Death of the newsgroup.

On 11/28/2010 4:47 AM, Dancing Fingers wrote:
May be we're just old farts holding on to antiquated technology?
Isn't everyone blogging now? What is a blog anyway and how do you
blog about airplanes?

Yeah I'm old.

Blogging off.

Chris


OK, I can't resist: Steve McQueen starred in "The Blog."

Dan, U.S. Air Force, retired

"Bug Dout" wrote in message
...
Dancing Fingers writes:

May be we're just old farts holding on to antiquated technology?
Maybe. But this antiquated technology--Usenet--is still the best way to
exchange ideas, nimrods and trolls aside:

- One place to get every topic you're interested in. In contrast, with
forums you have to create a login for each one, even in the same
topic!
- Newsreaders (I use gnus within Emacs) can efficiently display messages
and allow the user to rapidly page through posts.
- Very efficient use of bandwidth, both Internet and mine. No stupid
cutesy images, avatars, blah blah.
- Newsreaders can be setup to screen out the idiots. In this case gnus
is probably the most powerful but also the most difficult to learn.
--
Science is organized knowledge. Wisdom is organized life.
- I. Kant

Basically, the big problem of the past year or so has been the departure of
the ISPs, especially those that were part of the telephone companies. That
has left us all with fewer contributors, amounting to less "signal", and the
same amount of "noise" so that the ratio looks much poorer.

For the moment, I am prepared to stick around and see what happens. I don't
get to read every day; but this is still the best format for exactly the
reasons just stated, and therefore it is worth preserving.

Peter

This newsgroup has become clogged by a couple of write-only posters. I have seen newsgroups die before. When a critical mass of uresponsive or posters is reached, real discussion dies of starvation. It seems Usenet does have a lot of competition now, too, of course. Twitter, in particular, covers some of the same market. In some ways, the 140 character limit is a good thing, and there are ways around it.