Re: [Pan-users] GNKSA

[Duncan]

Beartooth posted on Tue, 05 Jul 2011 19:24:54 +0000 as excerpted:

> What does all this add up to? I conjecture that those of us who
> make serious use of any newsreader do most of our reading in a few
> groups of groups (primarily gmane, plus news.grc et al.), *which we
> probably have largely in common* -- the groups of groups, if not the
> groups themselves. We might want to try to optimize Pan, not for usenet
> in general, but for the relatively few groups of groups.
> 
> Am I making sense?

Perhaps it's because I just got home from work, but the first time I read 
thru, no.  Then I read it a second time, and it made rather more sense.

I take it that by groups of groups, you're talking about specific 
(private, special-purpose, like gmane, not generally distributed news 
like USENET in general) news servers.  What I read you as trying to say 
is that most users active here have a few of those servers in common, and 
perhaps don't do so much general USENET over regular servers.  And from 
that, you conclude that perhaps we should optimize pan for them, not 
necessarily news in general.

If I'm reading you correctly (and it's possible I'm not), I don't believe 
I agree.  First of all, it's a reasonably well known phenomenon that most 
users are "invisible".  The majority of pan users have probably not even 
looked for this list/group, because it simply hasn't occurred to them.  
And of those that have, many will be short-timers, they'll ask a question 
or to, get their answer, and we'll not see or hear from them again, 
possibly forever, possibly until 2-5 years later when they have another 
problem.  And it might surprise people how many lurkers we have reading 
the list too, who never (or almost never) post.

(Actually I have some personal experience in that regard.  I once had 
someone attack me on a list and had lurkers coming out of the woodwork as 
they say, defending me, saying they'd never posted before but read the 
list regularly, and that they regularly read my replies to others and 
regularly learn from them, even if they /had/ never posted until that 
moment.  It was actually a rather humbling experience to see people 
breaking the resistance to posting, and making their first post, 
defending /me/, but it was rather enlightening to me as well.  There's a 
*LOT* of lurkers out there; our posts really do have an unseen audience 
and affect WAY more people than we might think!)

By that very same token, the regular posters here are somewhat atypical 
for a pan user, and it's dangerous to try to draw conclusions about what 
groups and servers people actually use pan for, based on only the 
comments we see in the list/group, because by definition and experience, 
they /are/ atypical representatives of the ordinary pan user.

Besides that, I know a lot of people who /have/ posted here over the 
years, have stated that they use pan for major binary downloading, 
following several TV shows, for instance, via newsgroup posting.  Others 
do the music groups, and of course there's the folks that do pr0n.  They 
may follow a few text groups/lists, but not many.

So I don't believe it's a good idea to optimize pan only for a few 
specific servers plus a few groups on the wider USENET (including 
alt.binaries), because that would cripple pan as a tool that many people, 
not necessarily regular posters here, but pan users non-the-less, depend 
on.

-- 
Duncan - List replies preferred.   No HTML msgs.
"Every nonfree program has a lord, a master --
and if you use the program, he is your master."  Richard Stallman