doesn't make sense; the kill-file process goes probably
at least two orders of magnitude faster than reading.

As for keywords, most news-readers have a fairly full
complement of pattern-matching commands in their repertory
so that you can find almost anything you want.  Here again
there's a knowledge and familiarity issue to be addressed,
however.  Most people put absolutely idiotic things in the
keywords field, if they put anything.

>True, those of us who read nearly every article anyway would
>be reading every article in all of the various subgroups,
>but those of us who read only the articles that interest us
>and KILL the remaining 95% would greatly benefit from
>separate groups.

This is inconsistent.  If you read everything anyway, your
argument is without foundation.

In the next series of points, what you're chiefly saying is
that it doesn't work *your* favorite way.  Well, OK, but if
it did work entirely your way, it would not be working some
other persons's way.  Basically, you're asking others
to give up their preferences, just because they don't happen
to interest you.

>A fair amount of the volume of this group is taken up by
>people flaming each other -- and I use the word "flame" in
>the argumentative sense as well as the queeny sense -- to
>the point that the topic is not really motss-relevent
>anymore.

True, it happens.  But not everything that seems to one
person a flame is a flame to the participants; rather, they
are energetically and passionately arguing their points.

>When the only motss-relevence of a certain thread happens to
>be that the poster(s) is homosexual, that's when the thread
>has lost my interest (if it hasn't already).

The same *kind* of choice (though of course a different one)
is made by every person who reads.  People are interested in
what *they* are interested in.  You seem not very ready to
grant that others have personal styles that differ from
yours.

>How many postings have gone into my KILL file because they
>said little more then "This guy I saw on TV is *SO* hot!",
>only to be followed up by others who edit the subject
>line...

Editing the subject line is the *right* thing to do when one
changes the subject, of course.  By far the greater problem
is people who change the subject of their remarks but leave
the Subject: line set to whatever it was.  Most of these are
probably either oversights or the inability or unfamiliarity
on how to edit.  This again is one of our training problems.

>And while I'm griping about tentative soc.motss subgroups,
>how about one for HIV/AIDS discussion and memorials?

I think that's an excellent suggestion.

>Some of us don't know who this "Rob Bernardo" person was,
>and, no offense, don't care.  I nearly doubled the size of
>my KILL file within two days after he died because of
>various people posting the "news" (all under different
>subject lines), or giving their own testimonials.

Let's say there's a person you love very much (I hope there
*is* such a person in your life).  Let us suppose that
this person dies, unexpectedly, unaccountably.  Let's also say
this death touches many other people too, several dozen of
them, very deeply.

Now what would you think if four months and four days later,
I come out of nowhere and tell you, the others, and the
world in general that the death you agonized so much over,
and still do, was to me a giant pain in the butt, no
offense?

I hope you can see how tasteless, how shockingly
insensitive, how blindly and arrogantly offensive such a
remark would be.

Sir, I was and am very deeply offended by what you have
said.

-- 
[Jess Anderson <> Madison Academic Computing Center <> University of Wisconsin]
[Internet: anderson@macc.wisc.edu <-best, UUCP:{}!uwvax!macc.wisc.edu!anderson]
[Room 3130 <> 1210 West Dayton Street / Madison WI 53706 <> Phone 608/262-5888]
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Newsgroups: soc.motss