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Old April 10th 13, 07:15 AM posted to rec.autos.makers.ford.mustang
Brent[_4_]
external usenet poster
 
Posts: 4,430
Default Why so little traffic on a Mustang Usenet group?

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.



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