On Sat, 21 Nov 2015 16:23:18 -0500, Brooklyn1
wrote:

On Sun, 22 Nov 2015 07:36:10 +1100, Jeßus wrote:

On Sat, 14 Nov 2015 10:46:37 +1100, "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.

That's one of the more cogent comments on the current situation that
I've seen. I'm rapidly losing interest as well, there's very few
groups with posters that are worth reading or communicating with any
more.

Of course, this has been going on for years now, but lately... for me
Usenet hasn't never been at such a low point as it is right now.

When you think about it, there isn't a better venue on the Internet
for those purely into conflict, trolling or just plain arguing. So as
long time genuine posters bail, the signal to noise ratio has
deteriorated.

And any new blood finding their way onto Usenet is coming from
technically inept google group users... enough said there.

It ain't looking terribly good at this stage.

That's because most of the dimwitted/non contributers are now
facebooking. I've always found it ironic when some say they have
learned here but those are the information takers who rarely if ever
have contributed. They flap their gums about gardening but seem to
have nothing to contribute, not even a single photo of their garden.

LOL Sheldon, you say the same thing in rfc...

Perhaps it's best they depart and create a vaccuum that will suck in
real gardeners, who talk less but demonstrate more. Imagine, someone
types over a thousand words about why they are leaving because it's
other's fault but hasn't spent nearly that much effort in meaningful
contributions. The truth is facebooking requires much of ones time,
facebookers don't have time for usenet... facebookers really enjoy
that inane soap opera. I spent a day looking around at facebook, all
BSing morons out lying each other.

I'm currently using a friend's Faecebook account to sell a car, it's
even worse now than when I last looked a year ago.