"The Real Bev" wrote in message
...
On 01/28/2016 06:59 PM, Orange wrote:


"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.

Wait, I did join a facebook group with something like 10K members. It's
really a chore to read it even if I'm interested in the subject matter.

Depends on what you want to read it for. I don’t find the one where
plenty ask questions about local events and services and pet stuff in
to be a chore to read and its got 4K members in a town of 20K people.

I also belong to a small group of motorcyclists, and for some reason I
can't see only NEW posts even though I use Social Fixer to either mark all
read or mute all.

The best way to get that result is to turn notification on for that group.

This is annoying. Facebook screws around with stuff so that Social Fixer
has lost much of its utility, but the aforementioned functions still work
on non-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 existed.

Hardly anyone knew it existed in its heyday.

Yeah, that's what I was saying.

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.

Perhaps that was a pretty damn good filter -- if you have to actually seek
out something you'll value it more than if it just dropped into your lap.

Clearly most didn’t value it enough to keep using it enough to stop it
dying.