View Single Post
  #7  
Old April 10th 13, 11:16 PM posted to rec.autos.makers.ford.mustang
Ashton Crusher[_2_]
external usenet poster
 
Posts: 2,874
Default Why so little traffic on a Mustang Usenet group?

On Wed, 10 Apr 2013 06:15:38 +0000 (UTC), Brent
> wrote:

>On 2013-04-10, Ashton Crusher > wrote:
>
>> - Usenet is uncontrolled so it attracts lots of spam and crazy people.
>> - It cost ISPs money to support Usenet so most of them stopped
>> supporting it and running servers for it.
>> - Usenet was a known commodity to the "older" generation who started
>> out on CompuServe and text based networking and they were comfortable
>> using it. An awful lot of the "newer" generation never became aware
>> of it or found using it too complicated so the user base has dwindled
>> way off.
>>
>> I much prefer Usenet for "discussion" since you can have hundreds of
>> discussions all in one organized framework.

>
>> I generally don't like the "Forums" because it fragments everything
>> including things that really should all be discussed together... Like
>> Mustangs. Now to discuss "mustangs" you have to join several forums,
>> email lists, groups, etc and you wind up either missing a lot of
>> interesting stuff or reading teh same stuff posted redundantly.

>
>I really dislike web forum software. All that anyone had to do was mimic
>one of the many decent newsreaders out there and they didn't. Same with
>the google groups interface for usenet. Pure crap. There's no reason web
>forums can't work, they are just use crappy interfaces and they aren't
>getting better. comment systems, blogs, etc and so forth are just
>getting worse and worse not better. Slower, more clicks, more
>annoyances, more broken pieces and bugs.
>
>I can fly through usenet. everything is well ordered with a decent
>newsreader. I still read it via a terminal emulator from
>my own unix box. Web forums are slow and clunky. The better ones have
>canned 'new' post searches that bring up the active threads. That's
>about as good as it gets.
>
>> You can't fight "progress" and it seems Usenet is doomed to eventually
>> die out due to lack of support and participation. Certainly the
>> objections to all the spam and cross posting are valid ones, problems
>> that can be controlled in "Forums" - that is one good thing about
>> "forums".

>
>> - One thing you rarely find on Usenet anymore is civility however. The
>> anonymity makes to too easy to start flame wars.

>
>I find a great deal of less that civil behavior in forums and even on
>social media sites. Some of it gets canned, threads get shut down, but
>it still happens.
>
>Usenet is essentially dead. I found an autos/driving blog to my liking
>and I post there now more than I do to usenet. It's much nicer and the
>wordpress software is ok so long as thread branches don't get too deep
>and I can read it like an admin would, which this one allows. No admin
>powers, but I can read threads through the admin interface, but by most
>recent rather than subject. It's klunky but livable since I read almost
>all the threads anyway. If I didn't read nearly all the threads it
>wouldn't work so well.
>
>


One of the biggest problems on Forums, besides the fact that the mere
proliferation of them has horribly segmented the potential user base,
is trying to read new, threaded messages. You need to constantly
start over, going up and down the tree to get to what's new and many
times it's hard to tell what's new till you "get there". Decent
Usenet Readers have made all this stuff like a warm knife thru butter
but sadly the tide is against them.
Ads