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

David Hare-Scott wrote:

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.

For someone who claims to be subsribed for as long as you claim you
are demonstating an exceptionately shallow intellect... usenet is no
different now from how it's always been. All anyone can hope to get
from any Newsgroup is as much as they contribute. Perhaps you are
simply too full of yourself because over the years you've contributed
very little, nothing meaningful other than your self absorbed
claptrap. Adios and don't let the door hit your ignorant ass.

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.

"David Hare-Scott" writes:

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.

As other posters have already mentioned,
there are plenty of free Usenet clients.
I'm using GNUS, (part of Emacs).

There's even "Google Groups". Not really a Usenet client,
but it will get you here.

Anyway, I've always looked forward to your posts and you never
disappoint.

If you find something online that you like better, please
come back and tell us about it.

Sorry, that kill files are all that we have.
I'm sure the guys at Bell Labs that dreamed this up never
anticipated the spammers and trolls, or the idiots.

--
Dan Espen

"David Hare-Scott" wrote:

But usenet is dying. The number of posters reduces every year. It seems
there are too few good ones left to maintain critical mass.

The reports of Usenet's death are greatly exaggerated. (Sorry, Sam!).
It's still light years ahead of BBS systems run on a Commodore 64, or
Fidonet... it has been diluted by a zillion blogs and other resources, and
I can't possibly follow all of them and still have time to garden and send
binary data with a hand-activated switch!

Like all families, we have our share of crazies, more easily ignored than
the ones we're related too.

So, thank you very much, I'm sticking around.

But that's just my opinion.
I may be wrong.


--
Gary Woods AKA K2AHC- PGP key on request, or at home.earthlink.net/~garygarlic
Zone 5/4 in upstate New York, 1420' elevation. NY WO G

On 13 Nov 2015, "David Hare-Scott" wrote in
rec.gardens:

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.

You have to be either foolish or very discriminating to actually pay
for a Usenet newsreader. There are many good free ones. The for-pay
ones are different but not necessarily better. You have to set them all
up, of course.

But if you're looking for an excuse to quit, by all means carry on with
your misconception.

Derald wrote:
"David Hare-Scott" wrote:

X-Newsreader: Microsoft Outlook Express 6.00.2900.5931

I have just got a new machine that doesn't natively come with a news
client
Well, your present machine didn't, either; har!

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.
Nah: Too many free Linux and Windows newsreading clients-with
flexible means of eliminating unpleasantness-as well as free servers
out there in the Zone and Mrs. Jones has you ;-) You'll be back,
even if just for the occasional drive-by, I betcha.

Most will not care which is fine.
I am not in that group.

Nor am I . There are too few here who actually post , much less useful
information . You leaving makes that one less positive contributor in the
group .
FWIW , Mozilla Thunderbird and eternal-september news server are a free
and easy to configure combination . And both are free .

--
Snag

In article , says...

"David Hare-Scott" writes:

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.

As other posters have already mentioned,
there are plenty of free Usenet clients.
I'm using GNUS, (part of Emacs).

There's even "Google Groups". Not really a Usenet client,
but it will get you here.

Anyway, I've always looked forward to your posts and you never
disappoint.

If you find something online that you like better, please
come back and tell us about it.

Sorry, that kill files are all that we have.
I'm sure the guys at Bell Labs that dreamed this up never
anticipated the spammers and trolls, or the idiots.

Just an aside, but Bell Labs had very little to do with the development
of USENET. It was originated at Chapel Hill and Duke and was at one
time a competitor to the Internet.

On 11/15/2015 6:53 AM, Terry Coombs wrote:
Derald wrote:
"David Hare-Scott" wrote:

X-Newsreader: Microsoft Outlook Express 6.00.2900.5931

I have just got a new machine that doesn't natively come with a news
client
Well, your present machine didn't, either; har!

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.
Nah: Too many free Linux and Windows newsreading clients-with
flexible means of eliminating unpleasantness-as well as free servers
out there in the Zone and Mrs. Jones has you ;-) You'll be back,
even if just for the occasional drive-by, I betcha.

Most will not care which is fine.
I am not in that group.

Nor am I . There are too few here who actually post , much less useful
information . You leaving makes that one less positive contributor in the
group .
FWIW , Mozilla Thunderbird and eternal-september news server are a free
and easy to configure combination . And both are free .

It has been a long time ago since I signed up with Block.News, bought
20GB then for not much money. Just checked my account and I've only used
0.78203GB up to now. Secure system, no problems in the last many years.
Lots of places out there to get signed up. I use Thunderbird vs
Microsoft's crap.

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
snip...

Well, yes you could say that Usenet is dying. That is because people are
leaving. _You_ are leaving. Need I say more?

You can certainly keep up with this group at no cost beyond a bit of time
using the eternal-september server and Thunderbird as a client just as I'm
doing for this reply. No need to subscribe to any other discussions if that
is what you want so the extraneous noise will be less of a bother. Sure, we
get some a-hole posts here but they are remarkably few compared to other
groups.

On 11/13/2015 5:46 PM, David Hare-Scott wrote:
I have been using usenet for decades now ...snip...]

I've been on usenet for many years. I usually post in the group
alt.narcissists.text. BTW, are you leaving because of something I said?

ADule

"adule" wrote in message
...
On 11/13/2015 5:46 PM, David Hare-Scott wrote:
I have been using usenet for decades now ...snip...]

I've been on usenet for many years. I usually post in the group
alt.narcissists.text. BTW, are you leaving because of something I said?

ADule

It is what you did not say...

On 11/15/2015 4:58 PM, SG1 wrote:

"adule" wrote in message
...
On 11/13/2015 5:46 PM, David Hare-Scott wrote:
I have been using usenet for decades now ...snip...]

I've been on usenet for many years. I usually post in the group
alt.narcissists.text. BTW, are you leaving because of something I said?

ADule

It is what you did not say...

I knew that.

"J. Clarke" writes:

In article , says...

"David Hare-Scott" writes:

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.

As other posters have already mentioned,
there are plenty of free Usenet clients.
I'm using GNUS, (part of Emacs).

There's even "Google Groups". Not really a Usenet client,
but it will get you here.

Anyway, I've always looked forward to your posts and you never
disappoint.

If you find something online that you like better, please
come back and tell us about it.

Sorry, that kill files are all that we have.
I'm sure the guys at Bell Labs that dreamed this up never
anticipated the spammers and trolls, or the idiots.

Just an aside, but Bell Labs had very little to do with the development
of USENET. It was originated at Chapel Hill and Duke and was at one
time a competitor to the Internet.

My mistake. The first time I saw Usenet I was working at Bell Labs.
All these years I've been making an unwarranted assumption.

Thanks.

Now I'm wondering what command I typed to read news
and where it came from. Oh well, some of my memories
have been in the compost heap too long.

--
Dan Espen

On Sun, 15 Nov 2015 17:16:22 -0600, adule wrote:

On 11/15/2015 4:58 PM, SG1 wrote:

"adule" wrote in message
...
On 11/13/2015 5:46 PM, David Hare-Scott wrote:
I have been using usenet for decades now ...snip...]

I've been on usenet for many years. I usually post in the group
alt.narcissists.text. BTW, are you leaving because of something I said?

ADule

It is what you did not say...

I knew that.

Not to worry, people leave Newsgroups, and have to announce it yet,
because they have very thin skin... usenet is much better off without
them.