Newsgroups: rec.arts.int-fiction
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From: buzzard@TheWorld.com (Sean T Barrett)
Subject: Re: Time for rec.arts.int-fiction.moderated?
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Date: Fri, 22 Feb 2002 05:26:50 GMT
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In article <a54hf2$ich$1@news.fsf.net>, Adam Thornton <adam@fsf.net> wrote:
>If enough people leave such that the newsgroups become no fun to
>read anymore because the people I like and respect are mostly gone or
>the noise-to-signal is too high, I'll leave too.  It happened with
>alt.tasteless, it happened with alt.folklore.computers, it happened with
>alt.sysadmin.recovery.  I don't lose sleep over it.

r.a.i-f and r.g.i-f are the only non-moderated newsgroups
in my .newsrc anymore [*]. So I'm making a stand.

The community thing particularly peeves me. I'm on three muds,
a semi-public IRC channel channel, and two small bulletin
board systems. All of those things work much better for
getting a reasonable sense of community; on the bbs's in
particular, there are subboards for random chitchat and
and subboards for specific topics. Similarly on one of the
muds which has IRC-like channels.

The cool thing about this is that you can pick and choose
what you want to read/write about, but it's all still within
one single community. So if you start to go off-topic, you
take it to another board/channel.

Usenet lacks this facility--you can't really take an off-topic
thread to email when there are eight participants (you could,
but I've never seen it happen)--and you can't take it to a
more appropriate newsgroup because it's an entirely different
community.

So I'd really rather people stopped staking out
discussion-groups-for-a-single-topic as a community chat
forum where off-topic threads (and I mean 'which text editor
is the best for programming' here) are acceptable; because
there are plenty of other, *better* internet media for building
that kind of community, and Usenet is unique in its now
rarely-exploited facility to sustain topic-specific discussion
across a huge, global range of users. Every off-topic thread
drives away people with useful info to contribute to the topic
in return for becoming yet another generic community.

Also, I'm going to shut up about this soon, because it doesn't
look like enough people care.

SeanB
[*] Technically false; talk.bizarre is still in my .newsrc,
but I haven't read any articles from it in six months.
