"The Real Bev" wrote in message
...
On 01/28/2016 11:47 AM, Your Name wrote:
wrote:
On 01/27/2016 09:15 PM, Your Name wrote:
wrote:

Few used it even when it was highly active. When I rode on the ski
lifts with strangers I asked them if they ever used any of the skiing
or
other newsgroups. Granted, a small sample -- maybe 100 people, if
that
-- but you'd think that ONE might have been an addict. Nope.

For swift help from strangers, many of whom are actually qualified to
offer it, nothing has even come close. The "forums" are maddeningly
inefficient and the users are frequently... of negative utility.

Hi, you must be new to the internet. ;-)

sigh You guessed it. Only since 1994 sob.

*All* internet forums, including Usenet, Facebook, Wikipedia, IMDB,
etc., etc., are infested with idiots, know-nothings, and trolls
claiming to be experts. The reality is most of them are 12 year olds
(either physically or mentally).

My only facebook friends are people I "knew" from usenet, actual RL
friends and relatives, and friends/relatives of usenet "friends". I have
met some of the usenet people in real life and stayed in their home. How
often does that happen in facebook-only relationships?

Much more in my experience.

With usenet you could get to "know" people from their repeated
interactions with you and others; with facebook you're limited to
pre-approved people for the most part,

No you are not with the facebook groups.

and total strangers just don't wander in because they're interested in the
subject of the group.

Hordes of them do with the facebook groups.

Or maybe that actually happens,

It does.

but I'd bet against it.

You've just lost that bet.

The interface doesn't encourage serious interchanges, just pronouncements.

That is just plain wrong.

Twitter, of course, is worse. I have a Twitter account, but I just used
it to track down people I knew in a previous life, and I've done that
maybe 3 times.

Plenty use it for much more than that.

The benefit of proper Usenet software or good forum software is that
you can killfile such imbeciles and ignore them.

The problem with forums is the low density of text and ****-poor
indexing.

As against the almost-no indexing in Usenet newsgroups, and the fact
that in most newsgroups the morons can't be banned.

Google used to have an excellent usenet search function, but they gutted
it a few years ago. Better than nothing now, but not by much. You can
still ask a question in some relevant groups and get good answers, but
many are just gone forever.

It was a tremendous resource, and we let it die.

We didn’t let it die, it died because hardly anyone even knew it exited.

We should be ashamed.

Nothing to be ashamed of. It never got anything like the public
recognition that facebook etc has. Even those who have never
used it and refuse to even have a cellphone at all have heard
of facebook. Nothing like that ever happened with usenet.