On 11/13/2015 6:46 PM, David Hare-Scott wrote:
I have been using usenet for decades now and regularly on these two NGs
for about 12 years as far as I recall. I have learned much and I hope
sometimes taught something useful. At times it has been real fun and I
felt a comradeship with people who I will never meet in the flesh.
There has always been some noise, a background of posts that were a
waste of time and some posters who were always or nearly always a waste
of time. On the whole it was worthwhile.

But usenet is dying. The number of posters reduces every year. It
seems there are too few good ones left to maintain critical mass. There
has always been the ignorant the foolish and the arrogant but now the
proportion has grown in the population and so the signal to noise ratio
has declined. For those who say you can always plonk the idiots and the
terminally toxic, the problem is by the time you do that there isn't
much left. I have been reading and posting less and less.

Aside from the general decline in numbers the core problem is those who
want to abuse the system for fun or profit. Spammers and the selfish
are with us in every medium and you need to cope with that somehow. In
this respect interfaces where users must be identified and can be banned
by administrators for either reason have an advantage but clearly this
winnowing is never completely effective. Nonetheless most NGs survived
a long time without resorting to moderation - but no more. Smaller
groups (eg aus.gardens) have shrunk to the point where they are pretty
much useless and the energy isn't there to amalgamate or reorganise to
groups with sufficient mass to continue. The medium has had its day,
Sadly.

The sad, the sick, the crazy and the selfish are sometimes amusing but
often just annoying and time wasting. Their common characteristic is
they have no appreciation of their own behaviour. In real life there
are consequences to bad behaviour in society, nobody will talk to you if
you go far enough. The medium to some extent enables the socially ill by
providing real-life anonymity, allowing nymshifting and seeming like
people are not actually real, they are just streams of electrons out in
the ether.

If you are sick enough to spend all your efforts getting attention by
being a turd then usenet will make it possible. If (however well
meaning you may be) you feel it your bounden duty to jam your politics,
religion or wackiness down the throats of an international audience then
you can do it here. If you are 15 years old (in years or attitude) you
can perversely get an ego massage wasting the time of good people who
just want to talk about plants. It no longer seems possible to agree to
disagree, you must have the last word and go over the same ground again
and again. The dead horse is no longer getting beaten but a hole in the
ground where the dust of the horse used to be must be assailed daily.
The extremists of the left and right of US politics are both blind the
fact that around the world NOBODY ****ING CARES about your sectarian
poison. You are both safe and warm in your respective blankets ( red
and blue to be sure) of national, social and moral insularity - a plaque
on both your houses.

I have just got a new machine that doesn't natively come with a news
client so I am faced with buying and setting one up on it, or not. My
decision is to not. I will probably stop reading here within a month
when my old PC gets retired.

Most will not care which is fine. To those who have shared their
knowledge, experience and goodwill, thanks and fare thee well. May your
seed always germinate, your tomatoes be tasty and your flowers waft
their perfume over your life.


What do you mean "comes without news client" and you don't want to buy one?

I use Mozilla's Thunderbird for mail and ng's and its free and easy to
set up.

I agree usenet is shrinking, mainly do to large isp's not subscribing to
giga news or what ever but there are free feeds like eternal september,
while not handling binaries cover most discussion groups.