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From: Michael Black <
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Newsgroups: comp.misc
Subject: Re: Slashcott enters second week ?
Date: Sun, 2 Mar 2014 23:24:04 -0500
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On Wed, 26 Feb 2014, RS Wood wrote:
>> Usenet needs more people to participate than it does carpetbaggers
>> taking over one unused newsgroup because the website they've invested in
>> so much has incremented its level of commerciality.
>
> Michael - You seem overly invested in protecting this Usenet group for the
> people who were using it prior to February 2014. Here's who those people
> are, and what they were posting:
>
But you forget, I never left Usenet. I expended a lot of effort 17 years
ago trying to build up the local hierarchy, I've stayed with the
newsgroups as participation has dwindled. I remember the disgust some
locals proclaimed about usenet, yet they'd never participated. I also
remember some fools who thought they should use usenet as a survey, count
heads, rather than use the interactive nature of the newsgroups to involve
people, pull them in as participants. I remember having a freenet here in
Montreal, "internet access for all" for a total of four months in 1996,
the people behind the scenes unable to use the local newsgroup, yet then
contemptably blaming us when the project failed.
I've seen all the stories about "too much spam, and too many trolls", the
disgust so many people have with the newsgroups, yet often that's just
repetition of something they heard, not something they experienced. I've
seen people look at newsgroups, complain about too much spam and then fail
at whatever project they were attempting, because they couldn't adjust to
the new situation of being online. For 25 years before that, I saw the
same types of people and groups come up with other excuses for why they
didn't do that well in involving people.
I never left, and yet suddenly a group of people want to start a club in
an unused newsgroup. I didn't come here through your webpage, I came here
because someone posted in a newsgroup or two that I still read. I came
because I had no idea what you were doing here. But in reading all the
messages that were here last week, I see newbies having great plans, yet
still not out of the newbie to Usenet stage. I've seen all that before,
people leaping before they listen and learn.
I find it amazing that all this time nobody said "hey, let's use usenet",
yet when yet another website shows its commercial side or whatever, you
come here planning to use this as your club room.
I don't care about this newsgroup, I care about all the planning you have
for Usenet in general, when you haven't shown any leadership quality. It
doesn't matter which newsgroup you took over, or whether you'd created
yet another newsgroup, it's whether you participate in Usenet or are
treating this like a clubhouse, at which point you might as well have gone
to a mailing list, or one of those google or yahoo groups.
So far what I see is some web-based notion of how things should be done
applied to a newsgroup. Yet, I can remember when someone basically said
Usenet was like the card catalog of the internet, a reasonably well
structured arrangement of discussions, so when you wanted to discuss
something, you generally could find where it's at, and if not, then find a
more general newsgroup to fit your interest in. But this seems to be
about this newsgroup, and then the rest of Usenet some ancillary to it,
which is outrageous when so many seem to be new to usenet (or at least
long gone and now returning).
You don't need a centralized forum or newsgroup when all of Usenet is well
organized.
Judging at what you consider "active" newsgroups, I can tell there hasn't
been much exploring ("hacking" for those who love trendy labels). I have
no idea what state they are in, but there were newsgroups for events and
newsgroups for new things on the internet and newsgroups for faqs and all
that, the structure is there, so work with it, rather than thinking as
newcomers that you have the solutions. Indeed, in the old days, you'd
start up a newsreader for the first time, and that sort of newsgroup was
waiting, already subscribed to, and you were generally expected to read up
on Usenet, and read a newsgroup a bit before posting.
You collectively can't make decisions about usenet until you actually are
out there being participants. In the posts I replied to last week, I saw
a collective lack of knowledge of Usenet, yet some assumption of the right
to "make it better".
Those posts of mine last week were in effect a reaction to your collective
newbiness, which would have happend anyway if you'd popped into some of
the many newsgroups I still read and replied to an old post via google,
crossposted without a need, replied to an offtopic post as soon as you
arrived, told the existing population that things needed to be cleaned up,
or told us how to fix things without spending any real time participating.
Michael
