Peter J Ross wrote:
> On 2022-03-04, Jason Evans <
jse...@mailfence.com> wrote:
>> On Thu, 3 Mar 2022 02:15:30 -0000 (UTC), Spiros Bousbouras wrote:
>>
>>> I have a vague recollection from years ago that the process for creating
>>> a new group involved a public voting process and if there were N votes
>>> in favour and M votes against then N must be above some value and N-M
>>> must also be above some value. But looking at
>>>
https://www.big-8.org/wiki/
>> Content_and_Format_of_a_Request_for_Discussion_(RFD)
>>> and
https://www.big-8.org/wiki/Final_RFD_/_Last_Call_for_Comments
>>>
>>> I saw nothing like that. Is my recollection totally wrong or is or was
>>> true for some groups hierarchy ?
>>
>> There were lots of problems with the public voting system, namely trolls.
>
> I have no memory of "trolls" being a problem in the latter days of
> public voting.
The Usenet that existed when there was voting was completely different
from today's Usenet. There were a few issues with votes, but overall
the voting system accomplished what it was set out to do - gauge
interest in a proposed newsgroup.
One of the differences that today's Usenet population doesn't appreciate
is that in those days it was not easy to obtain multiple email addresses
that could be used to cast multiple votes. In order to cast n votes,
you needed to have n working email addresses. For most folks, n was 1.
The other basic difference was the population of Usenet. The idea of
creating a new newsgroup was to make it easier for a group of people to
discuss a given topic. There weren't hidden agendas; it was a
straightforward question of whether a new group would improve the
discussion or not. Voting was a straightforward way to answer that
question.
>> People would vote against a group for the sake of causing problems.
>
> Again, not in the latter days.
>
>> Since Usenet is relatively anonymous, there is no way to fairly and
>> accurately count individual votes. If someone voted 20 times under 20
>> different email addresses (it's not that hard to do), nobody would
>> know.
>
> Again, it didn't happen.
There was no motivation to do it, and it WAS that hard to come up with
20 working email addresses in those days.
> Or to be precise: whenever it was attempted, it was detected.
The problem was not multiple votes by one person, but encouraging people
to vote who had no intention of using the newsgroup. It was against the
rules to do things like post the voting information to a mailing list
and encourage members of the mailing list to vote; the idea was to gauge
the interest in the Usenet community from people who were actually
interested in using the group. Back then, believe it or not, most
people followed the rules. In a few cases, violations were observed and
votes were discarded.