Reviving Usenet

[v***@at.BioStrategist.dot.dot.com]

I object to how blogs and social media have fragmented the internet. I
beleive what mortally wounded the usenet was (1) the newsreaders that took
forever to load a list of newsgroups (heck, they could do it gradually over
time on an as-used basis) and (2) the web based services who never maintained
the full archive and inserted their own groups in the mix. I think if there
were clever phone based browsers, better kill files and so on, the usenet
could be revived. Perhaps we need a page telling folks about newsgroups one
could post to blogs and newsgroups and tell them to use usenet.

- = -
Vasos Panagiotopoulos, Columbia'81+, Reagan, Mozart, Pindus, BioStrategist
http://www.panix.com/~vjp2/vasos.htm
---{Nothing herein constitutes advice. Everything fully disclaimed.}---
[Homeland Security means private firearms not lazy obstructive guards]
[Urb sprawl confounds terror] [Phooey on GUI: Windows for subprime Bimbos]

[b***@gmail.com]

Post by v***@at.BioStrategist.dot.dot.com
I object to how blogs and social media have fragmented the internet. I
beleive what mortally wounded the usenet was (1) the newsreaders that took
forever to load a list of newsgroups (heck, they could do it gradually over
time on an as-used basis) and (2) the web based services who never maintained
the full archive and inserted their own groups in the mix.

The latency in the USENET s a good thing. You can sleep on a hasty flame post and have it
removed downstream. If the USENET were to make a comeback on the WWW it would not
experience the problems you mention if it were agreed to contain text only groups. Many NNTP
admins didn't forward groups because of the binary traffic.

I agree with you that social media and blogs are the death of free discussion on the Internet and that context replying like we are having here is what is needed to save civil discourse in the world. The business use of the blog has given marketers, PR, and terrorists a much louder voice on the Internet than they should have.

Post by v***@at.BioStrategist.dot.dot.com
I think if there
were clever phone based browsers, better kill files and so on, the usenet
could be revived.

The blog is favored by social media companies because it is easier than this contextual dialogue to mine for keywords; marketers are too dumb to understand limited regular expressions!

Phablet form factors are just beginning to get into the character resolutions that match the glass CRTs we had back in 1985. 8-x24 characters. If users cannot cope with that many characters then they deserve to be second class citizens of the world. The rest, kill files, etc follows.

Post by v***@at.BioStrategist.dot.dot.com
Perhaps we need a page telling folks about newsgroups one
could post to blogs and newsgroups and tell them to use usenet.

I am happy to say that although I have ripped Google a new one even recently on not supporting contextual reply, it appears to exist here. Although it needs some hooks to set larger fonts; better than nothing, and better than any Javascript textarea widget from a blog. So the problem is not to communicate USENET posts to blogs, except maybe a link to a post, but to get blog users to use the reply features I am using right now in Google Groups.

Reddit and Slashdot have had Markdown format for some time now, and hardly anyone uses that. The reason is that most users now alive were weaned on IRC, chat rooms, and blogs, where none of the features we are using right now on USENET existed. The challenge is to retrain users to use this, not blogs.

Bruce Salem