On Fri, 08 Feb 2008 04:13:33 GMT, "Jay Honeck"
wrote in NFQqj.20667$9j6.17497@attbi_s22:


Interesting history. Sad to see this sort of thing has happened many times.

Well, adolescent children are programmed to oppose parental
constraints in order to establish their independence as adult
individuals. It's inevitable; it's (probably) in our genes. We all
did it, and future generations will likely continue to challenge
authority in an attempt to establish their independence and announce
their adulthood. Much to the consternation of more mature adults, its
fundamental to the maturation process of transitioning from dependence
on parental oversight to becoming an autonomous person.

What is disappointing is the breakdown of the traditional method of
controlling rogue Usenet nodes that inject into the newsstream
inappropriate, off-topic, and articles clearly intended to be
disruptive. In the past, if a downstream node gatewayed abusive
content into Usenet, its upstream nodes would cut off its access to
the network through their systems until the news administrator of the
rogue site got his users back in line. Today there are at least two
reasons that method is breaking down.

First, there are news administrators who actually condone abusive
articles thinly guised in the name of free speech. While I am a firm
believer in free speech, I'm at a loss to understand their true
motivation. Any thinking adult accepts the constraints of order on
freedom. If Usenet lacked order and structure, there would only be
one newsgroup that contained the sum of all Usenet content. Clearly
that wouldn't be very useful.

But more importantly is the immunity granted Common Carriers (such as
the phone company) against liability for the content they carry. If a
news administrator can be shown to be censoring content, he is in
danger of losing that immunity. Rather than taking responsibility for
the quality of the content emanating from their nodes, these meek news
administrators abdicate that responsibility out of fear, laziness and
indifference. They are as much to blame for the decline in the
quality of Usenet content as the abusive posters whom they tolerate.

So aside from reporting articles that violate the Usenet provider's
Acceptable Use Policy to their abuse department, about the only other
acceptable course of action to stem the tide of noise is to lobby the
news administrator of the abusive node's upstream feed to disconnect
the abusive node. The identity of that site is usually discernable
from the article's 'Path:' header field.

There is also, what I would characterize as a feeble and largely
self-defeating course of action against intentionally disruptive
posters: peer pressure. Publicly admonishing them, while providing
the admonisher with a certain amount of satisfaction in venting his
frustration, in reality only contributes to reducing the newsgroup's
signal to noise ratio. But worse than that, public admonishment can
be a construed as a reward by the abuser, as it validates the abuser's
ability to affect the newsgroup's readership, and it opens a line of
communication for further off-topic articles. If one cannot resist
responding to abusive articles, he should respond to it via private
e-mail, so that the abuser is denied a public forum to spew additional
disruptive content.

As I have said before (with the exceptions above), there are only two
clear choices responsible Usenet participants are able to exercise:

1. Choosing what they read, and
2. Choosing to post or not.

That's it. Simple.