Because sometimes doing so (up to a point) is the only rational thing to do.

If the point is to make the move happen as quickly as possible, and the strategy one adopts is one that enrages the participants and makes them stay out of pure spite, then it is kind of counterproductive, isn't it? Besides which, needs don't cease to be real simply because they're emotional ones and what does the net exist for, if not the enjoyment of the people on it? If our "rational solution" to a problem ignores those needs and undermines that enjoyment, then just how rational is it, really, and what of value does it accomplish, even if people are willing to grit their teeth and go along with it, that one time? Stress does accumulate, and if people are called on to do this too often, it isn't going to make for a very pleasant, or even a very civil, forum.

This will be true even in the friendliest of settings, and in all fairness, the custom referred to is one long established, predating the Internet by ... who really knows, how long? Granted, it is one that ignores the differences between live and online conversation. The line I will hear is, "would you go up to a group of people at a party, and ask them to move their discussion to another room?" But, a conversation on Usenet will appear on the screen of everyone, so it as if the participants in each of the discussions at our hypothetical party were speaking to each other using bullhorns.

No matter. Even the most reasonable of people like to do things in the way they are used to, so custom is something that changes gradually, not all at once. To do things this way eases the shock and insures that the new body of custom is, at each point, one that is well tested enough to insure some degree of harmony among the participants. And, let us be honest. Usenet was never known for the calm reasonability of its denizens. Using confrontation instead of gradual persuasion to effect change, insures that at best one will have to slog through endless flamefests to get anything done, and who needs the headache?

So, like I said, I ran into this thread. At the time (it's still 1995 at this point) off topic posting was still the exception, instead of the rule that it was to go on to become by 1999 in most groups. I decided to try to do something, and this time I took the earlier gripes of the established regulars into account. With this in mind, I entered the thread.

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