-----BEGIN PGP SIGNED MESSAGE----- In <199707311120.MAA00669@server.test.net>, on 07/31/97 at 12:20 PM, Adam Back <aba@dcs.ex.ac.uk> said:
Another longer term way to improve the situation is to charge some small token amount per article, just to encourage people to use it with some intelligence (use cross posts rather than separately reposting to each group).
It is also entirely possible for people to have 'bots which auto-post in response to articles matching keywords, or matching authors. (We've seen a few of these on cypherpunks).
If people want to make a nuisance for others by spewing random garbage via bots to newsgroups, they could post mega bytes of stuff per day and swamp the content. What can you do about this? Charging a small amount per post, or per megabyte would provide a small disincentive for this type of behaviour. However it would never reflect the true cost to USENET bandwidth as a whole.
One interesting idea which has been floated on this list in the past is for authors to have their free posting rate moderated by other peoples ratings of their posts.
One way to implement this is for other people to pay the author for their articles a penny if they like the article. That way people who write things which others find interesting to read get subsidized posting. Is it still free speech if you have to pay for your posts if you're arguing for an unpopular minority?
This will not work!!! Charging for e-mail/news posts will no nothing to prevent spam and more than likely increase the noise on such lists. It is the spamers who have the money to post volumns of their crap. Allso I think you will find that it will be the fanatics who will think it worth the $$$ to get their message out. While I find the various mailling lists & newsgroups of intrest the majority of them are not thet intresting that I would be willing to pay $$$ every time I post a reply to someones questions (most of my posts outside of CP are answering questions on programming,crypto, & OS/2). I think that the overall quality of the newsgroups would decline if you started paying on a per-post basis. It should be noted that the Bandwith issue is a red-herring. It is an antiquated concept from the Fidonet days and does not apply. The bandwith of the USENET has been *PAID IN FULL* by every subscriber to an ISP. The ISP customers pay for their connections to their ISP who in turn pay for their connections to the Access providers who inturn pay for the Backbone. The PIPE has been paid for what goes over it not an issue. If all I want to do with my T1 connection is ship *.jpg files via ftp 24/7 that is no ones busines but my own. If I chooses to use my bandwith to transmit a variety of file formats using various protocols (HTTP,FTP,GOFFER,ARCHIE,...ect) who are you to say that some formats are good and some are not!! (this is not even getting into the content of the data being shiped).
Also, this might be an interesting information market model because technical experts might even find themselves with a well paid job of answering technical questions in newsgroups.
There is a web site that is doing exactly this. They provide forums for users to post technical questions in which "experts" will answer them. Upon receiving the answer the person who posted the question is requested to rate the answer. I haven't been on the site in awhile but the last time I was there they were working on a mechinism to compensate their "experts" for answering questions. They had a point system based on the difaculty of the questions. After registering with them and obtaining a certain number of points for correctly answering questions you would be classified as an "expert" for that forum which then would make you eligable for compensation. I believe all funds were to be generated through web page advertisement. I'll see if I can find the URL for the site and post it to the list. - -- - --------------------------------------------------------------- William H. Geiger III http://www.amaranth.com/~whgiii Geiger Consulting Cooking With Warp 4.0 Author of E-Secure - PGP Front End for MR/2 Ice PGP & MR/2 the only way for secure e-mail. OS/2 PGP 2.6.3a at: http://www.amaranth.com/~whgiii/pgpmr2.html - --------------------------------------------------------------- -----BEGIN PGP SIGNATURE----- Version: 2.6.3a Charset: cp850 Comment: Registered_User_E-Secure_v1.1b1_ES000000 iQCVAwUBM+CJB49Co1n+aLhhAQFwPwP/d785GrsF7f9Snv+TPdtXz4fDuLPrdB71 Ho7h/XOn5+dviy/Bn8U82Qo+xyCtCvNfb9Zf6/CvP+TFjAsFZlx/UE0ZYSbcHZS2 48UZqw60bIXW9N0ia9jUpd76FmsobFHHUSo+wRR5CXugNJzlYmoOfgHaRAsW85gR tmzq1Fn5jik= =2wPi -----END PGP SIGNATURE-----