100 Snoozenet archive names, descriptions, Makefiles, and so on. Alt.sources has become a clone of the moderated groups it sought to bypass. Meanwhile, alt.aquaria and alt.clearing.aquaria have given more forums for aquar- ium-owners to congregate. This Information Highway Needs Information Except for a few jabs at Unix, we’ve recited history without any real criti- cisms of Unix. Why have we been so kind? Because, fundamentally, Usenet is not about technology, but about sociology. Even if Unix gave users better technology for conducting international discussions, the result would be the same: A resounding confirmation of Sturgeon’s Law, which states that 90% percent of any field is crap. A necessary but, unfortunately, not sufficient condition for a decent signal- to-noise ratio in a newsgroup is a moderator who screens messages. With- out this simple condition, the anonymity of the net reduces otherwise ratio- nal beings (well, at least, computer literate beings) into six-year olds whose apogee of discourse is “Am not, Are so, Am not, Are so....” The demographics of computer literacy and, more importantly, Usenet access, are responsible for much of the lossage. Most of the posters are male science and engineering undergraduates who rarely have the knowl- edge or maturity to conduct a public conversation. (It turns out that com- paratively few women post to the Usenet those who do are instantly bombarded with thousands of “friendly” notes from sex-starved net surfers hoping to score a new friend.) They also have far too much time on their hands. Newsgroups with large amounts of noise rarely keep those subscribers who can constructively add to the value of the newsgroup. The result is a polarization of newsgroups: those with low traffic and high content, and those with high traffic and low content. The polarization is sometimes a creeping force, bringing all discussion down to the lowest common denominator. As the quality newsgroups get noticed, more people join— first as readers, then as posters. Without a moderator or a clearly stated and narrow charter such as many of the non-alt newsgroups have, the value of the messages inevitably drops. After a few flame fests, the new group is as bad as the old. Usenet parodies itself. The original members of the new group either go off to create yet another group or they create a mailing list. Unless they take special care to

rn, trn: You Get What You Pay for 101 keep the list private (e.g., by not putting it on the list-of-lists), the list will soon grow and cross the threshold where it makes sense to become a news- group, and the vicious circle repeats itself. rn, trn: You Get What You Pay for Like almost all of the Usenet software, the programs that people use to read (and post) news are available as freely redistributable source code. This policy is largely a matter of self-preservation on the part of the authors: • It’s much easier to let other people fix the bugs and port the code you can even turn the reason around on its head and explain why this is a virtue of giving out the source. • Unix isn’t standard the poor author doesn’t stand a chance in hell of being able to write code that will “just work” on all modern Unices. • Even if you got a single set of sources that worked everywhere, dif- ferent Unix C compilers and libraries would ensure that compiled files won’t work anywhere but the machine where they were built. The early versions of Usenet software came with simple programs to read articles. These programs, called readnews and rna, were so simplistic that they don’t bear further discussion. The most popular newsreader may be rn, written by Larry Wall. rn’s doc- umentation claimed that “even if it’s not faster, it feels like it is.” rn shifted the paradigm of newsreader by introducing killfiles. Each time rn reads a newsgroup, it also reads the killfile that you created for that group (if it existed) that contains lines with patterns and actions to take. The patterns are regular expressions. (Of course, they’re sort of similar to shell patterns, and, unfortunately, visible inspection can’t distinguish between the two.) Killfiles let readers create their own mini-islands of Usenet within the bab- bling whole. For example, if someone wanted to read only announcements but not replies, they could put “/Re:.*/” in the killfile. This could cause problems if rn wasn’t careful about “Tricky” subjects. Date: Thu, 09 Jan 1992 01:14:34 PST From: Mark Lottor mkl@nw.com To: UNIX-HATERS Subject: rn kill