On Fri, 29 Jan 2016 18:17:59 -0000, Les Cargill wrote:

The Real Bev wrote:
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? 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, and total strangers just don't wander in
because they're interested in the subject of the group.



Facebook was designed as a platform to amplify assortive mating amongst
the Elite at Havahd.

Then it overthrew the Eugenicist origins and tried
to become a popular thing. Now it's just kind of sad.

Or maybe that actually happens, but I'd bet against it. The interface
doesn't encourage serious interchanges, just pronouncements. 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.

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 should be ashamed.



Nah. NNTP is just one-to-many email. It was supposed to be ephemeral,
the "messaging" protocol. If anything needed to be persistent,
there was FTP, GOPHER, then HTTP.

Or you could archive individual posts locally. Or run your own
server if you were mad as a hatter and wanted to delve that
deep into the rabbit hole.

I first used Usenet to access support for the first (dialup) ISP
I subscribed to, around the time of the Eternal September.

Before Google, there was DejaNews and it broke at some point. Just
stopped working. I think Google sort of tried to resurrect it, but
it's just gone, man.

I used to post through Dejanews as I could do so from home and work. But there was a 1 week (!) delay in receiving posts, so everything I replied to was out of date. This made people very angry.

--
Keith was explaining to his sister how to jump start a car.
"I explained about which cables to hook up where and in what order.
She said, 'ok, I got all that, so now, which car do you start first?'"