Re: Once upon a time

On Sat, 14 Dec 2024 3:06:02 +0000, Steve Hayes wrote:

On Fri, 13 Dec 2024 14:23:12 +0000, bertietaylor@myyahoo.com
(Bertietaylor) wrote:
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Once upon a time say 30 years ago this newsgroup was illustrious!
How things change.

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That was because about half the members, misguidedly thinking that
"newer is better", decided to migrate to Facebook, where they called
themselves "The Prancing Halfwits".

They were upset by the posts of 3 designated trolls.

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There they fell foul of the Facebook design, where it is difficult, if
not impossible, to follow threads and replies, since they are
displayed out of order, if they are displayed at all, and the whole
thing died of inanition.

Or they died out of boredom of old age and did not get replaced.

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I still occasionally see posts from Paul Ilechko over there, but none
of the others.
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And without the input of those who left, this forum lost critical
mass, and so there's little worth seeing here nowadays either.

No way to do research in past posts without google groups.
Usenet is a keen area for ai programming. For making robots look smart
with canned answers.

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There are also quite a number of alt ngs, some devoted to individual
authors, which have little or no traffic. Perhaps if people who posted
in those also crossposted to rec.arts.books we might see something of
a revival, but I doubt if there are enough people left around Usenet
even to do that.

Robots should be welcome. Interesting if they learnt to abuse each other
as was the custom

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