Think about it. I post a reply to a question in a newgroup. The more intelligent and interesting it is, and the more my reputation makes people want to read my interesting comments, the more I pay. Does that make any sense?
You're stuck thinking about users again. This is between sites, as I thought I explained previously. This is about my spool having less trash. If your post is not a pirated copy of Word, and if you, as a user, can be intelligent and interesting and enhance your reputation in less than, say, 20 KB per post (you seem to be doing fine in less than 2KB, so no worries there), then I don't think the wonderful world of USENET should change for you. Not one bit. On the other hand, I want the site that accepts postings from you to incur higher costs if you or your site-mates inject pirated copies of Word that take up space in my spool and eat up my bandwidth when *my* site's set of users and downstream feeds have no interest in that (apparently we lack "human nature"). On a private thread that cc'd you, I said this: If my server pre-fetched only the articles in the groups that its users were known to read, on the whole it would have much fewer large binaries than visit its spool every day. Behold, less trash. Yes, there would be completeness in rec.humor.funny and comp.mail.mh, and I would want those articles distributed in the manner they are now - whether by having articles pushed at me or by pre-fetching because I know there are consumers, I don't care which. The groups that *nobody* on my server reads would not consume content for articles, only for pointers. All the content would still be out there somewhere for some time, at the price of higher latency. If I had an additional policy knob that avoided pre-fetching content from servers that carried trash, so much the better. "Pre-fetching" is loosely equivalent to "accept flooded articles" to me; I don't make a fine point of only spooling articles that I know will be read, I just don't want to spool today's five pirated copies of Word. Neither do I want to prevent USENET from being used to distribute larger stuff, though, so what to do? The idea is to make the cost of injecting trash high. If your site doesn't tend to inject lots of things that other sites tend not to want to carry in their spool (pirated copies of Word, MP3s, and pornography are the current set of examples), you - as a site - would be rewarded by not having many unicast hits. If you do, you'd be "denied" the ability to poison other people's spools. The articles you have to offer would still be available as "pointers," in the event that one of your site's many users contributed something other than one of the items noted previously. Reducing the number of pirated copies of Word offered by your site would be rewarded by a reduction in the amount of unicast hits as more sites became willing to accept articles from you. Note that I consider unicast transfers of articles to take place between spools; when a reader asks for an article that is only resident as a pointer, the reader's spool would go get it and, in theory, cache it for the next reader who happened to want it. Probably some unwanted copies of Word would end up in spools this way, but at least it would be as a result of some user asking and not just because ten other sites decides my spool should have as many copies of Word as possible. Number of unicast transfers does not equal number of readers of an article; hopefully you'll see some increasing distance between what I'm saying and the belief that it would somehow change USENET for you. When presented with the notion that no cost savings would result (again, on the private thread that cc'd you), because "users" are going to fetch every article in large binary groups because of what is loosely termed "human nature," then I said: Yes, we agree on that. If the fact is that that particular aspect of human nature means we can't prevent reposting it all every week, though, then this really is an academic discussion. We can make the system more complex for the sake of shaving a few sharp edges off, but the real shape of USENET isn't going to change. There might be some benefit from an academic perspective in an implemention that would allow a news admin to set a knob so that articles below a certain size got flooded as currently happens, while articles above got "pointerized" (headers plus overview records, perhaps) and thus only fetched if actually desired by a downstream site. The notion is not to replace USENET with the web publishing model (we already have the web for that, and "web forums" and their ilk haven't exactly rendered USENET obsolete); if anything it's to augment it with some capabilities from that model that are there for site admins to use if they choose to do so. If that turns into costs that site admins want to recoup in the form of charges for their users, that's left as an exercise for the implementors (remembering my opinion stated above that I don't think USENET should change for you). Stephen
On Tue, 12 Feb 2002 01:59:14 -0800, Stephen Stuart wrote:
Think about it. I post a reply to a question in a newgroup. The more intelligent and interesting it is, and the more my reputation makes people want to read my interesting comments, the more I pay. Does that make any sense?
You're stuck thinking about users again. This is between sites, as I thought I explained previously. This is about my spool having less trash.
I'm talking about between sites. Why do you think there's a difference? Ultimately, supply and demand and the inexorable laws of economics will cause the cost of a product or service to track the cost to provide that product or service.
If your post is not a pirated copy of Word, and if you, as a user, can be intelligent and interesting and enhance your reputation in less than, say, 20 KB per post (you seem to be doing fine in less than 2KB, so no worries there), then I don't think the wonderful world of USENET should change for you. Not one bit.
I think it's wishful thinking to expect a change in the cost model not to effect the change in the cost of a service. Every example I know of points the other way. When ARIN started charging for IP registration, for example, ISPs started charging their customers for IP space. The net effect was a reduction in the use of IP space that didn't pay for itself. The same would happen to USENET.
On the other hand, I want the site that accepts postings from you to incur higher costs if you or your site-mates inject pirated copies of Word that take up space in my spool and eat up my bandwidth when *my* site's set of users and downstream feeds have no interest in that (apparently we lack "human nature").
So you want to charge for useless content without increasing the costs for useful content. You imagine that an automated system that approximates worth based on short size will meet this goal. But the obvious collateral effects are that: 1) Worthless or harmful content that is nevertheless short will be legitimized. After all, the creator is paying for it. 2) Useless and beneficial content that is nevertheless long will be penalized. Why should I pay to educate you?
On a private thread that cc'd you, I said this:
If my server pre-fetched only the articles in the groups that its users were known to read, on the whole it would have much fewer large binaries than visit its spool every day. Behold, less trash.
And if you are talking about arrangements within a single administrative domain, this won't change the price/cost model but will still reduce trash. So you don't have to go to 'sender pays' to get what you want.
The idea is to make the cost of injecting trash high.
Fine, when you invent an automated system that can sort trash from treasure, you can do this. Otherwise, you'll increase the cost of injecting treasure as well.
If your site doesn't tend to inject lots of things that other sites tend not to want to carry in their spool (pirated copies of Word, MP3s, and pornography are the current set of examples), you - as a site - would be rewarded by not having many unicast hits.
You are now in defiance of reality, I think. I don't have hard data, but I'm going to bet that more than 50% of USENET users are in it for the binaries. Do you have statistics to show that your view of what is "trash" is anything more than your view?
Note that I consider unicast transfers of articles to take place between spools; when a reader asks for an article that is only resident as a pointer, the reader's spool would go get it and, in theory, cache it for the next reader who happened to want it. Probably some unwanted copies of Word would end up in spools this way, but at least it would be as a result of some user asking and not just because ten other sites decides my spool should have as many copies of Word as possible. Number of unicast transfers does not equal number of readers of an article; hopefully you'll see some increasing distance between what I'm saying and the belief that it would somehow change USENET for you.
Again, I have no reservation about this being done between specifically consenting sites as a way of providing a more efficient feed between them. My reservation consists of expecting A to provide unicast news services to C when they have no agreement except through an intermediary B. You can't say, "if you agree to feed news to me in this new highly efficient manner, you must agree to provide unicast news service at your expense to anyone who wants it." This would, as I see it, affect the USENET cost model so dramatically as to risk making the content situation even worse. Yes, it might make things better for porn and warez. But I worry about what it would do to the good content that's still there. You can't think that sender pays won't reduce the amount of sending that benefits only the recipient.
There might be some benefit from an academic perspective in an implemention that would allow a news admin to set a knob so that articles below a certain size got flooded as currently happens, while articles above got "pointerized" (headers plus overview records, perhaps) and thus only fetched if actually desired by a downstream site.
I agree. that could be a good idea between sites that wish to adopt such an arrangement, especially between major hub servers and smaller leaf servers or network. And perhaps if a few large news sites agreed only to accept that type of arrangement, USENET could gradually get to that point.
The notion is not to replace USENET with the web publishing model (we already have the web for that, and "web forums" and their ilk haven't exactly rendered USENET obsolete); if anything it's to augment it with some capabilities from that model that are there for site admins to use if they choose to do so. If that turns into costs that site admins want to recoup in the form of charges for their users, that's left as an exercise for the implementors (remembering my opinion stated above that I don't think USENET should change for you).
It may be instructive to think about *why* web forums can't replace USENET. If you don't know, it would be a very bad idea to adopt their concepts. One advantage USENET has is a more global and consistent namespace, and that it would still have. But another is that distribution is inexpensive, even from low-bandwidth locations, and changing that could really change things. That said, I do realize that USENET has a lot of utter garbage and I'd love a good way to reduce that. DS
participants (2)
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David Schwartz -
Stephen Stuart