From: joe@sfbooks.com
In article ,
TK Sung wrote:
> As a frequent contributor in misc.invest.*, as well as being an ex usenet
> operator, I'd like to add my 2 cents.
I respect your opinions of the misc.invest.* traffic as better informed
than any I'd be likely to form now, and leave it to you and the other
readers of the related groups to sort out any differences. So I'm
just going to comment on two more general points.
> "Joe Bernstein" wrote in message
> news:bl2o64$nsi$1@reader2.panix.com...
> > That said, the
> > argument that the number of posts you're finding is not indicative,
> > precisely because without the group, the discussions aren't happening
> > as they should, is a key point. Centralising discussion is a perfectly
> > legitimate reason to create a group, as I should know, having helped
> > create soc.history.ancient for partly similar reasons.)
> If the need is not proven, it should go into alt.invest.* till it is
> proven.
I disagree, very strongly.
It's true that there are Big 8 groups that don't see much activity,
and there are others that have outlived their time. Certain parts
of namespace seem to be built to encourage obsolescence, even. But
*by and large*, groups that have passed the Big 8 process tend to
do at least reasonably well. And the picture of misc.invest.* that
I've gotten from this thread so far as I've read it suggests that
most groups in that area have done quite well indeed; so I see every
reason for optimism about misc.invest.bonds as long as two conditions
are met:
1) it gets enough votes;
2) enough of those come from people who actually plan on using the
group, not just from people who think "It's a good idea" or
"I want to help these people".
There has repeatedly been a tendency on news.groups for people to
argue that groups should only be created from a basis of proven
traffic, and in the absence of that, people should use alt.*
instead. I have never found this convincing. Fundamentally,
I don't think all topics are equal where Usenet is concerned.
Many are the subjects of interest by relatively polite and
orderly people, who will not take over an unrelated newsgroup so
as to talk about what they want to talk about. So I think that
while "If you build it, they will come" is a *really stupid* way
to plan a newsgroup's success (and if the proponent of this group
relies on it, the group may be a failure even if it passes its
vote), it *is* sometimes *true* as a description of probable
outcome.
Anyway. You say a topic without proven traffic should be tried
in alt.* before any presumptuous attempt to create a Big 8 group.
You seem to be under the misapprehension that alt.* is this Big
Inferior Place whose best and brightest actively want promotion
to the Big 8. It ain't so. I see *very* few proposals to promote
alt.* groups these days. The only one I can recall in the last
two or three *years* was the proposal to promote
alt.binaries.news-server-comparison (name from memory, may not be
correct) to a news.* group. *And that proposal got shot down
because nobody wanted the changes that would accompany the move.*
These days, propagation of at least some alt.* groups is *better*
than propagation of new Big 8 groups.
The creation of new Big 8 groups has slowed from a torrent in
1996 to a crawl - I think there were fewer than ten last year.
There are multiple reasons for this, but I think one *piece*
of the explanation is that a number of news.groups readers reacted
to the 1996 torrent by turning extremely harsh glares on all
proposals, basically insisting that the only thing that could
justify a proposal was existing Usenet traffic - mailing lists
were no longer seen as good enough - or even existing Big 8
traffic - these "traffic cops" had also noticed the decline in
attempts to move out of alt.*. I found some of their arguments
essentially equivalent to saying "You shouldn't try to create this
group, because it doesn't already exist, so you can't prove that
it would have the traffic it would have if it existed." I think
this unrelenting insistence that no proposal was worthy of success
is much of why, over time, we've found that no proposal is able
to *achieve* success, and alt.* has *completely* taken over as the
place where English-language newsgroups are created in response
to changes in the world. It's not clear to me why this particular
proponent chose to try dealing with the tortoise rather than with
the hare, but I oppose all attempts to insist on prior alt.* groups
as basically equivalent to saying that the Big 8 should no longer
create groups at all.
So basically, my opinion is that if alt.invest.bonds is created,
there will *never* be a misc.invest.bonds. And I claim that the
evidence from the last several years backs me up. Either show
me that my claim about evidence is false, or acknowledge that
what you're suggesting is that a fundamental part of misc.invest.*
topic space should be sent elsewhere.
> > But this *isn't a split proposal*.
> That begs the question why it isn't. One possibility is that bond
> discussions are already well served by existing subgroups that not
> many goes into misc.invest. Another is that misc.invest is clogged
> with spams, people are not using it to discuss bonds. If former,
> misc.invest.bonds is not needed. If latter, well, it's entirely
> different problem, and alt.invest.bonds may prove the need.
A proposal may not-be-a-split-proposal because it proposes to move
an alt.* group (though not lately) or a mailing list (also
increasingly uncommon).
A proposal may not-be-a-split-proposal because it fills a gaping hole
in Usenet namespace; I refer, again, to sci.geo.cartography.
A proposal may not-be-a-split-proposal because it addresses a
different *kind* of discussion of the topic from what is already
on Usenet. (The classic example is proposing a moderated group,
but in a way, this proposal is an example of a different form of
the same thing.)
There are other reasons why a proposal may not-be-a-split-proposal,
for example if it's a proposal to remove a group, but those are the
ones that come to my mind, anyway, as conceivably relevant in this
situation. My main point in this string of comments is simply to
insist that splits are not the only good or acceptable reason to
create groups. I do realise that is somewhat orthogonal from your
actual point in the above quote.
Joe Bernstein
--
Joe Bernstein, writer joe@sfbooks.com
At this address,
personal e-mail is welcome, though unsolicited bulk e-mail is unwelcome.
--- SoupGate-Win32 v1.05
* Origin: you cannot sedate... all the things you hate (1:229/2)
|
