🚀 go-pugleaf

hhuang@athena.mit.edu (Han-Young Huang) writes:
>In article <1993Jan18.204348.28242@shearson.com> pmetzger@snark.shearson.com (Perry E. Metzger) writes:
>>I don't think people want a newsgroup because they prefer the
>>semi-private nature of the mailing list. The S to N ratio, although
>>fairly low, is extremely high compared to most Usenet newsgroups. In
>>any case, this question gets rehashed every few months and the market
>>almost always seems to come up with the same answer.

>All I'm saying is have a more public place for extropians, such as two
>mutually gated newsgroups (alt.extropians, bit.listserv.xtropy-l).
>But I'm a newbie, so instruct me where I'm mistaken.  Perhaps attempts
>have been tried, and they have always been given the thumbs down?

You are free to do what you like, but people tried
bit.listserv.xtropy-l. Everyone on the mailing list knew about it;
people tried to start it up because some of them didn't like the
environment on the normal mailing list. The claim that the name being
obscure killed it seems specious -- few people on the whole planet
other than the ones on the list have any idea what an extropian is and
an "alt.extropians" is very unlikely to be thought of as "less
obscure" -- virtually the entire "extropian community" knew about the
new forum, and contrary to what you may think bit. groups are about as
well distributed as most alt. groups -- obscurity was not the problem.

People assume that newsgroups always attract traffic -- but thats
largely because they don't pay attention to the ones that do not,
which are the vast bulk of them, which get little or no traffic at
all.  The result of the "experiment" was that no one from the normal
mailing list really posted much on the newsgroup and it basically
died.  I think that overall the current setup works fairly well. If
you don't like it, feel free to try something else -- this isn't a
democracy. However, as I've said, I doubt that there would be any
point to it.

--
Perry Metzger		pmetzger@shearson.com
--
Laissez faire, laissez passer. Le monde va de lui meme.