Re: Emigration from Usenet

On Sun, 28 Jul 2024, Johanne Fairchild wrote:

ram@zedat.fu-berlin.de (Stefan Ram) writes:
>

Richard Kettlewell <invalid@invalid.invalid> wrote or quoted:

ram@zedat.fu-berlin.de (Stefan Ram) writes:

The experts used to be here. Linux was announced in comp.os.minix.

. . .

The ‘expert’ conversations are still happening, just not on Usenet.  You
can find them in mailing lists, blogs, issue trackers, papers, etc.

>
  BTW: I shouldn't be calling Linus Torvalds and the others
  I mentioned “experts.” That would be a serious downgrade for
  them! These folks are top-tier innovators. But yeah, there
  were definitely experts back in the Usenet days, and some
  of them are still around in certain Newsgroups.

>
Yes.  ``Expert'' has been redefined.
>

A core problem with Usenet is that you can’t exclude people whose net
contribution to a discussion is negative.

>
  Or maybe the real issue is the folks who think you can't just block
  certain people out? Yeah, Usenet expects everyone to manage their
  own filters. If someone’s bugging you, you can totally filter them
  out of your feed. And if it drives you nuts to see how others respond
  to them, just find a newsreader that lets you filter that too!
  Heck, you can filter posts that have a specific word pattern in them!
  But it’s not like there’s a central authority doing that for you.

>
It's true that NNTP is able to handle the job, but most people are not
willing to be experts at using NNTP clients.
>

People have no choice but to use a client regardless of what service or system they are using to communicate with others. They don't need to be experts. NNTP is simple, so if someone wants more users, they are always free to write a web client or something, which seems to be what the masses want these days.