Subject: Re: draft-ietf-nat-protocol-complications-02.txt

From: Vernon Schryver <[email-masked]>
Date: Wed, 12 Jul 2000 21:07:06 -0600 (MDT)

> From: Keith Moore <[email-masked]>

> ...
> face it, it's not the superior quality of AOL's service that keeps 
> AOLers from moving - it's their susceptibility to marketing BS and
> their addiction to chat rooms.  it's hard to help those people.

Other than latency, message size, message rate, and the number of
participants, what is the difference between an AOL chat room and this
mailing list as exemplified by this thread?

I don't intend to imply anything bad about this thread or suggest any of
the participants do or stop doing anything.  I've never subscribed to AOL,
never used an AOL chat room, and the closest I've come to something like
IIRC is the BSD UNIX `talk` and `write` commands and SDS-940 predecessors
in the 1960's.  However, I don't think that confers any virtue, and I hope
it doesn't blind me to all of the similarities between pots and kettles.

Vernon Schryver    [email-masked]

---

From: Keith Moore <[email-masked]>
Date: Thu, 13 Jul 2000 00:00:40 -0400

> mailing list as exemplified by this thread?

why, the participants, of course.

once people move into chat rooms and make acquaintances there, they
become reluctant to leave.  if changing service providers means they 
must leave, they're less likely to change service providers even
though they get lousy service.

I suspect the "reluctance to leave" is no less true for mailing lists.  
but IETF mailing lists don't require you to use any particular ISP.

still, my point was that the AOL community is more-or-less disjoint
from the community of folks who read IETF documents, and is likely
to remain so.  that's not necessarily a bad thing overall, but it
does imply that IETF will have little effect on the decision-making
habits of AOL subscribers.  if AOL subscribers cared about standards
compliance they would have left AOL long ago.

Keith