Re: Emigration from Usenet [was: Re: PTD was the most-respected of the AUE regulars ...]

On Fri, 26 Jul 2024, Johanne Fairchild wrote:

D <nospam@example.net> writes:
>
[...]
>

I never had a facebook account, so my evolution went from brief usenet
in the late 90s, to BBS:s, to web forums for many years, and lately a
come back for usenet.
>
I think there is a small trickle of new people from the digital
minimalism movement.

>
Some people think of Stack Overflow as a certain replacement or
competitor for the USENET.  But have you considered that perhaps they
could be getting near their end?  With Google Groups leaving the USENET,
I wonder if the USENET will house the experts once again.  Experts are
people who study.  People who study do need to exchange ideas.  These
trendy tools out there are obviously inadequate for experts.  So there
must be the need for experts to communicate.  And when we look at the
USENET today, it's doing great.
>
And if you're someone who has come back to the USENET, we can ask---why?
What happpened that brought you back?  If you're not an outlier, then
perhaps you're an illustration of a relevant phenomenon.
>

Well, in my case, it was a combination of several factors. First of all, I don't like to update my web browser every day, so more and more websites are no longer working for me, including forums. Second, more discussions moved to discord, chat rooms, facebook etc. I tried mastodon, but find it awful for long form discussions. So one day I remembered mailinglists and usenet from my youth and thought that perhaps the quality and signal to noise have become better on those platforms since the world has moved on, and since the common man no longer knows how to access them... and lo and behold... I was right! ;)
So web sites no longer working, discussions moving into proprietary platforms, discussions moving to platforms I do not like (discord, mastodon etc.) are probably some of the factors I hopped onto usenet and mailinglists again.