Big 8
The eight Usenet hierarchies where a new group needed a public debate and a vote — the opposite of alt.*.
After the Great Renaming of 1987 there were seven official hierarchies: comp, misc, news, rec, sci, soc and talk. humanities joined in 1995, making eight, and the name stuck. What set them apart was procedure: a Request for Discussion in news.announce.newgroups, then a Call for Votes, with ballots counted by the independent Usenet Volunteer Votetakers. A group passed with a two-thirds majority and at least 100 more yes votes than no.
The process gave Usenet a stable core that site administrators were willing to carry, along with endless procedural arguments. Since 2006 the hierarchies have been run by the Big-8 Management Board, which decides without a public vote — by then there simply weren't enough voters left to count.