From: farthing@leland.Stanford.EDU (ljf)
Subject: Re: soc.feminism editorial policy (was Re: I can't believe it!)
Organization: DSG, Stanford University, CA 94305, USA
Date: Mon, 11 Jan 93 02:35:15 GMT

In article <1993Jan8.134127.27585@newstand.syr.edu> greeny@top.cis.syr.edu (J. S. Greenfield) writes:
>I'd be interested in hearing from people who think that moderation offers
>a benefit for a newsgroup like soc.feminism, just what benefits they see,
>and whether they believe that those benefits cannot be achieved by other,
>less restrictive, means (for example, via kill files).

I read both soc.feminism and alt.feminism and reading alt.feminism has
reinforced my belief in the benefits of moderation.

IMO, a newsgroup has a nature, a certain flavor.  You enter some
newsgroups knowing that nearly every poster is confrontational and you
behave accordingly.  I know that I'm much more aggressive in such
newsgroups.  Other newsgroups are calmer, less hostile, where you can
muse about a problem or agree to disagree with other posters.

You've mentioned killfiles as a means to moderate a newsgroup.  As the
proud (ahem) holder of a huge killfile for alt.feminism, I'll say that
killfiles have zilch effect on the nature of a newsgroup.  My killfile
means that *I* don't have to read the posts of people I find stupid, or
hateful, or obnoxious.  My killfile has no effect on the nature of
alt.feminism, which means that we can have numerous posts addressing
(what I think is) the homophobic lesbian-bashing by Scheaffer.  I
don't have to read him, but his posts and the followups have a
distinct effect on the nature of the newsgroups (making it more
confrontational and nasty, imo).

The only way a killfile would work to effect a change in the nature or
flavor of a newsgroup is for a group of posters to agree to put
certain people in their killfiles (a shunning of certain posters).  I
think you'd probably dislike this.

I think the benefits of the moderation of soc.feminism are shown by
comparing it to alt.feminism.  Soc.feminism has much less flaming and
more detailed articles than the articles in alt.feminism.  Most
posters on soc.feminism appear to have a certain amount of good will
toward each other, getting angry with each other, but willing to
refrain from flaming (most of the time) and try to understand what the
other person is saying.  Many of the posts in alt.feminism appear to
be more of the nature of "I hate feminists, why don't like they like
men anyway."  

*shrug*  I've only had one rejected article to soc.feminism which
seemed unreasonable to me (a post appeared under my account and I
hadn't written the post and wanted to say that in soc.feminism, but
was refused).  Most of the posts I've seen in other newsgroups which
were rejected by the mods of soc.feminism seemed flamey enough to be
rejected for excessive flaming, imo.  I've seen a couple of posts that
appeared to be rejected for no good reason.

I'm also curious as to why you're addressing the moderation status of
soc.feminism.  (Perhaps you've mentioned this in an earlier post, but
I missed it.)  Are you trying to change the moderation status?  If so,
why, especially now that alt.feminism exists?

Newsgroups: alt.censorship,news.admin.policy