Not really. Certainly not if, like the vast majority of posters, one is using a threaded newsreader. Look at it this way. The only thing that you see when a thread is present in a group is the current lead article for the thread and a number in the left hand margin indicating how many articles there currently are on the thread that haven't already expired. The only thing that is going to change when you start dumping additional articles into the thread is that the number in the left hand column is going to go up. But it would take a massive effort to make it rise from a two digit number to a three, and a colossal effort to make it go from a three digit number to a four.

Now really, does the number "93" take up significantly more space on a display than the number "42"? So, really, the complaint that this was adding more clutter to that already present was a red herring - a deliberately spurious argument tossed out in order to distract the reader, much as a false scent may throw a hunting dog off the trail of its quarry.

Question: But what about those with unthreaded newsreaders? Are you saying that they're just out of luck ?

Answer: Pretty much.

Yes, I know that's not a very "nice" thing to say, but I think sometimes it's time to stop being nice and start being rational. Threaded newsreaders were with us in the early 1990s. Now, as I have asked before, if someone chooses to business with an ISP that is using software that was out of date during the first Bush Administration, whose fault is that?

For better or worse - and it has almost invariably been for better - the online community has traditionally taken the position that it is up to the user to keep his technology current. To those who would pose the above argument, let me respond with one of my own - would it be reasonable for me to have (at any point) asked people to stop using frames on their home pages, because I could only afford a 2400 baud modem and frames are a pain to deal with in Lynx? It's nice to be nice, but if we feel that we always have to accommodate the least well equipped, we're not really going to have the freedom to do much of anything - and it's really not an exotic (or terribly expensive or difficult to use) bit of software that we're talking about in this case.

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