Lionel  wrote: 
 >Kibo informs me that kaih=9GjyoD8mw-B@khms.westfalen.de (Kai Henningsen) 
 >stated that: 
  
 >>You seem to be under the mistaken impression that this is about rights of 
 >>posters and/or lurkers. 
 >> 
 >>Instead, it is about people paying for Usenet servers and for bandwidth to 
 >>connect them. 
 >> 
 >>It seems they like to have group lists informed by market research: and 
 >>market research is what this voting is all about. 
 >> 
 >>And lurkers are, of course, important there, because they are customers of 
 >>those server owners. Posters are less important, actually - there are 
 >>probably orders of magnitude fewer than lurkers, they don't pay any more, 
 >>and in fact they produce all this traffic that must be paid. 
  
 >This is possidly the the saddest, most cynical rationale for the 
 >existance of Usenet that I have ever heard. If that is actually an 
 >accurate description of the situation, those operators deserve to be in 
 >charge of a zero-content Usenet that no longer contains anything but 
 >crossposted cascades & flamage. 
  
 Well, the commercial perspective may be a bit harsh, but the underlying 
 rationale is right.  By far, the most numerous users of usenet servers 
 are readers and lurkers.  Once upon a time, before usenet was provided 
 by commercial entities, the value of a group on a particular server 
 was judged more by how many people wanted to read it.  An admin would 
 add it if enough of his users asked for it, and, as I said, by far, 
 most of these users were readers and lurkers.  This process of 
 soliciting a group to an admin has since been substituted in the Big-8 
 by the current process: it remains as a means for soliciting groups 
 to admins on a global scale.  However, it should not be mistaken for 
 a process that supercedes individual server criteria or requirements, 
 no matter how automated the response is to the results.  Usenet is 
 still a "their server, their rules" universe.  And under those 
 conditions, what services the users of each server want matters 
 more to those servers than how users choose to use those services. 
 That means lurkers and readers are actually have more conceptual 
 value by usenet (admins) than posters.  And the current process' 
 policy reflects that value admins place on lurkers and readers. 
  
 ru 
  
 -- 
 My standard proposals rant: 
 Quality, usefulness, merit, or non-newsgroups popularity of a topic 
 is more or less irrelevant in creating a new Big-8 newsgroup. 
 Usenet popularity is the primary consideration. 
  
 --- SoupGate-Win32 v1.05 
  * Origin: you cannot sedate... all the things you hate (1:229/2)