On Sun, 05 Feb 2017 13:58:00 -0800, Jeff Liebermann
wrote:

On Sat, 04 Feb 2017 19:49:33 -0600, wrote:

I miss those days. The majority of newsgroups are either dead or filled
with morons or off topic political based fighting and name calling these
days. There were many worthwhile newsgroups that I used to enjoy, and I
wont even go there anymore.

The surest sign of success is abuse and pollution. Usenet is
obviously successful.

I wrote this rant on Usenet "personalities" maybe 20 years ago when
observed the same problems you've mentioned:
http://802.11junk.com/jeffl/crud/genesis.txt

I cant understand where everyone went.

Probably Reddit:
https://www.reddit.com/r/VintageRadios/
https://www.reddit.com/r/vintageaudio/
https://www.reddit.com/r/audiorepair/


I'll have to look at those. I personally hate web based forums, but that
is mostly bcause on dialup, it takes too long to load the pages. I used
to go ro some of those Yahoo Groups, years ago, but even them have been
taken over by spam trolls and abuse.

I know almost everyon has an
account with that miserable facebook these days (except me), but I cant
say I have ever seen any useful discussions on FB.

I have a Facebook account and I'm not afraid to use it. Mostly, I
hang round two local groups that deal with the usual neighborhood
problems. It works fairly well, and much better than the old bulletin
board outside the post office or market. It might work better if I
take the time to learn how to navigate the Facebook maze.


Some people seem to like FB. I actually had an account for a very short
time. After spending many hours trying to understand how to use it, (and
it's not easy), I made a page for a small non-profit event that I run.
It took less than one week for idiots to ruin it. Nothing posted to it
had anything to do with the topic. It became a place for people to beg
for money, call other people names, discuss politics, and post photos of
themselves drunk. Since I could only work on it from the library or a
local restaurant (using the WIFI), I finally turned the page over to
another member of our group and said here is the group and the password,
FIX THIS. After a week or so, they said that I had not made it limited
enough, and it was beyond fixing. I told them to remove everyone from
the "friends list" except the actual members of our organization.
But even doing that did not seem to stop the abuse of the site (page).
Out of extreme frustration, I deleted the whole thing, and said I would
never touch FB again.

My only affordable internet access is still
dialup, because that's all there is in this rural area where I live, and
bloated websites like FB and most of the news media sites wont even load
anymore).

Check into alternatives to cable and telco internet. There are plenty
of WISP's (wireless internet service providers).
http://www.wispa.org/Directories/Find-a-WISP
Maybe share a wireless backhaul connection with the neighbors. I
setup a few such systems using various backhauls (including
satellite). They were slow and clumsy, but sufficient as the
alternative would have been dialup or no internet.

Also, you can really cut down on the traffic by using the mobile URL's
instead of the usual URL. Try it:
https://m.facebook.com
https://m.google.com
etc... You may need to install a browser addon that fakes the user
agent string, so that the web pile thinks you're using a smartphone.
http://www.howtogeek.com/113439/how-to-change-your-browsers-user-agent-without-installing-any-extensions/
For example:
https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/user-agent-switcher/
There are others. There are also browser tweaks for dialup:
http://lifehacker.com/140120/geek-to-live--how-to-survive-a-slow-internet-connection
Or, you can switch to a text based browser.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Text-based_web_browser
However, I'm not sure it will work with Facebook.

I am a lot more limited than you could imagine. My nearest neighbor is
over a mile away. The nearest small town is 5 miles, the nearest large
city is 55 miles. I can not get a reliable cell phone signal here. To
make a call, I have to either drive up the hill, or (in warm weather), I
may go up on the roof. Because of that, I MUST keep a landline (which
also takes care of my dialup needs). There is no cable. The only way
might be a satellite dish. And that would cost me at least $100 per
month. I dont want the tv part of it. I dont watch much tv and I only
watch ME-TV (oldies). My antenna on the 35 foot tower I made from pipe,
works pretty well for tv, but only gets stations from one direction,
since there's a hill on my other side.

I am going to check on some of these text based browsers and stuff like
that though. At one time, I used a browser called "Off By One", which
only displayed text and pics. But it will not work on any websites using
HTTPS (secured), and many of them are using that now, even wikipedia.

Thanks