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From: buzzard@world.std.com (Sean T Barrett)
Subject: Re: School me (was: An unpopular question yada yada...)
Message-ID: <G70H15.K95@world.std.com>
Date: Thu, 11 Jan 2001 18:36:40 GMT
References: <92iceb$geu$1@nnrp1.deja.com> <Mw976.5491$Ad7.170311@sodalite.nbnet.nb.ca> <3A5D7EF0.AF3E38C8@qwest.net> <93kftj$2ov$1@nnrp1.deja.com>
Organization: The World Public Access UNIX, Brookline, MA
Lines: 61
Xref: news.duke.edu rec.games.int-fiction:60554

In article <93kftj$2ov$1@nnrp1.deja.com>,  <steve@hamsteak.com> wrote:
>2.  In order to get more people to read my original post, and therefore
>have more people possibly contact me with info on how to find the
>software I was looking for, I deliberately phrased my subject in a
>provocative way.  I'll admit that.  But is that a bad thing?  Doesn't
>everybody want to increase the chances that people will respond to
>their posts?

Not exactly. Usenet is a community endeavor. Selfishness is,
by and large, destroying Usenet; a few communities, such as
r*if, have managed to survive largely unscathed.

People who want the community to survive have the goal of
maximizing the benefit for everyone. To maximize the benefit
for everyone, you tailor your message to your audience, and
that means staying on-topic, by definition. [*]

So to launch into a hypothetical example:
Crossposting to five hundred newsgroups will get more people
to read your message, and probably increase the number of
responses you'll get; but it will simultaneously fill a
bunch of groups with off-topic posts, and as those off-topic
posts add up, the community in the newsgroups is destroyed.
People leave because the signal-to-noise ratio is too low;
new people who happen to join the group in the middle of
a hideous copyright thread decide 'this isn't what I'm interested
in participating in' and leave. (Groups are not destroyed
overnight, of course, but it adds up.)

So, yes, I'd say viewing Usenet as a system which you should
tweak to maximize your payoff in the short term is a bad thing,
since in the long term it destroys Usenet. Of course I have myself
used provocative subject lines, though for on-topic material.

Now, I'm not saying your original post was off-topic; I'm
just saying that your abstract justification for the provocation
is flawed. Personally, I think that if you're going to post
a request that for assistance in an action that is widely
regarded as immoral and illegal, acknowledging that the action
is widely immoral and illegal SHOULD be a pretty good way of
making it easy for everyone else to stay on topic and avoid
the obvious off-topic copyright thread; there's no point in
berating you for doing something illegal and immoral when
you tell us up front that you know we think it's illegal and
immoral.  I think it almost worked, too, until we got off
on the semantics of the term 'theft'.

And, by the way, debating what is an appropriate subject
for discussion isn't particularly on-topic either--or more
explicitly it's just as much noise from the POV of someone
who's new and just wants to talk about the stuff that IS
in the charter.  So I'm going to stop discussing this and
I encourage others to as well.

SeanB
[*] That almost every online community, once established, fails to stay
on-topic is known as Sjoberg's Law of Public Cliquishness. Mercifully, the
amount of it in r*if is minimal; we did not, for instance, see discussion
of the election here; we do get the occasional in-joke, but one can argue
that a certain level of banter is appropriate to create the feeling of a
human community.
