Re: Netnews: The Origin Story

Computer Nerd Kev <not@telling.you.invalid> wrote:

D <nospam@example.net> wrote:

This is the truth!  As a thought experiment I sometimes think about
how I would be able to handle usenet if it had 10x the nr of posts,
and I don't think I would.
 
It would have to be either a laser focus on a very small nr of
groups, or aggressive filtering of the subject lines.

 
True, although in desperation for content my focus has expanded to
lurking in groups I'm barely interested in.  I might not mind needing
to narrow my focus back a lot.

In it's heyday in the mid 90's, the posting rate was such that in
popular groups, one could spend hours reading, clearing the rest of a
thread that went off the rails, marking all as read on entirely
uninteresting threads, and managing to clear what seemed like a
thousand or two posts.  And then, at the end of it all, if one had
managed to sift through, say, 1000 posts, finding that the group had
received 1250 new posts during the time one had cleared the 1000.

The rate of the firehose of posts is hard to imagine if one wasn't
active on usenet at the time to witness it in person.