[273] in Commercialization & Privatization of the Internet
pointless bickering
daemon@ATHENA.MIT.EDU (Barry Shein)
Mon Mar 4 19:04:18 1991
Date: Mon, 4 Mar 91 18:40:51 -0500
From: bzs@world.std.com (Barry Shein)
To: bob@aecom.yu.edu
Cc: com-priv@psi.com
In-Reply-To: Bob Lummis's message of Mon, 4 Mar 91 17:18:40 EST <9103042218.AA23956@alsys1.aecom.yu.edu>
>From: Bob Lummis <bob@aecom.yu.edu>
>I'd like to add to the noise level by observing that the listservs are
>actually used by real researchers other than computer scientists and
>like-minded technofreaks. If you look at the complete list of
>listservs, you see many disciplines and many serious topics.
...
>I conclude from this that the listservs work well enough to be actually
>used by non-computer-science researchers. And that we may have
>something to learn from them.
I carry 2027 newsgroups here (granted, 148 of those are listserv
reflectors.) The topics are incredibly varied, at this point I'll
guess the minority are non-computer-oriented.
(I see 307 comp.* groups, that doesn't count all the relevant alt
groups, but under 1,000 computer groups is probably a reasonable
guess, and a good number of those comp groups aren't for
"techno-freaks" either, such as comp.society.futures or various
general user-question groups.)
So this is not a compelling point. There may well be other compelling
points. It would be nice if someone would summarize them, I am also
mystified what it is about listserv's that makes them interesting.
(My impression is that they allow you to (un)subscribe and a few other
similar administrative operations with a mail message and otherwise
are mailing lists, what am I missing? I also assume they are designed
to copy every message to every subscriber's mailbox, no?)
