| Personal experience I toyed with newsgroups back when I was in high school. I found them unwieldy and not very user-friendly. This was using various types of newsgroups software. It was just too difficult to find what I wanted, and then you had various ISPs filtering the groups so if you found something via web search, it was a crap shoot whether you could hit that group. Shortly after I stopped using them.
I think the people who still use them are (a) using them for illegal purposes or (b) using them for pr0n. My opinion. |
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 DavePR
join:2008-06-04
Canyon Country, CA
 ·DSL EXTREME
1 edit | I have been participating in a discussion of a nerdish hobby on Usenet for well over 10 years. There are discussions for every hobby under the sun on the Usenets. There are also groups for every subset of science and technology, from weather to digital TV; upscale audio; flea power ham radio; etc.
Usenet is text and has none of the absurd overhead of HTML (usually) and is well suited to measured discourse.
Google Groups is one of the worst things to happen to Usenet as it allowed the riff-raff to post, without the aptitude test inherent in setting up a third party client.
I already left Earthlink via Time-Warner due to absurd cost, lousy security, and incredibly bad customer service. Today I am more certain I made the right move.
Why does everything end up appealing to the lowest common denominator? Does it have to have pictures to sell it to the average yake? |
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webgiant
join:2008-07-13
Overland Park, KS
1 edit | said by DavePR:Google Groups is one of the worst things to happen to Usenet as it allowed the riff-raff to post, without the aptitude test inherent in setting up a third party client. Thanks for making me feel old.
Specifically, about 15 years ago AOL was considered one of the worst things to happen to the Internet "as it allowed the riff-raff to post" on Usenet News (and other places), "without the aptitude test inherent in setting up" an Internet access connection.
Google Groups wasn't the worst thing to happen to Usenet News in terms of "allowing the riff-raff to post", it was the worst thing to happen to Usenet in terms of allowing people to bypass their ISP's Usenet News server. ISPs could see that people weren't using the news server's text-only groups anymore, since the end users could get them on Google Groups, so the ISPs started shutting down their Usenet News servers for cost savings.
Google Groups also blurred the lines between Usenet News and web-based message boards, making the Joe Average user of text-only groups not really understand about Newsreaders and the like. The upshot of the blurring was that Usenet News servers were no longer required because everyone was headed to Google Groups.
So now we're seeing the death knell of Usenet News, which has been replaced by the web-based message boards known as Google Groups. Usenet News is about 0.3% text-only messages, and 99.97% binary-only groups, and ISPs have been trying to shed the latter for years. Google Groups has helped them get rid of Usenet News and its 99.97% binary-only groups, (generally) without offending the folks who still use text-only groups. |
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