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Goodbye with mixed feelings
Once upon a time on usenet 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. David that is such a damn eloquent post about not just what is wrong with usenet but society - in fact society moreso. Thunderbird is a free email / newsgroups client and Eternal September a free NNTP server so I for one hope that you'll reconsider. I'm seeing this first in aus-gardens as I've been so busy in my own (NZ) garden I haven't had time to check the groups for a while and aus.gardens is alphabetically superior to the two rec. groups (both of whch I read) and is in the same hemisphere as me. Also I see a lot of posts for the first time in ages.... I have copied your post to my saved folder where it joins several similar posts from over the years from other decent rational people. Good people who are worth 'reading' and the loss of whom is a blow to this medium. Some of those people reconsidered and I hope that you do too (I see a bunch of posts in this thread hopefully entreating you to stay). If you don't go then you give in to the arseholes - and leave me (and I'm sure many others) with less of a reason to check these groups. I've been trying hard not to give in to the exodus to advertising sponsored on-line forums where petty dictators get to control who can and can't say what they want to say. Your presence if you do decide to go will be sorely missed me me at least. I'm more of a reader than a poster and your posts are always worth the time taken to read them. Whatever you decide I wish you all the best - may your life be filled with love and laughter. Sincerely, Shaun. |
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