On community
Russ Allbery
why I'm posting it to a group I'm not sure anyone is still reading.
I just filed into my mail archive a really nice and heart-felt note I
received from someone, out of the blue, thanking me for some of the things
that I've done (mostly with free software). On a whim, I started reading
some of the other things that I've filed away over the years. Then I
started thinking about the message I received, not so much what he said
but the nature of the communication, the context in which it was sent and
received.
Someone (I don't even remember who) a long time back told me to save all
the messages I was sent expressing gratitude, just to have them to read
over when I'm feeling down. So I have a small collection, in a few
different topics, going back to the late 1990s, and I've just finished
re-reading them all. The more recent messages are mostly from random
different people, people who have found some software package useful or
some response helpful, or who liked some bit of writing. Those make me
feel good in a pleasant sort of way, like I accomplished something.
Then I go back a bit farther, back to the 2001 era or earlier, and there
are these messages from people who I just respect more than I can say,
people who I remember being there, creating the communities that I cared
greatly about, saying they were impressed by something I wrote, some
discussion I helped. And I read those messages, and this sense of
context, this sense of community comes flooding back, and I'm sitting here
staring at the screen and feeling the echo of that original feeling.
"This is a message from *David R. Henry* complimenting me on my writing.
*Steph* thought that was a great post. *Wednesday* put something I wrote
in her sig."
And I read through some of those messages, and I see people wishing me
well in the middle of huge flamewars about net-abuse, and I see people
pulling together to try to preach the religion of a newsgroup for any
topic people want to talk about, and I remember responding to Bloxy's in
blank verse.
And then I realize that I'm sitting here with tears in my eyes and I'm
feeling this overwhelming sense of wistfulness and loss, and part of me is
going "isn't this interesting -- where is this coming from?" and part of
me is going "woah, what just happened?"
Why am I sitting here feeling like something that was incredibly important
to me slipped out the back door of my life, and I'm not even sure when it
happened?
Why are the messages that come with all of that emotion, all of that sense
of community and support and comraderie, three or four or five years old
or more? Why are the messages that that made me scared to post because
they were so raw, the messages where I remember vividly how I felt when I
wrote them, responses to Dave Hayes, or reactions to news.groups stuff
that no one even remembers any more, or replies to people who I've lost
track of completely? Did I just stop doing the things I used to do? Why
does it feel different?
Because it does feel different to me. Yesterday, I would have argued that
it didn't, but I just finished looking at the geologic strata of my
on-line presence, and I would have been wrong.
I've strongly disagreed with the idea that Usenet is dying. I still do, I
think. I think things ebb and flow and shift around, but up until now I
haven't really thought about how my interaction with Usenet has changed,
whether Usenet has died a little *for me*. But I'm sitting here, trying
to capture how I feel about newsgroups and the communities in them, how I
feel when I post, what threads I participate in, and... there's That
Hierarchy, there's a sense of attachment to the technology and to a bunch
of technical newsgroups, and there's some combination of dogged
persistance and obligation attached to news.groups. But... friends,
connections, common causes, play, passion for a cause... that all used to
be there, that's all in those old messages, and where did that all go?
Did I change, did it change, what happened?
I remember the stress too. I remember getting so angry I couldn't see
straight, I remember losing hours to trying to salvage some thread that I
started with some idiotic half-baked comment, I remembered seriously
burning out a few times on trying to get through to people. And then
every once in a while, I would just *nail* it... I'd manage to write
something that just captured a moment, that just rang in my head like a
bell, and when I posted something like that, there were people to echo it,
there was e-mail from people who I respected more than I ever expressed
saying "good job," and the messages wouldn't just be about the future
authenticate strategy or how to balance AFS servers or even about my
opinion on some random book. They'd be part of a discussion, about hopes
and dreams and politics and religion and belief, that dug down into the
meat of what other people believed, that came off my fingers raw and
contradictory and impassioned, and they weren't *like* everything else I
did.
Now, when I post something controversial, I'm worrying afterwards about
whether it's just going to start a long thread that I'll feel obligated to
respond to and produce a lot of stress. I think about how to extract
myself from pointless debates. I worry about energy levels. I write much
more reasonable stuff, but you know, I also don't write about the same
sort of thing any more. I wrote a response to Dave Hayes about community
ownership and responsibility intermixed with the words of a Toad the Wet
Sprocket song. I can't remember the last time that doing something like
that even occurred to me.
Did I just change? Or did something change about the environment that
would helped me write like that, feel like that?
Over the past couple of years, I've done a lot of shifting of where I
spend my on-line resources, in a way that I think is very similar to what
many others have gone through. I've put a lot of time into my web pages,
I've focused on publishing work that I've done, I've narrowed the mailing
lists I'm on down to technical ones, and I've started widely reading blogs
and LiveJournal and commenting on LJ posts. And I've seen fewer and fewer
familiar faces in news.groups or news.software.nntp, I've given up on the
net-abuse groups completely, and That Hierarchy fills a void for me but...
it's a different void.
Some of it is just growing older, moving away from communities that meant
a lot to me when I was younger, having groups like Stanford's local
newsgroup community largely drift apart. But there's also something...
different about the web. About LiveJournal. It's not Usenet. And it's
not Usenet in a way that's more than technological.
I get mail about the things that I put on the web, but it's from people I
don't know, expressing appreciation for things that are functional, not...
emotional. I get contributions, and they're each one-to-one, and each
results in an exchange and then passes on out of my life. I exchange mail
with close friends and family, and that mail supports and nurtures those
relationships and greatly enriches my life, but that's a relationship, not
a community. It doesn't fill the same void. And tonight, I'm thinking
about community, and I'm remembering how many of those conversations
started on Usenet, and I wonder how I would now meet the next person with
whom I would start a long correspondance, what shared community would
provide new material to chew on and bridge the places where we ran out of
topics.
I read LiveJournal, and I follow other people's writing and tales of their
lives and I feel like a voyeur at times, and at other times just like the
recipient of a magazine. I post comments, and someone perhaps listens for
a moment or two, and maybe there's a small thread, and then the relentless
"latest first" nature of LiveJournal pushes the discussion out of sight
and it dies, and at the end there is no more sense of community, no more
sense of shared space than there was if I had never said a thing.
I read journals and blogs, and I see posts with comments, and I see one
person owning a space and writing to an audience. I see a rallying chorus
of supporters, comforters, and friends, I often see a community that those
people *brought* to LiveJournal, I respect LiveJournal for providing a
forum for those personal thoughts, and I feel a sense of alienation.
Either I'm a friend, in which case my comments carry all of the context of
my friendship invisible to anyone else listening, or I'm a stranger and my
comments are even less significant than a random e-mail reply to a web
page. And either way, time marches relentlessly on, the entry scrolls off
the bottom of friends pages, no one checks back for more comments, and the
restless executioner of technologically enforced attention span puts a
bullet in the head of another conversation.
I've encountered people I knew from Usenet on LiveJournal, and I don't
know what to do. I feel a sudden strong sense of connection, coupled with
a sense of nostalgia and loss, and I don't know how to express it. I
don't know if they even remember me or care. I can comment in a journal
thread or find their e-mail address and send them mail, and we might
exchange a message or two about old times, and then the connection would
fade away again. And that doesn't help, because the connection wasn't to
just that person, it was to that thing that we were both part of, and I
don't know where that thing is now.
There are messages in my archives that, five years later, make me cry to
read. They make me cry because they came from people who were MY people,
from members of MY community, from people who welcomed me to something we
all SHARED. They make me cry because they came from people I knew. I got
to know those people on Usenet. And I'm not sure I know how to get to
know people on-line any more.
LiveJournal is personal space for people and their friends, or for writers
and their audience, where every journal is firmly staked with a "Property
Of" sign and persistant community can only be brought, not created.
LiveJournal communities are collections of soap boxes used for individual
pronouncements, each one forming its own little space of personal property
in the comments.
E-mail is immediately intensely personal and direct, like sharing a table
in a restaurant. It offers privacy for two people who know each other
well and can bridge the silences, and a forum for casual politeness
between two people who have something momentary to communicate, but trying
to get to know people purely through e-mail is hopeless without an
immediate connection. There's nothing with which to bridge the silences
while still letting the conversation continue. I get to know people by
*watching* them, and I cannot watch someone else in e-mail without also
performing.
Usenet and social mailing lists are special. Shared space is special.
Shared space creates communities. Communities enable *new* relationships.
Open communities build friends.
I've kept my friends. I'm blessed by my friends. But somewhere along the
line, tonight, I'm feeling like I lost my communities. My communities
were on Usenet, and I've changed, and Usenet has changed, and I'm not sure
that I can see them any more, and I'm not sure how I found them in the
first place. But something disappeared and I didn't replace it, and I'm
afraid the places where I found it originally are too toxic to find it
again.
I'm not sure that I have a point or conclusion to this. It was just
something I had to write, because it's like the sorts of things I used to
write. And if this is read by some of those people who were part of that
community I just read about again... I want you to know how much that
community meant and means to me. I've never told people how much they
meant to me as promptly or as much as I should. I've never told a lot of
people how much I respect them. I rarely realized at the time, in the
midst of all of the chaos, anger, frustration, and argument, just how much
of a community both the Usenet net-abuse and the news.groups folks built,
but it is a deeply powerful thing in hindsight. Thank you, all of you,
for creating that.
Bev, it still takes up disk space.
--
Russ Allbery (r...@stanford.edu) <http://www.eyrie.org/~eagle/>
Meg Worley
leaving Russ's post out entirely. Anyone who hasn't read it needs to
go upthread and read the whole thing in any case.
I know what you mean, Russ -- and it's been a long time coming. I've
been watching groups decay out from under me for 10 years now. At first
I scratched the relevant itch with a substitute group (ba.food in place
of rec.food.cooking, etc.), but gradually I started looking outside of
Usenet.
All the things you say of blogosphere[1] are true, although it does
form a community. At least within the subcultures (bluestocking blogs,
for example), where people have conferences and what not as a secondary
gathering point, community lives on, albeit in a different state. As
you suggest, it's more about ownership and ego and less about conversation.
A couple of years ago, I thought this was a terrible thing. Now I find
it unfortunate but more worthy of nostalgia than mourning. I think age
has a great deal to do with it: The Usenet generation has moved into
stages of greater time demands (child-wrangling, 80-hour-a-week jobs, etc),
and we're not being replaced with younger throngs of Usenet junkies.
The move from communal venture to sole proprietorship is one that
happens and rehappens cyclically, as you know (because you heard me
give a paper on it, if for no other reason). Just don't get so
disillusioned that you can't/won't jump on board the next interesting
community endeavor that motors past your door.
Rage away,
meg
[1] Of course you say them of LiveJournal, not the blogosphere, but since
SixApart bought it out, the two have started moving closer and closer
together. Even before that, LJ was gradually ceasing to be the place for
people who write with purple feather quill pens.
--
Meg Worley _._ m...@steam.stanford.edu _._ Comparatively Literate
Todd Michel McComb
As a funny coincidence, in a men's room last night, I picked up the
Silicon Valley Metro, and flipped through it. I don't believe I'd
ever opened such a thing before. Well, I flipped to the column by
their "online correspondent" who was offering people some advice
about online identity issues. The advice was stated very succinctly,
with some rudimentary argument, but it was this: Lie. About
Everything. Lie about your name, lie about who you are, lie about
where you are. Just lie. You'll be much better off, the article
said. How did I feel, instantaneously, about that? Like I wanted
to punch that person in the face, thus proving their point in a
roundabout way, I guess. And of course then I realize that that
would accomplish nothing, and move on to just a general sadness.
That certainly isn't the sort of space *I* wanted to create.
First (or maybe not) we had kooks, and then there were the basic
spam mungers. Now, more and more, there's no indication at all of
who a person is. No recoverable address, no indication of their
name or who they are. Ordinary people are adviced by presumably
well-meaning "experts" that that's the way things ought to be. They
post things no more controversial than where they liked a hot dog,
all under a cloak of paranoid secrecy. How do you have a community
with that as the dominant mentality? You don't. You just plain
fucking don't. So, yeah, I think I know how you feel, Russ.
Of course, technically speaking, Usenet is not dying at all. It's
bigger than ever, according pure numbers.
Todd McComb
mcc...@medieval.org
Kai Henningsen
> I'm not sure if this is going to be particularly coherent.
Sure looks coherent to me.
>Perhaps that's
> why I'm posting it to a group I'm not sure anyone is still reading.
Well, as long as people still carry the group and occasionally search for,
say, I'm sure Russ must have been in *some* interesting threads this week
...
Anyway, there's a reason I like Usenet (and That Hierarchy) and I dislike
all those web boards, related to blogs or not. There's exactly one I read
regularly, and it's for the news - Groklaw.
I've never been as imbedded in communities as most people - I've serious
issues that way - but I still find some of that on Usenet. (And some
mailing lists.)
But web stuff ... I don't quite know why, but it feels similar to me like
tv (and movies) versus radio. I like radio. I very, very rarely watch the
others.
Kai
--
http://www.westfalen.de/private/khms/
"... by God I *KNOW* what this network is for, and you can't have it."
- Russ Allbery (r...@stanford.edu)
Usenet
news:87vf8fr...@windlord.stanford.edu:
> I'm not sure if this is going to be particularly coherent. Perhaps
> that's why I'm posting it to a group I'm not sure anyone is still
> reading.
There are people reading. And people appreciating what you've written.
Thank you. Not just for this post, but for the things you have done on
behalf of Usenet.
All communities change, be they three-D-space communities, or cyber
communities. Although not all the changes are for the positive, the bad
stage is a necessary part of the regrowth process.
The death of Usenet has been announced many times, yet the sun always rises
on another day of NNTP fun. Personally, I think the biggest changes are
the ones within ourselves individually. Personal taste, opinions,
prejudices, temperments, irritants, etc, etc, all change over time. That
changes ones perception of Usenet at least as much as Usenet changes.
Again, thank you for your commitiment to the community of Usenet. You have
made a difference. Not many people can truthfully make that claim.
Anthony de Boer - USEnet
>Why am I sitting here feeling like something that was incredibly important
>to me slipped out the back door of my life, and I'm not even sure when it
>happened?
Life grows and changes, and all the new stuff flooding in means you don't
always still have time to do all the old stuff too. If I look back over
the years, there were things I've done back when and enjoyed a lot at the
time that I can't always say I've done lately.
>Why are the messages that come with all of that emotion, all of that sense
>of community and support and comraderie, three or four or five years old
>or more? Why are the messages that that made me scared to post because
>they were so raw, the messages where I remember vividly how I felt when I
>wrote them, responses to Dave Hayes, or reactions to news.groups stuff
>that no one even remembers any more, or replies to people who I've lost
>track of completely? Did I just stop doing the things I used to do? Why
>does it feel different?
Growing up means leaving the part of the learning curve that's
challengingly steep, and getting onto something more of an uphill hike.
The days of looking straight up at the experienced guys, and being scared
of the chances of falling or getting something dropped on me, have been
replaced by being up there and actually being one of them myself.
I've met BWK Himself, and said something witty enough to make him laugh.
At 20 I doubt I'd have dared to open my mouth, or known what to say.
I won't claim to have anywhere near all the clues, but I have about as
many as I can carry now.
>I've strongly disagreed with the idea that Usenet is dying. I still do, I
>think. I think things ebb and flow and shift around, but up until now I
>haven't really thought about how my interaction with Usenet has changed,
>whether Usenet has died a little *for me*.
It's maybe a bit like the old neighbourhood after a war, and parts have
been bombed flat, and even rebuilt will never be the same, and maybe the
war's still going on somewhere. And it's the war against the spammers
I'm talking about; once upon a time Usenet was unspoiled, but then we
got the era when you'd go into a group and it would be filled with
commercial crap, and then people realized that their addresses were
being trolled and you were going to get you inbox crapped in, and those
aspects have spoiled it for a lot of people, or caused them to duck
behind spamtrap addresses and fake identities. Many don't want to put
anything of themselves out there anymore, just sit behind a browser and
suck it all in.
Then there's the story of The Man Who Got Fired For Something He Said
In Usenet, and Dejagoogle and the worry that HR departments are going
to surf on candidates. I still post under my real name, and maybe I'm
being overly brave and ought to adopt a fake identity, but it wouldn't
feel right. It wouldn't be honestly me anymore.
> ... They'd be part of a discussion, about hopes
>and dreams and politics and religion and belief, that dug down into the
>meat of what other people believed, that came off my fingers raw and
>contradictory and impassioned, and they weren't *like* everything else I
>did.
>
>Now, when I post something controversial, I'm worrying afterwards about
>whether it's just going to start a long thread that I'll feel obligated to
>respond to and produce a lot of stress.
Churchill, the quote about a young man who isn't a liberal having no
heart, and an older man who isn't a conservative having no head?
That sort of energy for grabbing ahold of topics and thrashing with them
is something you have in your teens and twenties, something that peaks
in university. Past 40 you really envy the kids who still have it in
them; you can still do it when you want to but you can feel yourself
pushing yourself (I'm 42, and from your writing you sound like you're in
your thirties somewhere) and most things have all been done before and
there's nothing new under the sun and you're looking at a particular
thread or flamewar again, and it's that little word "again" that wasn't
there yet back in the good old days.
>I get mail about the things that I put on the web, but it's from people I
>don't know, expressing appreciation for things that are functional, not...
>emotional. I get contributions, and they're each one-to-one, and each
>results in an exchange and then passes on out of my life. I exchange mail
>with close friends and family, and that mail supports and nurtures those
>relationships and greatly enriches my life, but that's a relationship, not
>a community. It doesn't fill the same void. And tonight, I'm thinking
>about community, and I'm remembering how many of those conversations
>started on Usenet, and I wonder how I would now meet the next person with
>whom I would start a long correspondance, what shared community would
>provide new material to chew on and bridge the places where we ran out of
>topics.
In part it's because in the Good Old Days, before the Internet started to
really take off in '94 or so, those of us who were online were the
counterculture. This wasn't mainstream yet, we were geeks to even be
there, so we had a lot more in common with each other.
AOL and the Great September changed all that, for Usenet at least, and
then what seems like the entire population of the civilized world
showed up online over the next few years. My parents are both online
now, just about everyone I know has e-mail, and, as a perusal of just
about anyone's work inbox reveals, hardly anybody still has the sort
of online writing skills that made Usenet what it was (and still in
corners is), yet everyone is bashing a keyboard at each other.
>I read LiveJournal, and I follow other people's writing and tales of their
>lives and I feel like a voyeur at times, and at other times just like the
>recipient of a magazine. I post comments, and someone perhaps listens for
>a moment or two, and maybe there's a small thread, and then the relentless
>"latest first" nature of LiveJournal pushes the discussion out of sight
>and it dies, and at the end there is no more sense of community, no more
>sense of shared space than there was if I had never said a thing.
It's a bunch of little Me-planets with absolute vacuum between them;
there's no shared space, and the missing bit is the ability to have and
follow a thread in someone else's journal. Going back to umpteen
different journal entries to check for new comments just isn't on, and if
there were 17 comments before and 18 now, good luck spotting the new
one without having to read through all the others.
Anyway, people can kick out diary entries, and you can maybe comment on
them one level deep, but after that the technology can't keep any sort
of discussion alive.
Then too, the whole web concept has that layer of GUI menu-based
mentality wrapped up in it. If you have both hands on the keyboard
and have read the relevant documentation, most of our CLI-based
technology still beats the crap out of the crap that's come up to
replace it.
>Usenet and social mailing lists are special. Shared space is special.
>Shared space creates communities. Communities enable *new* relationships.
>Open communities build friends.
I look around at various people in groups I follow; many of them I've
never met, nor would I have sought them out, but, FFS, they're *friends*
now.
>I've kept my friends. I'm blessed by my friends. But somewhere along the
>line, tonight, I'm feeling like I lost my communities. My communities
>were on Usenet, and I've changed, and Usenet has changed, and I'm not sure
>that I can see them any more, and I'm not sure how I found them in the
>first place. But something disappeared and I didn't replace it, and I'm
>afraid the places where I found it originally are too toxic to find it
>again.
In every group, over time, people change. They grow up, some people die,
newbies arrive, sometimes the same old threads have come around yet again
and they're not as much fun anymore and someone moves on quietly, or
maybe there's a flamewar and some people feel uncomfortable and
disappear, while others leave in a huff or get cast out of paradise. The
more years go by the more the set of regulars will change.
>I'm not sure that I have a point or conclusion to this. It was just
>something I had to write, because it's like the sorts of things I used to
>write.
And you write *well* Russ, and thank you for that piece.
--
Anthony de Boer -- as seen at http://www.leftmind.net/ -- BOFH, eh?
/ "Yes, sir, I know you want me to open my pants, whip out my magic \
[ wand, wave it over your account and give you endless bandwidth, ]
\ but we both know it's not going to happen." -- Joe Zeff /
Russ Allbery
> I know what you mean, Russ -- and it's been a long time coming. I've
> been watching groups decay out from under me for 10 years now. At first
> I scratched the relevant itch with a substitute group (ba.food in place
> of rec.food.cooking, etc.), but gradually I started looking outside of
> Usenet.
I'm in a somewhat odd place there, since I stopped reading the newsgroups
I originally joined Usenet to read many years ago when I stopped
collecting comics. (In fact, even before the Usenet bits, I ran across my
farewell message to the #comics IRC guys, which carries with it its own
feelings of nostalgia.) Most of my communities on Usenet have been
meta-communities of a sort, communities based around enabling communities.
It's probably not too surprising that that can be even more fragile than
communities based around a common interest, since that work is in some
ways more inherently changeable.
I'm not sure why I've never really connected with communities based around
other interests of mine, other than rec.arts.comics.creative (and I don't
write fiction in public any more, so that tie has faded for obvious
reasons). The obvious groups for me to look at are in many ways the
rec.arts.sf.* groups, but I've always found those groups intensely
uncomfortable for reasons that I can't quite put a finger on. This
perhaps has something to do with my strained feelings towards SF fandom.
Of the technical groups I've read, I've mostly run out of time to answer
enough questions on the Perl newsgroups to really be visible, and there
doesn't seem to be quite as much of a community on news.software.nntp
these days.
> All the things you say of blogosphere[1] are true, although it does form
> a community. At least within the subcultures (bluestocking blogs, for
> example), where people have conferences and what not as a secondary
> gathering point, community lives on, albeit in a different state. As
> you suggest, it's more about ownership and ego and less about
> conversation.
I've certainly participated more in that medium than I would have expected
originally. I read my LJ flist regularly, I've poked around periodically
looking for friends of friends who write interesting journals, I've
commented a bit here and there, and I've even been involved (in an
ancillary way) in one of those cross-journal floating flamewars. It just
doesn't feel the same, though, and in a way that for me is decidedly
inferior, not just different.
And, honestly, I have a lot of problems with the self-centeredness. Odd
to say, since Usenet certainly has its share, but there's only so much of
the "troll for sympathy, get lots of sympathetic comments" journaling
style that I can take.
> A couple of years ago, I thought this was a terrible thing. Now I find
> it unfortunate but more worthy of nostalgia than mourning. I think age
> has a great deal to do with it: The Usenet generation has moved into
> stages of greater time demands (child-wrangling, 80-hour-a-week jobs,
> etc), and we're not being replaced with younger throngs of Usenet
> junkies.
Yes, much of how I'm feeling is clearly just the nostalgia of getting
older, of seeing things that were really important to me no longer having
a place in my life. I know from past episodes that this sort of nostalgia
can hit me hard, but it passes, and life just changes priorities over
time.
I'm quite sure that my memory is white-washing over a lot of stress and
unhappiness that I wouldn't want to have back. Full-time participation in
fractious and angry communities is very draining.
It's not like I have large chunks of free time during which I sit around
and wish for a Usenet newsgroup to read. My whole life is pretty much
packed to the gills, so it makes sense that I've dropped some activities
along the way.
> The move from communal venture to sole proprietorship is one that
> happens and rehappens cyclically, as you know (because you heard me give
> a paper on it, if for no other reason). Just don't get so disillusioned
> that you can't/won't jump on board the next interesting community
> endeavor that motors past your door.
I'll certainly try not to. I'm trying this journal thing and trying to
figure out where it works for me and where it doesn't, for one.
John Henry @ Google
> I'm not sure if this is going to be particularly coherent.
Russ -
I doubt you'd remember me, as we've only crossed paths a couple of
times, but I thought it was not only particularly coherent, but a
pretty darned good read.
Having been around a little while myself, I can definitely understand
where you're coming from in terms of people moving on, groups dying or
mutating into something new, etc. Hell, I probably added to the
problems plenty myself over the years.
As I remarked in the group where this message was brought to my
attention, I think the ennui that comes from considering the sheer
volume of people and conversations that Usenet has brought over the
years is somewhat offset by the meeting of new people, fresh faces, new
pioneers. I'm not a particularly social guy myself, but in large part,
the people who I know through Usenet have been part of my life longer
than anyone outside of my family. There are dozens of folks I can name
from my home groups who have, over the eyars, drifted away or
disappeared or passed on or moved to web-based fora or whatever.
But there's an upside to this, too; when you have no new participation,
you run into an issue almost like inbreeding; it becomes a mutual
admiration society of sorts, where you know everyone's opinions,
everyone thinks in the same general terms and directions, and people
kind of rest on their laurels. When new people come in, you have new
minds, new directions, new ideas. Some of our pioneers are gone, but
just like a fella at Stanford many years ago took the notion of
net.news and pushed it one step further to Usenet, so someone else will
come along and push it another step, in time.
There is much validity and logic in missing the people you used to
know. There are people who I regret not knowing better over the years,
before they passed out of my life...but for every one of them, there's
someone new, today, who is just as good a person, who I will admire or
respect just as much, who will provide me with just as many good ideas
or happy thoughts or funnyf lames or whatever.
I guess what I'm saying is that change is inevitable, and it's always
both good and bad. Don't let it get you down.
NB: On the 'mutual admiration society' tip, you *are* aware that
you've been nominated for a prestigious award, right? I believe the
FNVW at AUK is handling the balloting, but it's not one of those
'awards,' it's quite legit. Unfortunately Supernews doesn't even carry
the net.* hierarchy anymore, so I can't crosspost the nomination
myself, but I think the award is well-deserved and is a fitting way for
those of us who have 'known' you for years but never had the chance to
step up and say 'thanks' as a community, to do so.
For good and bad, Usenet is indeed *your* community, probably more so
than anyone else's. The things you've done over the years to grease
the cyberwheels of this place are invaluable, and I'd like to say to
you personally thanks, congratulations, and don't ever sell yourself
short - you have indeed 'made a difference' in a way that billions of
us only wish we could.
So, regardless of whatever philosophical differences we might find
between us if we chose to examine it, I'd like for you to know -
publicly - that you have my immutable respect and admiration for the
things you've done and continued to do; your work has affected millions
of lives in ways that you will likely never be aware of, most of them
positive. I could hope to someday have that kind of impact.
With utmost respect,
John H. DeJong
www.lowgenius.com
Russ Allbery
> The advice was stated very succinctly, with some rudimentary argument,
> but it was this: Lie. About Everything. Lie about your name, lie
> about who you are, lie about where you are. Just lie. You'll be much
> better off, the article said. How did I feel, instantaneously, about
> that? Like I wanted to punch that person in the face, thus proving
> their point in a roundabout way, I guess. And of course then I realize
> that that would accomplish nothing, and move on to just a general
> sadness. That certainly isn't the sort of space *I* wanted to create.
Taking a step back, I can see this attitude towards on-line space as a
natural reaction to the increased power that huge institutions are
acquiring to collect dossiers on individuals surpassing that which, fifty
years ago, we would expect only law enforcement agencies to have. It is,
unfortunately, a largely futile backlash in many respects; I don't think
making up some random fake e-mail address while posting to Usenet is going
to do anything concrete to help.
I understand the impulse. I'm still regretting giving my real address to
a supermarket for an affinity card, since the intrusion of piles of weekly
paper spam was not worth my vague ethical desire not to lie and I know
that the supermarket chain is not interested in ethics at all. I use the
wish-list and rating features of major on-line vendors and think while I'm
doing so about how much information about myself that is almost certainly
now available to more corporate consortiums and government agencies than
I'm entirely comfortable with.
Bruce Schneier writes a lot about this, pointing out that the fundamental
problem is caused by taking ownership of one's personal data away from the
individual and putting it in the hands of organizations with no inherent
motivation to treat it respectfully or keep it private. There have been a
few preliminary and only slightly effective efforts in the US towards
balancing that situation with government regulation, making exposure of at
least sensitive data like SSNs and credit card numbers a public relations
and liability nightmare for data collectino companies. Not nearly enough,
nothing like the European data privacy laws, but at least something.
I just don't think that people involved in on-line communities
differentiate much between talking to corporations and talking to people,
and with some justification.
> First (or maybe not) we had kooks, and then there were the basic
> spam mungers. Now, more and more, there's no indication at all of
> who a person is. No recoverable address, no indication of their
> name or who they are. Ordinary people are adviced by presumably
> well-meaning "experts" that that's the way things ought to be. They
> post things no more controversial than where they liked a hot dog,
> all under a cloak of paranoid secrecy. How do you have a community
> with that as the dominant mentality? You don't. You just plain
> fucking don't. So, yeah, I think I know how you feel, Russ.
What bothers me more than people not using their real names is the
treatment of identity as disposable. Think you've annoyed too many people
on-line? Change apparent identities. Get bored with your last identity?
Change it. Feel like just making up something new to post with today?
Why not?
Personally, I don't care to know someone's "real name"; it doesn't much
matter to me except insofar that using consistently something that seems
like a real name on Usenet is increasingly a worthwhile filtering point
for finding someone who I care to read. What I care about is having some
consistent sense of identity, some idea that the person I'm interacting
with now is the same person that I was interacting with six months
earlier, and that this person is willing to own their identity and
reputation, good and bad, and not simply change it whenever it becomes
inconvenient.
In order to have a community, I think it's usually necessary to have some
degree of trust, and it's hard to build trust without some concept of a
consistent agent *to* trust. That agent doesn't have to be tied to a
real-life identity, but it has to have some degree of substance behind it,
not just be a trivially discardable facade.
Todd Michel McComb
Russ Allbery <r...@stanford.edu> wrote:
>That agent doesn't have to be tied to a real-life identity, but
>it has to have some degree of substance behind it, not just be a
>trivially discardable facade.
Right, and in the old days, some people seemed to feel as though
their online identities were *more* them than what their birth
certificate might say. I always found that vaguely creepy, but I
don't have any substantive problem with it. I'm not seeing that
sort of thing today. It's mostly the throwaway stuff.
Todd McComb
mcc...@medieval.org
Russ Allbery
> Right, and in the old days, some people seemed to feel as though
> their online identities were *more* them than what their birth
> certificate might say. I always found that vaguely creepy, but I
> don't have any substantive problem with it. I'm not seeing that
> sort of thing today. It's mostly the throwaway stuff.
Yeah.
I used to have some real dichotomies of internal thought process between
different ways that I presented myself, and I used to use different
identities in different groups to reflect that (with obvious pointers in,
e.g., my sig that would let people link them if they cared). I still do
that when posting to rec.arts.comics.creative just out of a sense of
nostalgia, but as I've gotten older, I've integrated those different
approaches to life better together into one view on things.
If I were working in a job that didn't allow me to be creative, I wonder
if I still wouldn't maintain a separate personal and professional identity
(and the professional identity pretty much has to be tied to the birth
certificate for legal reasons, which means that the personal identity
would be something different). Thankfully, I'm not in that situation.
Russ Allbery
> Anyway, there's a reason I like Usenet (and That Hierarchy) and I
> dislike all those web boards, related to blogs or not. There's exactly
> one I read regularly, and it's for the news - Groklaw.
And I don't know if I'm like you at all there, but I don't read any of the
comments in Groklaw, just the headlines. I assume the comments are useful
for the author, but I'm not sure how useful they are to a reader.
I think of Groklaw more like a topic-focused Salon.com than like a web
board, sort of a "biased journalism" site where there's a fair bit of
facts mixed in with editorializing. Like Slashdot, I don't even think of
it as a web board; I never even think about the comments.
> I've never been as imbedded in communities as most people - I've serious
> issues that way - but I still find some of that on Usenet. (And some
> mailing lists.)
> But web stuff ... I don't quite know why, but it feels similar to me
> like tv (and movies) versus radio. I like radio. I very, very rarely
> watch the others.
I find the web not exactly non-interactive, but definitely minimizing
interaction. That's great if you just want to publish something and not
get into a big argument about it, but I hate trying to have discussions on
web sites. Even with the best of interfaces, the progress of discussion
on the web seems to invert the normal pattern on Usenet. I'm used to the
first message just raising some interesting issues and then digging into
all of the meet in subsequent discussion, where there's room to chase down
sidelines and elaborate on one's thought process.
With all of the web boards, blogs, LJs, and the like, it seems to be rare
for this to happen. Instead, the discussion usually gets more superficial
and dies out the deeper it gets into the comments, and it's rare for the
discussion to add any more depth than was present in the original message.
That also makes the original messages a lot harder to write, particularly
if the goal is to start a discussion.
Russ Allbery
> All communities change, be they three-D-space communities, or cyber
> communities. Although not all the changes are for the positive, the bad
> stage is a necessary part of the regrowth process.
> The death of Usenet has been announced many times, yet the sun always
> rises on another day of NNTP fun. Personally, I think the biggest
> changes are the ones within ourselves individually. Personal taste,
> opinions, prejudices, temperments, irritants, etc, etc, all change over
> time. That changes ones perception of Usenet at least as much as Usenet
> changes.
This is a good point, and yes, I expect that a lot of the changes I'm
feeling are personal. Although, I don't think they're uncommon among a
particular generation of Usenet readers, so there does seem to be some
sort of environmental component.
I still haven't seen the thing that I felt like could replace Usenet for
me show up yet. I think it probably will at some point. The web is a lot
closer now than it was five years ago, that's for sure, and while I still
think blog and web board technology is a long way off, things like
gmane.org make me think it's almost at the point of feasibility.
> Again, thank you for your commitiment to the community of Usenet. You
> have made a difference. Not many people can truthfully make that claim.
Well, thank you. I'm not sure what bits will end up looking like
differences from the perspective of a few more decades, but I've gotten a
lot out of Usenet and by and large I've done what I've done because I
enjoyed it. (Even if I wonder sometimes if I'm telling myself that just
to justify an attitude of dogged persistance.)
Todd Michel McComb
Russ Allbery <r...@stanford.edu> wrote:
>I don't think they're uncommon among a particular generation of
>Usenet readers, so there does seem to be some sort of environmental
>component.
Well, I was married before you came to Usenet, and I had children
before "the Internet" went mainstream. So my interest in long
arguments was pretty slim by then, believe me. (And, yeah, there's
some cause & effect implied there.) That's only one component of
things. There are some definite changes in the ways people interact
around here. Of course, one big underlying change was when being
on Usenet stopped being a privilege.
It's fine with me to say that things change, because they obviously
do. Adapt or die, right? Still, as you say, it'd be nice to have
a place to have discussions the way I like to have them. Besides
the obvious personal benefit of such a scenario, I'm also vain
enough to believe that my preferences there can make for a pretty
nice situation generally.
Todd McComb
mcc...@medieval.org
Russ Allbery
> Life grows and changes, and all the new stuff flooding in means you
> don't always still have time to do all the old stuff too. If I look
> back over the years, there were things I've done back when and enjoyed a
> lot at the time that I can't always say I've done lately.
Yeah, I look back on when I was a teenager and spent most of my time bored
out of my skull and wish I had all those spare hours back. :) I could do
so much more with them now!
There are things that I've picked up and increased my activity on a great
deal, so it makes sense that I've dropped other things. When I was
heavily involved in a lot of those communities and they were extremely
active, I almost didn't read fiction at all. I'm certainly putting a lot
more effort into publishing web pages and maintaining software now.
It's weird, though, to realize that while I've always been a "few close
friends" sort of person, there used to be some pretty wide nets of people
to whom I was connected and those connections aren't as strong as they
used to be. (Not just on Usenet either; the social network I had as a
student has attenuated a lot as well.)
> Growing up means leaving the part of the learning curve that's
> challengingly steep, and getting onto something more of an uphill
> hike. The days of looking straight up at the experienced guys, and being
> scared of the chances of falling or getting something dropped on me,
> have been replaced by being up there and actually being one of them
> myself.
Oh, man, and isn't that a bizarre feeling. I'm growing into it at work,
where it's pretty useful and cool since I have a lot more ability now to
get done things that I think are important (even if that means doing more
management and less implementation of it all myself, and I miss the latter
sometimes). It's a lot stranger on-line, where I usually feel like people
are giving me credit for doing way more work than I actually do.
> I won't claim to have anywhere near all the clues, but I have about as
> many as I can carry now.
Hm, that's an interesting way of looking at it. I'm going to have to
think about that some more.
> It's maybe a bit like the old neighbourhood after a war, and parts have
> been bombed flat, and even rebuilt will never be the same, and maybe the
> war's still going on somewhere. And it's the war against the spammers
> I'm talking about; once upon a time Usenet was unspoiled, but then we
> got the era when you'd go into a group and it would be filled with
> commercial crap, and then people realized that their addresses were
> being trolled and you were going to get you inbox crapped in, and those
> aspects have spoiled it for a lot of people, or caused them to duck
> behind spamtrap addresses and fake identities. Many don't want to put
> anything of themselves out there anymore, just sit behind a browser and
> suck it all in.
Yeah... the spammers never really bothered me as much as they seem to have
bothered a lot of people, and I admit to being somewhat baffled by how
extreme the measures that a lot of people take against e-mail spam are.
But while spam on Usenet itself didn't have much impact on the medium for
me (other than generating a community that I really felt part of, if a
contrary voice, for many years), the reaction to spam seems to be taking a
toll. I identify a lot with the concerns that Todd posted here, about a
see of disposable identities that I can't connect with.
There are other, subtle, even trivial things about Usenet that seem to
have a disproportionate effect on my enjoyment of reading it, but I see
you touched on one of them below.
> Then there's the story of The Man Who Got Fired For Something He Said In
> Usenet, and Dejagoogle and the worry that HR departments are going to
> surf on candidates. I still post under my real name, and maybe I'm
> being overly brave and ought to adopt a fake identity, but it wouldn't
> feel right. It wouldn't be honestly me anymore.
I feel the same way.
>> Now, when I post something controversial, I'm worrying afterwards about
>> whether it's just going to start a long thread that I'll feel obligated
>> to respond to and produce a lot of stress.
> Churchill, the quote about a young man who isn't a liberal having no
> heart, and an older man who isn't a conservative having no head?
*heh*. Yes. It doesn't seem to apply to me in politics (I started out as
an extreme conservative, and at the current rate of change in my political
beliefs I think I'm going to end up being a Trotskyite before I die), but
maybe it applies anyway in other places.
> That sort of energy for grabbing ahold of topics and thrashing with them
> is something you have in your teens and twenties, something that peaks
> in university. Past 40 you really envy the kids who still have it in
> them; you can still do it when you want to but you can feel yourself
> pushing yourself (I'm 42, and from your writing you sound like you're in
> your thirties somewhere) and most things have all been done before and
> there's nothing new under the sun and you're looking at a particular
> thread or flamewar again, and it's that little word "again" that wasn't
> there yet back in the good old days.
Mm, yes, I recognize that feeling. I was amused to see that some of my
best writing came in the middle of threads that I probably would just skip
now as being too much effort. Well, I went through a period of hashing
out my beliefs about communities and interaction in a pretty public way by
throwing myself against some rather hard targets, and now I've internally
settled a lot of those questions at least to my personal satisfaction.
The opinions keep changing, but the rate of change is a fair bit slower.
> In part it's because in the Good Old Days, before the Internet started
> to really take off in '94 or so, those of us who were online were the
> counterculture. This wasn't mainstream yet, we were geeks to even be
> there, so we had a lot more in common with each other.
> AOL and the Great September changed all that, for Usenet at least, and
> then what seems like the entire population of the civilized world showed
> up online over the next few years.
I came just before AOL and the Great September, but I spent my time in
places that were very conservative culturally, places where the Usenet
old-timers tended to hang out because they were busy trying to maintain or
preserve Usenet, so I think that culture was artifically prolonged for me.
Maybe that's a lot of the difference that I feel now in news.groups and
the net-abuse groups -- that pre-1994 culture is dead even there now.
That Hierarchy still maintains a lot of the original feel, but the
population is closed enough and polite enough that there isn't the same
sort of challenge. I'm not sure if that's a good or a bad thing; probably
a bit of both.
> My parents are both online now, just about everyone I know has e-mail,
> and, as a perusal of just about anyone's work inbox reveals, hardly
> anybody still has the sort of online writing skills that made Usenet
> what it was (and still in corners is), yet everyone is bashing a
> keyboard at each other.
This bothers me a lot. Maybe more than it really should.
I remember Usenet being fundamentally more readable than it is now, and
it's not just the awesomely ugly spam-blocked addresses or even problems
with grammar and spelling. There's rampant overquoting, a simple lack of
attention to trying to make posts readable, apparently way more
unintelligible comments, and apparently more simple incoherence. This
just wears at me, almost subconsciously. I naturally tend to care more
about formatting and layout than most people I know (I do things like
reformat and rework source code all the time), and I just don't get why
people would want to send messages that are that *ugly*.
> It's a bunch of little Me-planets with absolute vacuum between them;
> there's no shared space, and the missing bit is the ability to have and
> follow a thread in someone else's journal. Going back to umpteen
> different journal entries to check for new comments just isn't on, and
> if there were 17 comments before and 18 now, good luck spotting the new
> one without having to read through all the others.
Yeah, having no memory hurts a lot, and having no combined view of the
discussion hurts even more.
> I look around at various people in groups I follow; many of them I've
> never met, nor would I have sought them out, but, FFS, they're *friends*
> now.
Oh, yeah.
> In every group, over time, people change. They grow up, some people
> die, newbies arrive, sometimes the same old threads have come around yet
> again and they're not as much fun anymore and someone moves on quietly,
> or maybe there's a flamewar and some people feel uncomfortable and
> disappear, while others leave in a huff or get cast out of paradise.
> The more years go by the more the set of regulars will change.
I've been hearing this for many years, and believing it, but somehow I
never expected to be one of the people who was thinking about moving on.
It's really different when I'm the person thinking that some place just
isn't fun any more, or isn't interesting any more.
> And you write *well* Russ, and thank you for that piece.
Thank you... it seems to have not ended up being quite as rambling as I
was afraid it would be. It's been a long time since I've written a long
Usenet post after midnight at work with headphones on. I used to do that
all the time.
Russ Allbery
> But there's an upside to this, too; when you have no new participation,
> you run into an issue almost like inbreeding; it becomes a mutual
> admiration society of sorts, where you know everyone's opinions,
> everyone thinks in the same general terms and directions, and people
> kind of rest on their laurels. When new people come in, you have new
> minds, new directions, new ideas. Some of our pioneers are gone, but
> just like a fella at Stanford many years ago took the notion of net.news
> and pushed it one step further to Usenet, so someone else will come
> along and push it another step, in time.
One of the differences, or at least apparent differences, that I'm feeling
right now is that there just aren't many new people coming into some of
the communities that I cared the most about. The few that do I don't seem
to understand as well, or connect with (and I've gotten along with a
pretty wide variety of people over the years), and there just isn't the
same feeling of shared purpose that I remember.
> NB: On the 'mutual admiration society' tip, you *are* aware that you've
> been nominated for a prestigious award, right? I believe the FNVW at
> AUK is handling the balloting, but it's not one of those 'awards,' it's
> quite legit.
I didn't, no. *google*. Oh... heh. Well, I'm honored... certainly, the
previous winners are all people for whom I have a great deal of respect.
I'm not exactly well-known for getting along with AUK denizens (the basic
concept of the group that it developed in the post-DeLaney era bothers me
at a personal level), so I'm not too surprised I didn't know about it.
Still, I'm glad that people find the isc.org stuff useful in particular; I
feel pretty good about getting that going again.
(BTW, I've never issued an alt.* control message and won't for so long as
I'm involved in Big Eight newsgroup creation, so I think you may have me
confused with someone else there.)
> So, regardless of whatever philosophical differences we might find
> between us if we chose to examine it, I'd like for you to know -
> publicly - that you have my immutable respect and admiration for the
> things you've done and continued to do; your work has affected millions
> of lives in ways that you will likely never be aware of, most of them
> positive. I could hope to someday have that kind of impact.
Thank you, very much.
Jim Kingdon
> bigger than ever, according pure numbers.
I think that's part of why Usenet isn't a community to the extent that
it was. It is a victim of its success.
You can't really have a community (in many, but not all, of the
relevant ways) beyond a certain number of people. Usenet got some
mileage out of fragmenting according to topic, but that tactic has
been taken pretty much as far as it can go.
I got interested in us.* and net.* a few years ago largely because I
was wondering whether they could end up being small enough to be
communities (and separate enough from other hierarchies to avoid just
getting swallowed up). In a case like us.* there's also geographical
proximity as a possible facilitator (don't underestimate the role of
Usenix and group cons in keeping together the Old Usenet
Communities(TM)).
Not that I necessarily need more community in my life - some days I
feel quite busy enough (thank you very much) with the ones I'm part
of.
Russ Allbery
> I got interested in us.* and net.* a few years ago largely because I was
> wondering whether they could end up being small enough to be communities
> (and separate enough from other hierarchies to avoid just getting
> swallowed up).
I think that's a big part of the success of That Hierarchy; the difficulty
is that while it's great for discussions with a bunch of technical folks
about largely technical subjects, it's still only a subset of the people
that I'd like to talk to, and I'm not quite sure how to have some of the
discussions there that I like to have.
Jim Kingdon
> dislike all those web boards, related to blogs or not. There's
> exactly one I read regularly, and it's for the news - Groklaw.
Well, of course it is ridiculous to nominate candidates for The
Successor to Usenet, but since I have a low fear of being ridiculous,
I'd look in the following places instead of blogs:
* Wikipedia
* Dmoz (at least for those heavily involved. As a more casual editor,
I always felt like I wasn't quite a part of things)
* Various open source projects. For me it has been
http://www.wheatfarm.org/ . Lately I've been asking myself why I
spend so much time on it. It's not that I'm convinced that it is
What the World Needs in a technical sense (sure, we've made some
good decisions, but I'm actually agnostic on the whole premise of
the language). My answers to why I am involved basically boil down
to:
- smart and interesting people to work with (being able to get
together in person regularly has been a real help, although we do
lots of our work online),
- the code is developed in a style that is agreeable to me. The
problem with having become test-infected is that I just can't get up
any enthusiasm for working on a project without unit tests, or where
the other developers lack at least some commitment to writing them.
Now, these are more focused and less discussion-oriented than your
average social group, so let me think harder and try to come up with
projects who are trying to reengineer the whole concept of online
discussion. How about:
* http://h2o.law.harvard.edu - Focused on education, and online
articles which are assigned as part of a class, but still it is
probably the most interesting thing I've seen in a long time about
how to structure an online discussion (key idea: letting people
respond when they want to, and putting those articles up
immediately, leads to the loudmouths getting all the airspace, less
thoughtful posts, etc. Instead, have everyone write something
between now and next Friday, and don't post any of them pubically
until Friday. Repeat as desired to allow reactions to other
people's articles).
David Damerell
>Churchill, the quote about a young man who isn't a liberal having no
>heart, and an older man who isn't a conservative having no head?
Generally attributed to Churchill, anyway, unless one happens to know that
while Churchill moved from the Liberal party to the Conservatives in 1925,
he moved in the opposite direction in 1904.
--
David Damerell <dame...@chiark.greenend.org.uk> flcl?
Today is Potmos, March.
David Damerell
>Russ Allbery <r...@stanford.edu> wrote:
>>There's rampant overquoting,
And now, of course, Google's "zipless fuck" quote-free posts. Which I know
I've complained about before, but I want to complain about it again.
>All this said, there are bits of outer USENET that still work
rec.games.roguelike.nethack remains consistently good.
Russ Allbery
> begin quoting Roger Burton West <ro...@nospam.firedrake.org>:
>> Russ Allbery <r...@stanford.edu> wrote:
>>> There's rampant overquoting,
> And now, of course, Google's "zipless fuck" quote-free posts. Which I
> know I've complained about before, but I want to complain about it
> again.
Yeah, we had a chat about that. Their UI constraint was that they
couldn't figure out a way to put the quoted text into the dialog box due
to whatever interaction with Javascript they had to deal with, so chose
between quoting everything and quoting nothing. I agreed that they made
the right choice between those two options but then tried to push them
towards fixing their UI problem since neither of those choices are all
that awesome. I think they had some idea for how to fix it.
Russ Allbery
> Russ Allbery <r...@stanford.edu> wrote:
>> The obvious groups for me to look at are in many ways the rec.arts.sf.*
>> groups, but I've always found those groups intensely uncomfortable for
>> reasons that I can't quite put a finger on. This perhaps has something
>> to do with my strained feelings towards SF fandom.
> <Smiles> I think some of that is that SF fandom in its more public
> manifestations is about the social life of fandom, not an interest in
> reading s.f. SF fandom is a fairly tolerant community about things I'm
> not as tolerant of, too. And there are some social agendas connected
> with it that I'm somewhat squeamish about.
I've gotten better about this over the years. I used to be almost
anti-fandom, and now I've found more bits of it that I like and seem to be
finding a better mental space about the whole thing. But I still very
quickly start wanting to be elsewhere when the discussion devolves into
cliquish stuff that doesn't have much to do with books.
Some of that may just be that I don't know the people or the terminology,
something that I'm slowly fixing.
> You seem to have revived at least one net.* group, you know, all with
> one post.
Well, sort of. I expect it will go quiet again.
Russ Allbery
> Russ Allbery <r...@stanford.edu> wrote:
>> I've gotten better about this over the years. I used to be almost
>> anti-fandom,
> Anyone who can use the word "gafiate" isn't *that* removed from fandom.
I've read a *lot* of SF. :)
>> and now I've found more bits of it that I like and seem to be finding a
>> better mental space about the whole thing.
> I'd suggest trying NorWestCon sometime, as it tends to be more book
> oriented.
The only time I was at a NorWestCon it was also a Westercon, and I didn't
pay enough attention to the panels. I really hate travelling, so that
ends up being a constraint; it's rare for one of the bigger conventions to
end up in the Bay Area and when it's happened in the past (like ConJose),
it's often caught me at a very bad time personally.
> WisCon is both feminist and book-oriented which you might find of
> interest even if it's not actually for you.
I think I'd really enjoy WisCon, except that it conflicts with Baycon,
which is the only con that I've attended regularly for years. Not that I
always go to a lot of panels, but there's something to be said for
familiarity and not having to travel to Wisconsin.
> The thing with fandom is that there are a whole lot of different groups
> all under the same name, and some of them are really serious about
> reading and writing and some of them aren't.
And I'm serious about reading, but have done my turn through the "how to
write" panels and posts and now get very bored by them. I mostly just
want to talk about books, but I want to talk about books at a different
level than "oo, look at all the neat political ideas that Heinlein had!"
or "aren't the gravity equations backwards in Generic Hard SF Story With
No Characters?".
Really, the books group in That Hierarchy has been exactly what I was
looking for, although I think I'm looking for even more of that. But I'm
not sure. I may not really have the time for more than that.
rec.arts.sf.written might well give me that. I should probably give it
more of a chance.
> You might as well turn pro, you know.
I don't have the discipline or inclination to actually sell something. :)
Not to mention that there's another weird disjunction there that also
makes me uncomfortable, surrounding the pros who are also involved in
fandom.
> The other is becoming part of what I think of as organized fandom, the
> political side of running cons, which I suspect would have you running
> screaming in the other direction, but in all honesty, those are the
> people who put in hours for free to make conventions work.
I've made the interesting discovery that at least reading about some of
that is highly amusing. Well, at least it is when Cheryl Morgan writes
about it; I haven't sought out other fanzines to see if I would still
enjoy it from other people.
But I don't think I'd want to be involved in it. It's more just amusing
to read about, in the sense of watching other people's train wrecks.
> Some fans end up editors, so there's also that way. Couple of people
> have done crit-zines, which is kinda what you're already doing on line.
Kind of. It's not at the quality level of the people who really write SF
criticism. I'm never going to be a David Langford or a John Clute.
Russ Allbery
> Russ Allbery <r...@stanford.edu> wrote:
>> I've read a *lot* of SF. :)
> I'd read a ton of SF and didn't come across the word "gafiate" until I'd
> started reading histories of fandom. If you found it in the actual
> fiction, I suspect you of reading _Fallen Angels_.
Okay, point. Guilty as charged. I went through most of Niven's output a
long time back (10+ years ago), including that.
>> I think I'd really enjoy WisCon, except that it conflicts with Baycon,
>> which is the only con that I've attended regularly for years. Not that
>> I always go to a lot of panels, but there's something to be said for
>> familiarity and not having to travel to Wisconsin.
> Most of the people I know don't go to panels unless they're on them, so
> you're batting high here for potential pro except that you don't drink,
> and so might not want to be in the bar.
Well, the other side of that is that the list of things to do at a con if
one doesn't know other people there and in general doesn't enjoy trying to
socialize with random people is panels, dealer's room, and art show /
artist's alley. I always buy a fair number of books, but while I've spent
years where I didn't go to any panels at all and just used the con as an
excuse to hole up in a hotel room and read, I usually try to actually get
out and do something con-like.
Last year, I decided I was going to make Baycon a book recommendation con
and saught out every panel that looked like it was going to produce book
recommendations. That ended up working out pretty well, although I don't
know how many years I'll be able to do that before it's just the same
books every year.
Baycon has a lot of, well, garbage panels. Panels about current politics,
about random topics unrelated to SF except that geeks happen to like them,
or about things like "how to search on-line." I also have to be a bit
careful at Baycon not to go to panels where I'm in some danger of knowing
as much or more about the topic as the people on the panel (panels about
on-line communities or about computer-related topics, in particular),
since then I just get annoyed.
Really, the on-line community panels are ones that I always think that I'd
be interested in but need to avoid like the plague, since not only do I
get frustrated by what the panelists say, I also am not interested in
talking about the things that they seem to want to talk about.
>> And I'm serious about reading, but have done my turn through the "how
>> to write" panels and posts and now get very bored by them.
> I've decided that I'd rather talk about anything at a convention than
> "how to write." When I talk to people about how to compete with me, I
> want to get paid for doing it.
Well, not to mention that I'm not sure how much it actually helps anyone,
and 80% of those panels just turn into bitch-fests. Which are amusing the
first time, and very quickly get tedious.
> I think you want to make it to ReaderCon at least once. Pity you missed
> the lunch we had in 1999 or 1998 (gee, I forget now, but either of my
> last two ReaderCons had Usenet sides).
The crossover between SF fandom space and Usenet space involves several
people I really don't enjoy spending time around, unfortunately.
(Although in some cases I should probably give them more of a chance.)
I'm not the most social person. :)
> The best counter argument to that is the article in a very early New
> York Review of Science Fiction (you do have a subscription to that,
> don't you?).
Oh, yeah.
> Susan Palwick's "I Was a Teenaged Crud Fan: Confessions of an Uptown
> Girl." My counter argument is that if you have the passion to write the
> reviews, you have the passion to go pro with what you're doing.
Well... maybe. See, I really am mostly writing the reviews for myself; I
like having a record of the books that I've read, I like being able to
remind myself of the plot, and for a complicated set of reasons writing
reviews gets me to read more books. That other people find them
interesting is primarily a side effect, and I have the luxury right now to
think of it that way. I'm basically not writing for an audience; if an
audience happens to enjoy the reviews, so much the better.
I'm leery of trying to do more than that in part because if the reviews
start feeling like work, I have destroyed the whole point of why I was
doing them.
> And that if you're going to review the pros, you stand on better footing
> ethically to put yourself at the same risk, either by reviewing
> professionally or by publishing your own work (not as a profession, but
> as someone who's in the same level of play as the people you're
> reviewing).
This is the other gotcha in this situation. Right now, I'm not putting
the reviews in anyone's face. I'm posting them in a couple of private
spaces (my personal web site and my personal journal) whose only readers
are people who decide to go voluntarily into my personal space, and
posting them to a private newsgroup with a fairly limited audience that
isn't at all afraid to consider what I write to be totally off-base.
If I were to write for a more general audience, I'd feel quite a bit more
pressure to be *right*, as opposed to just tossing off whatever reaction I
happened to have. Right now, given that the audience for these things is
basically self-selected, I feel some degree of freedom to toss out
whatever half-assed opinion I have or be utterly and completely wrong
about a book. If I were writing a review for NYRSF or the like, I'd need
to actually be professional about it, and then we get back into that
feeling like work thing. I'd have to talk about more than just my
personal opinion on something (something that I do now pretty much only
when it beats me over the head).
> My own taste is for hanging out with people who are at a higher level
> than I am -- whether it's usenet or writing or raising killie fish. The
> price of admission to that is doing at least competent in whatever field
> it is, or having a equal but different competence in something else.
> There are pros who go to conventions to basically hang out with other
> pros (in the bar); there are pros who go to conventions to hang out with
> people they like, whether pros or not. And there are even other
> motives.
Part of my feeling, too, is that I'm already a (well paid) professional in
a completely different field and have no interest at all in changing that,
and I'd feel a little weird about taking a paying market away (even to a
very minor degree) from people who are really trying to do this for a
living, when I'm a complete dilettante.
>> I've made the interesting discovery that at least reading about some of
>> that is highly amusing. Well, at least it is when Cheryl Morgan writes
>> about it; I haven't sought out other fanzines to see if I would still
>> enjoy it from other people.
> You read fanzines? <grin>
I read Emerald City. I have, in fact, read all of Emerald City. I don't
read any other fanzines (well, I read David Langford's reviews on his web
site, but that's not quite the same thing).
I read Emerald City because I find new books to read from book reviews and
Cheryl Morgan writes fairly good book reviews (better, frankly, than the
boook review columns in either F&SF or Asimov's) and reliably turns out
four to six of them every month. (And books that I am interested in but
otherwise would never find, like a lot of small press and feminist stuff.)
I originally skipped past the fandom stuff to just read the book reviews,
but then found that the second-hand stories of SMOF affairs were actually
rather amusing when I didn't have to take part or clean up any of the
messes.
David Damerell
>David Damerell <dame...@chiark.greenend.org.uk> writes:
>>And now, of course, Google's "zipless fuck" quote-free posts. Which I
>>know I've complained about before, but I want to complain about it
>>again.
>Yeah, we had a chat about that. Their UI constraint was that they
>couldn't figure out a way to put the quoted text into the dialog box due
>to whatever interaction with Javascript they had to deal with, so chose
>between quoting everything and quoting nothing.
Erm... but if one hits the Edit button, you get a dialogue box with quoted
text.
>I agreed that they made
>the right choice between those two options but then tried to push them
>towards fixing their UI problem since neither of those choices are all
>that awesome. I think they had some idea for how to fix it.
Do you think they want to fix it? Google's UI is now exactly like a Web
forum, which is what most people understand. I suspect they want to become
what will appear to be a set of Web forums with some external
contributors.
--
David Damerell <dame...@chiark.greenend.org.uk> Distortion Field!
Today is Teleute, March.
Russ Allbery
> begin quoting Russ Allbery <r...@stanford.edu>:
>> Yeah, we had a chat about that. Their UI constraint was that they
>> couldn't figure out a way to put the quoted text into the dialog box
>> due to whatever interaction with Javascript they had to deal with, so
>> chose between quoting everything and quoting nothing.
> Erm... but if one hits the Edit button, you get a dialogue box with
> quoted text.
Yeah, they're doing something completely different with that control than
with the "quick" reply. They gave me an explanation, but I have to admit
that not knowing Javascript it went completely over my head.
> Do you think they want to fix it?
Yes, absolutely. One of their lead developers was annoyed that they'd not
been able to fix it yet; it sounded like it wasn't particularly hard, it
just required someone spending a bit of time on it.
> Google's UI is now exactly like a Web forum, which is what most people
> understand. I suspect they want to become what will appear to be a set
> of Web forums with some external contributors.
The people that I talked to were actually a lot more Usenet-focused than
that and really did "get it." (Better distinguishing their web forums
from the Usenet groups was another thing that I talked to them about.)
Russ Allbery
>>> Google's UI is now exactly like a Web forum, which is what most people
>>> understand. I suspect they want to become what will appear to be a set
>>> of Web forums with some external contributors.
>> The people that I talked to were actually a lot more Usenet-focused than
>> that and really did "get it." (Better distinguishing their web forums
>> from the Usenet groups was another thing that I talked to them about.)
> I would find this more reassuring had they not (in the change from groups
> to groups-beta) moved in exactly the opposite direction.
Except that they didn't. The original Deja database, and the first round
of Google Groups, is almost completely foreign to Usenet. It has no
concept of newsgroups, for instance, only more fields on which one could
search, and the archive they got is full of all sorts of random, broken
crap.
Groups Beta, on the other hand, is actually a news reader. It has a
concept of newsgroups and reading a specific newsgroup, and they're even
honoring control messages and cleaning up their newsgroup list. They've
taken *huge* steps towards treating Usenet as Usenet rather than as some
sort of web page to search.
The intermingling of their group forums and Usenet groups is unfortunate
and something that at least the people I talked to were interested in
fixing, but honestly, I can't get too excited about it. It's a lot like
an ISP carrying a huge set of internal newsgroups, although the
presentation could certainly use work.
Abby Franquemont
First of all, this is the first time in YEARS that I've seen:
Are you starting an unrelated topic? [ynq] n
This program may post news to many machines.
Are you absolutely sure that you want to do this? [ny] y
Prepared file to include [none]:
Because it's the first time in years that I've fired up trn. Russ,
I was motivated to do so because of having been pointed to your
post.
I definitely do mourn the USENET I knew and loved. I feel strongly as
if it shouldn't be gone. There's no online venue that I frequent now
that does the trick for me like USENET did. I wrestle with my own
feelings, too, about not having been active around USENET in any way
in ages.
If I had to pick an absolute top reason why I just don't read a lot
of the froups I used to... I think I would say that it's because it
used to be such a literate crowd, well-spoken even in a flamewar,
capable of structuring posts in ways that made them truly legible.
But now, this is not really the case of the majority of places I've
been around the 'net at large, certainly not of USENET and mailing
lists. I burn out pining for the long-lost niceties. And the places
where I might find 'em... I dunno. Seems traffic has died off a lot.
I've seen you around livejournal, as you mention. The other day,
actually, Chad asked if livejournal replaced USENET for me. And, no.
I mean, in some ways, with the whole "crowd I seem to interact with
regularly online," I guess so -- but it doesn't hold a candle to
USENET for content, style, threading, and so forth. It's not the SAME.
The factors you mention about most-recent-first sorting and so forth,
those are the absolute biggest weaknesses of any of the web-based
scenes that I know of personally. Add in the trend of "it's about me"
for individual journals, and well, it just isn't *right* somehow. It
doesn't have the right feel.
Me-too-ism, lack of meaningful quoting, lack of real writing style
conventions, all of these things are also factors in the web scenes
not really cutting it.
I want my USENET, still. I really do. And, so now you've got me here,
and got my attention. So... now what?
Thanks, Russ, for keeping the faith.
--
Abby Franquemont abby @ ucan.foad.org
Yeah, you've busted me with a non-real address in my .sig.
Abby Franquemont
Russ Allbery <r...@stanford.edu> wrote:
>
>I think that's a big part of the success of That Hierarchy; the difficulty
>is that while it's great for discussions with a bunch of technical folks
>about largely technical subjects, it's still only a subset of the people
>that I'd like to talk to, and I'm not quite sure how to have some of the
>discussions there that I like to have.
And that's a major issue for me personally. I'm less and less interested
in the primarily technical conversations, but the parts of USENET where
the stuff I do tend to feel like talking about gets discussed are filled
with trends that make it entirely unreadable from my perspective. And so,
I seem to have wound up blogging and mailing-listing and that's about
it... and it's all fractured discussion for the most part, that still
doesn't hold up to USENET standards.
Kai Henningsen
> Growing up means leaving the part of the learning curve that's
> challengingly steep, and getting onto something more of an uphill hike.
Actually, sometimes I think it's the other way around - you just do a lot
less of it, but when you do, it's significantly harder because you're no
longer specialized for learning.
> The days of looking straight up at the experienced guys, and being scared
> of the chances of falling or getting something dropped on me, have been
> replaced by being up there and actually being one of them myself.
I think I never was as scared of stuff like that *until* I came to be "up
there".
> behind spamtrap addresses and fake identities. Many don't want to put
> anything of themselves out there anymore, just sit behind a browser and
> suck it all in.
And I want to say "fuck them, then, they're just as anti social as the
spammers".
> Churchill, the quote about a young man who isn't a liberal having no
> heart, and an older man who isn't a conservative having no head?
Except that I disagree with him ... I think the local version of
"conservative" demands you either not have a head, or not have a
conscience, at any age. Not that the rest is completely free of the
problem, of course.
Note the word "local" in there.
> That sort of energy for grabbing ahold of topics and thrashing with them
> is something you have in your teens and twenties, something that peaks
> in university. Past 40 you really envy the kids who still have it in
> them; you can still do it when you want to but you can feel yourself
> pushing yourself (I'm 42, and from your writing you sound like you're in
> your thirties somewhere)
... 45 in not quite two weeks ...
>and most things have all been done before and
> there's nothing new under the sun and you're looking at a particular
> thread or flamewar again, and it's that little word "again" that wasn't
> there yet back in the good old days.
Actually, there are still enough things new for me. But then, I'm not
married and have no offspring ...
> I look around at various people in groups I follow; many of them I've
> never met, nor would I have sought them out, but, FFS, they're *friends*
> now.
Yes.
Kai
--
http://www.westfalen.de/private/khms/
"... by God I *KNOW* what this network is for, and you can't have it."
- Russ Allbery (r...@stanford.edu)
Kai Henningsen
> Kai Henningsen <kaih=9RcJG...@khms.westfalen.de> writes:
>
> > Anyway, there's a reason I like Usenet (and That Hierarchy) and I
> > dislike all those web boards, related to blogs or not. There's exactly
> > one I read regularly, and it's for the news - Groklaw.
>
> And I don't know if I'm like you at all there, but I don't read any of the
> comments in Groklaw, just the headlines. I assume the comments are useful
> for the author, but I'm not sure how useful they are to a reader.
I sometimes read them, and I usually feel like I wasted my time. There's
rarely anything I want there.
> I think of Groklaw more like a topic-focused Salon.com than like a web
> board, sort of a "biased journalism" site where there's a fair bit of
> facts mixed in with editorializing. Like Slashdot, I don't even think of
> it as a web board; I never even think about the comments.
Oh yes, when I'm bored I might look at Slashdot ... but PJ is doing much,
much better. *And* she's good at presenting all the raw facts, not just
what might be convenient.
Salon? I know that there is something with that name. I'm pretty certain
I've followed two or three links that ended there, but it never struck me
as something I might visit on my own.
> > I've never been as imbedded in communities as most people - I've serious
> > issues that way - but I still find some of that on Usenet. (And some
> > mailing lists.)
>
> > But web stuff ... I don't quite know why, but it feels similar to me
> > like tv (and movies) versus radio. I like radio. I very, very rarely
> > watch the others.
>
> I find the web not exactly non-interactive, but definitely minimizing
> interaction. That's great if you just want to publish something and not
That's not exactly what I meant, though I'm finding it hard to come up
with a reasonable description.
Maybe ... too much bandwidth for making it look nice, too little for the
important facts.
It's not universal, of course, but it's very, very pervasive in all visual
media - tv, movies, web.
But it works at an unconscious level with me. And it irritates me no end.
Maybe it's that what makes me so dislike the new Google interface
look&feel - too much unnecessary eye candy. And it doesn't even have all
that much compared to other sites.
> get into a big argument about it, but I hate trying to have discussions on
> web sites. Even with the best of interfaces, the progress of discussion
> on the web seems to invert the normal pattern on Usenet. I'm used to the
> first message just raising some interesting issues and then digging into
> all of the meet in subsequent discussion, where there's room to chase down
> sidelines and elaborate on one's thought process.
>
> With all of the web boards, blogs, LJs, and the like, it seems to be rare
> for this to happen. Instead, the discussion usually gets more superficial
> and dies out the deeper it gets into the comments, and it's rare for the
> discussion to add any more depth than was present in the original message.
I think of that as "bad newsreader syndrome" - the tech just isn't up to
handle it.
Kai Henningsen
> > Anyway, there's a reason I like Usenet (and That Hierarchy) and I
> > dislike all those web boards, related to blogs or not. There's
> > exactly one I read regularly, and it's for the news - Groklaw.
>
> Well, of course it is ridiculous to nominate candidates for The
> Successor to Usenet, but since I have a low fear of being ridiculous,
> I'd look in the following places instead of blogs:
>
> * Wikipedia
A completely different thing.
> * Dmoz (at least for those heavily involved. As a more casual editor,
> I always felt like I wasn't quite a part of things)
Don't know it.
> * Various open source projects. For me it has been
> http://www.wheatfarm.org/ . Lately I've been asking myself why I
Don't know it.
> Now, these are more focused and less discussion-oriented than your
> average social group, so let me think harder and try to come up with
... and thus aren't even possible candidates.
> projects who are trying to reengineer the whole concept of online
> discussion. How about:
>
> * http://h2o.law.harvard.edu - Focused on education, and online
> articles which are assigned as part of a class, but still it is
> probably the most interesting thing I've seen in a long time about
> how to structure an online discussion (key idea: letting people
> respond when they want to, and putting those articles up
> immediately, leads to the loudmouths getting all the airspace, less
> thoughtful posts, etc. Instead, have everyone write something
> between now and next Friday, and don't post any of them pubically
> until Friday. Repeat as desired to allow reactions to other
> people's articles).
Too slow, from that description, to fill that niche.
Frankly, I suspect the basic web protocols simply aren't up to doing a
reasonable job for something like Usenet. There's a reason NNTP is a very
different protocol from HTTP.
Kai Henningsen
> sometimes). It's a lot stranger on-line, where I usually feel like people
> are giving me credit for doing way more work than I actually do.
Then again, some of us think they can tell quite a bit about how much work
that would be, and contemplate doing it themselves, and just about run
away screaming ... thus, the credit.
Or in other words, it seems like a big deal when contemplating replacing
you. Man, am I happy I don't have to.
> Yeah... the spammers never really bothered me as much as they seem to have
> bothered a lot of people, and I admit to being somewhat baffled by how
The more they got, the less they bothered me in general. It's sort of
"can't stop them anyway, so why bother getting upset about it?".
> extreme the measures that a lot of people take against e-mail spam are.
I already think I do too much. It's just undoing some of the stuff I feel
I don't need is quite a bit of work, and it's work that doesn't actually
give me any immediate benefits ...
> > Then there's the story of The Man Who Got Fired For Something He Said In
> > Usenet, and Dejagoogle and the worry that HR departments are going to
> > surf on candidates. I still post under my real name, and maybe I'm
> > being overly brave and ought to adopt a fake identity, but it wouldn't
> > feel right. It wouldn't be honestly me anymore.
>
> I feel the same way.
I've never felt threatened in the first place.
> just wears at me, almost subconsciously. I naturally tend to care more
> about formatting and layout than most people I know (I do things like
> reformat and rework source code all the time), and I just don't get why
> people would want to send messages that are that *ugly*.
Don't look at me. I'm in the same place.
Kai Henningsen
> Rebecca Ore <spamtra...@NOHarvestverizon.net> writes:
> > Russ Allbery <r...@stanford.edu> wrote:
>
> >> I've gotten better about this over the years. I used to be almost
> >> anti-fandom,
>
> > Anyone who can use the word "gafiate" isn't *that* removed from fandom.
>
> I've read a *lot* of SF. :)
So have I, but I have no idea what that word means.
> level than "oo, look at all the neat political ideas that Heinlein had!"
*Neat*? Heinlein?
> Really, the books group in That Hierarchy has been exactly what I was
> looking for, although I think I'm looking for even more of that. But I'm
> not sure. I may not really have the time for more than that.
The aforementioned Nicoll seems to be one guy doing more-or-less regular
reviews, though typically about old stuff (like, author X died, ISFDB says
he wrote these, which do I remember reading?) ... or maybe that's just the
current phase.
> rec.arts.sf.written might well give me that. I should probably give it
> more of a chance.
I think so - if you can steer free of the political discussion and the
resulting stress.
Kai Henningsen
> (And of course people are unwilling to _learn_. I'm of the
> pre-September vintage, just barely, and I _expected_ that I wouldn't
> automatically have everything about the net made easy for me. The
> difference between commercial and open source support mailing lists
> seems to be that a commercial list poster, asking "how do I do X",
> expects a step-by-step guide; an open source poster is going to get
> some hints as to which man pages to read so that he can learn how to do
> not only X but also Y, Z and Q which are useful minor variations that
> he might find handy some day.)
Hell, I met that attitude before Usenet. From fellow university students,
no less. The first time, I was completely stunned and couldn't believe it.
If you don't want to learn, what on earth are you doing at a uni?!
> All this said, there are bits of outer USENET that still work even if
> the Good Stuff (at least as far as I'm concerned) is increasingly in
> private hierarchies. I find it actively painful to look at the LJ and
> IM software working through all the same mistakes which USENET and
> email had _solved_ by the time I got on board (1993). Doesn't anyone
> find out what's been done before before writing his own uber-k3wl
> buzzword-friendly web BBS or IM system?
I have no idea. We certainly did in 1985 when creating the first BBS in
this city (which later became known as ms.maus.de). (It didn't start out
with threading, but as soon as one of us saw that at some other BBS, we
immediately implemented it - I think that must've been within the first
year. And it started out as "these other BBSes do all these things we
don't like, so let's write one that does these things the right way". Such
as, using real names, not handles; having a user interface actually in
German; use mnemonic characters to select from menus instead of numbers;
and so on.)
Kai Henningsen
> reasons). The obvious groups for me to look at are in many ways the
> rec.arts.sf.* groups, but I've always found those groups intensely
> uncomfortable for reasons that I can't quite put a finger on. This
> perhaps has something to do with my strained feelings towards SF fandom.
I see fairly little fandom in those rec.arts.sf.* groups I read. Which
these days is mostly *.composition, and sometimes *.written and *.science.
All of which have a problem that seems fairly common in non-technical
groups these days: far too much off-topic talk about real-world politics
and economy. Unfortunately I'm not immune to it myself.
You're more likely to be irritated in these groups by talk about the Iraq
war or libertarians-against-communists than by fandom stuff - the latter
isn't completely absent, but nearly so, IME.
Of course, I don't read rasf.fandom ... or rasf.written.robert-jordan. But
it's hard to disregard groups in which you find people like Charlie
Stross, Pat Wrede, Mary Gentle, and occasionally even Lois McMaster Bujold
... to name some names well-known outside Usenet.
(There's also, say, Elf Sternberg of the Journal Entries, or James Nicoll
of the many true life-threatening episodes that he often inserts as
asides, or David Langford of the "Langford!" help me out here with
encyclopedic knowledge incantation ...)
Short description of these three groups for the unfamiliar, what they're
actually intended for:
rasf.composition - about how to write the stuff
rasf.written - about what others have written, including YASID "this
is what I remember, anyone know title and author?"
rasf.science - what does actual science have to say about these things
(both written and to-be-written)
Todd Michel McComb
Abby Franquemont <ab...@eniac.stanford.edu> wrote:
>And that's a major issue for me personally. I'm less and less
>interested in the primarily technical conversations, but the parts
>of USENET where the stuff I do tend to feel like talking about
>gets discussed are filled with trends that make it entirely
>unreadable from my perspective.
I guess that first I should say that not all non-technical groups
are going into the toilet. That's my main interest, and some groups
are still (very) good.
That said, this is kind of coming full circle. Back in the olden
days, in the mid-80s, I used to long for people with more varied
interests to come onto Usenet, because I wasn't all that interested
in discussing technical topics for any length of time. When that
really happened in the early 90s, I enjoyed it. I could make some
analogies, some crude, but basically those people were the last on
and the first off. It's too bad.
Luckily, as stated originally, there are some exceptions.
Todd McComb
mcc...@medieval.org
Russ Allbery
to say in response to it. This last weekend was not a particularly good
weekend for deep thought (although it was a very good weekend for learning
to play backgammon at a somewhat better level than random flailing).
Abby Franquemont <ab...@eniac.stanford.edu> writes:
> Russ Allbery <r...@stanford.edu> wrote:
>> I think that's a big part of the success of That Hierarchy; the
>> difficulty is that while it's great for discussions with a bunch of
>> technical folks about largely technical subjects, it's still only a
>> subset of the people that I'd like to talk to, and I'm not quite sure
>> how to have some of the discussions there that I like to have.
> And that's a major issue for me personally. I'm less and less interested
> in the primarily technical conversations, but the parts of USENET where
> the stuff I do tend to feel like talking about gets discussed are filled
> with trends that make it entirely unreadable from my perspective.
Yes, same here. I have somewhat less of this problem, in that many of my
interests fit the standard geek profile and therefore I tend to be able to
find common ground with people who largely talk about technical topics. I
seem to get a fair bit of SF book discussion in That Hierarchy, for
instance. And many of my other hobbies are more doing than talking sorts
of things anyway.
I think fiber geeking in particular though is one of those topics that's
fallen into a bad crack in what's viable to discuss on-line. It doesn't
really fit in with a very technical crowd, but I know a lot of people
involved in fiber arts who want in-depth, thoughtful discussion, readable
posts, and that sense of community that we all love about Usenet and are
ill-served by the web boards and LJ communities and the like.
I'm not sure what, if anything, can really be done about that, though.
Just creating a space with those characteristics is a lot easier said than
done.
> And so, I seem to have wound up blogging and mailing-listing and that's
> about it... and it's all fractured discussion for the most part, that
> still doesn't hold up to USENET standards.
Yup.
Russ Allbery
> Salon? I know that there is something with that name. I'm pretty certain
> I've followed two or three links that ended there, but it never struck
> me as something I might visit on my own.
It would surprise me if there was anything in Salon that would interest
you, since the site is pretty much exclusively about US politics, with a
side helping of coverage of the US entertainment industry and a pretty
good sports column.
I read them mostly because I like the sports column and partly because
they provide another perspective on some political issues. I pay for a
subscription mostly to support journalism with an opinion, instead of the
various variations on corporate lackey, he-said she-said faux objectivity
crap. I'd like to also support real in-depth, muck-raking, fact-finding
journalism, which Salon doesn't do much of, but it's pretty hard to do
that at scale with the kind of resources you get from Internet
subscriptions.
> Maybe ... too much bandwidth for making it look nice, too little for the
> important facts.
> It's not universal, of course, but it's very, very pervasive in all
> visual media - tv, movies, web.
There is that too.
I have a thing about style and layout that causes me to (as mentioned
elsewhere in this thread) compulsively develop coding styles, re-indent
code, and the like, so I loved style sheets and have rehashed the design
of my web pages several times. But that was to make it easier to
understand the content, not to make it look pretty except insofar as
well-formatted text appeals to my sense of aesthetics.
>> With all of the web boards, blogs, LJs, and the like, it seems to be
>> rare for this to happen. Instead, the discussion usually gets more
>> superficial and dies out the deeper it gets into the comments, and it's
>> rare for the discussion to add any more depth than was present in the
>> original message.
> I think of that as "bad newsreader syndrome" - the tech just isn't up to
> handle it.
There are some specific bits of technology that you absolutely have to
have to support an ongoing discussion. One of them is the ability to
remember what you've already read and only show you the new things.
Another is to be able to track multiple ongoing threads and show you the
new material in all of them in a summary view rather than making you
remember what you were reading and chasing them all down again. Nothing
widely deployed on the web right now seems to have either of these, and
the other problems (like crappy editor interfaces, bad visual
presentation, and weird ownership problems with sites) are minor compared
to that.
Kai Henningsen
> Kai Henningsen <kaih=9SfEQ...@khms.westfalen.de> writes:
>
> > Salon? I know that there is something with that name. I'm pretty certain
> > I've followed two or three links that ended there, but it never struck
> > me as something I might visit on my own.
>
> It would surprise me if there was anything in Salon that would interest
> you, since the site is pretty much exclusively about US politics, with a
> side helping of coverage of the US entertainment industry and a pretty
> good sports column.
Doesn't sound like it, even if you take out the "US" in there.
> I read them mostly because I like the sports column and partly because
Sports leaves me cold ...
> they provide another perspective on some political issues. I pay for a
> subscription mostly to support journalism with an opinion, instead of the
> various variations on corporate lackey, he-said she-said faux objectivity
> crap. I'd like to also support real in-depth, muck-raking, fact-finding
> journalism, which Salon doesn't do much of, but it's pretty hard to do
> that at scale with the kind of resources you get from Internet
> subscriptions.
... and *that* I get quite a bit from the radio. (http://wdr2.de/ mostly,
except on the air, not on the web.)
Mean Green Dancing Machine
Todd Michel McComb <mcc...@medieval.org> wrote:
>In article <877jktv...@windlord.stanford.edu>,
>Russ Allbery <r...@stanford.edu> wrote:
>>
>>That agent doesn't have to be tied to a real-life identity, but
>>it has to have some degree of substance behind it, not just be a
>>trivially discardable facade.
>
>Right, and in the old days, some people seemed to feel as though
>their online identities were *more* them than what their birth
>certificate might say. I always found that vaguely creepy, but I
>don't have any substantive problem with it.
Thank you very much. And I'm sure piranha thanks you, too.
(I'm not that irritated, but that was indeed my initial reaction.)
--
--- Aahz <*> (Copyright 2005 by aa...@pobox.com)
Hugs and backrubs -- I break Rule 6 http://rule6.info/
Androgynous poly kinky vanilla queer het Pythonista
Why does George Bush hate America?
Mean Green Dancing Machine
Russ Allbery <r...@stanford.edu> wrote:
>Rebecca Ore <spamtra...@NOHarvestverizon.net> writes:
>>
>> I'd suggest trying NorWestCon sometime, as it tends to be more book
>> oriented.
>
>The only time I was at a NorWestCon it was also a Westercon, and I
>didn't pay enough attention to the panels. I really hate travelling,
>so that ends up being a constraint; it's rare for one of the bigger
>conventions to end up in the Bay Area and when it's happened in
>the past (like ConJose), it's often caught me at a very bad time
>personally.
"Norwescon", BTW.
>> WisCon is both feminist and book-oriented which you might find of
>> interest even if it's not actually for you.
>
>I think I'd really enjoy WisCon, except that it conflicts with Baycon,
>which is the only con that I've attended regularly for years. Not that
>I always go to a lot of panels, but there's something to be said for
>familiarity and not having to travel to Wisconsin.
Potlatch. Too bad you just missed the one in SF; next year it will be
back in Seattle.
(Someone mentioned this thread on alt.poly just now. ;-)
Mean Green Dancing Machine
Russ Allbery <r...@stanford.edu> wrote:>>> That Hierarchy
>>
>> [*]
>
>It's the other hierarchy run with the Usenet II soundness principals and
>the like that started as an alt.sysadmin.recovery hierarchy and has since
>grown a few other separate groups. You have to ask to get a feed, mostly
>it's people running their own news servers or who know someone who is,
>etc. There was originally a rule against mentioning the name of it
>outside of the hierarchy, so I have a hard time bringing myself to do so,
>even though at this point it's likely completely pointless.
Gotcha. I'll see whether I've got the time/energy for a longer followup
to your original post, but the summary is that while I see problems with
Usenet, I have gone through the feeling of Usenet decline since before
Endless September started (when alt.callahans mutated into something I
was no longer interested in), and my current two primary groups are still
doing reasonably well (alt.polyamory and comp.lang.python -- though I do
have some concerns about the long-term health of alt.poly because of
LiveJournal).
Mean Green Dancing Machine
Russ Allbery <r...@stanford.edu> wrote:
>
>That Hierarchy
[*]
Russ Allbery
>> That Hierarchy
> [*]
It's the other hierarchy run with the Usenet II soundness principals and
the like that started as an alt.sysadmin.recovery hierarchy and has since
grown a few other separate groups. You have to ask to get a feed, mostly
it's people running their own news servers or who know someone who is,
etc. There was originally a rule against mentioning the name of it
outside of the hierarchy, so I have a hard time bringing myself to do so,
even though at this point it's likely completely pointless.
--
Adam Thornton
Roger Burton West <ro...@nospam.firedrake.org> wrote:
>Doesn't anyone
>find out what's been done before before writing his own uber-k3wl
>buzzword-friendly web BBS or IM system?
Shit no. Real men just grab their dicks and start coding!
Reading, and especially doing the Dreaded Literature Search, is BORING,
when you could be writing gWanker2005++.NET!
Bah. Didn't get as much recovery out of that vacation as I needed,
apparently.
Adam