Re: Netnews: The Origin Story

not@telling.you.invalid (Computer Nerd Kev) writes:

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.

I do the same.  I couldn't handle the volume of the early 2000s, but I
was amazed seeing people who do.  Experts can read messages very quickly
and don't need to think much---they're so well trained that they
recognize things very quickly.  I miss seeing that.  I always liked to
be around to just watch that happening.

I'd choose one of two threads and try to exhaust them.  I think it's
quite okay to let most of the content go by.  Nevertheless, I do think
that when communities get large, a certain new kind of organization must
take place.  For example, let's consider comp.lang.c back in 2002, say.
There was one guy there called ``Dan Pop''.  If I recall correctly, he
worked at CERN.  He was a language lawyer that was fun to watch.  In
many ways he was setting the tone for the group and people respected
that.  He'd reply various posts telling people that was not C.  I
learned a lot from that.  The busier the group, the more strict we must
be on topics choice and so on.  I think that's alright.  Right now, I'm
totally laid back here because we have so little content going on here.
If it increases, I'd try not to waste people time reading so much chat
or getting a thank-you-for-posting article (as I did in this thread).
We have so little content right now that I do think it's nice to tell
someone---yeah, keep these posts coming.

I don't know how else I would be able to handle 10x the content.

>
What I don't know is how people handle 10x this content on popular
Web forums. On Usenet you can skip through things quickly with an
interface of your choice. On a Web forum just ten new threads in
five sub-forums are a chore to navigate through, and then you have
things like "mega" threads that are hundreds of pages of flat
posts. I've never worked out how people cope with those, let alone
prefer them!

Tell me about it.  It's so weird how we change good things for bad
things and even think that we've done very well.