death of newsgroups (Microsoft closing their newsgroups)

[Xah Lee]

• Death of Newsgroups
http://xahlee.org/UnixResource_dir/writ2/death_of_newsgroups.html

plain text version follows.

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Death of Newsgroups

Xah Lee, 2010-07-13

Microsoft is closing down their newsgroups. See:
microsoft.public.windows.powershell.

I use comp.lang.lisp, comp.emacs since about 1999. Have been using
them pretty much on a weekly basis in the past 10 years. Starting
about 2007, the traffic has been increasingly filled with spam, and
the posters are always just the 20 or 30 known faces. I think perhaps
maybe no more than 100 different posters a year. Since this year or
last year, they are some 95% spam.

comp.emacs is pretty much just me.

gnu.emacs.help is not much better. It's pretty much the same
developers and the same few elisp coders, with perhaps 1 new face with
once-per-lifetime post every few days. gnu.emacs.help is doing a bit
better because it is connected to fsf's mailing list.

comp.lang.perl.misc is dead few years ago. It's filled with just
snippet of FAQs that's posted by machine. There's perl.beginners since
2002, and it's a moderated group.

The one newsgroup that i use that's still healthy is comp.lang.python.
Part of the reason it's healthy because it's connected to a mailing
list, and python has become a mainstream lang. Though, it is also
infected by a lot spam in late years.

I did a study of language popularity by graphing newsgroup traffic
thru the years. See: Computer Language Popularity Trend. I thought
about updating it now and then, but it's useless if the majority of
posts are machine generated spam.

For vast majority of people who is not a regular user of newsgroups in
the 1990s or earlier, i suppose newsgroup has been dead since perhaps
2002.

It's somewhat sad. Because newsgroup once was the vibrant hotbed for
uncensored information and freespeech, with incidences that spawned
main stream public debate on policies, or change of nations.
(scientology being one famous example, then there's Cindy's Torment
censorship, then i remember also several cases of political dirty
secrets being released in newsgroups ) These days, much of this
happens in the blogs and there's Wikileaks.

Xah
∑ http://xahlee.org/

☄

 

[Kenneth Tilton]

• Death of Newsgroups
http://xahlee.org/UnixResource_dir/writ2/death_of_newsgroups.html

plain text version follows.

--------------------------------------------------
Death of Newsgroups

Xah Lee, 2010-07-13

Microsoft is closing down their newsgroups. See:
microsoft.public.windows.powershell.

I use comp.lang.lisp, comp.emacs since about 1999. Have been using
them pretty much on a weekly basis in the past 10 years. Starting
about 2007, the traffic has been increasingly filled with spam, and
the posters are always just the 20 or 30 known faces. I think perhaps
maybe no more than 100 different posters a year. Since this year or
last year, they are some 95% spam.

Forest. Trees. Please note order.

Case in point: twelve weeks ago His Timness mentioned this on
comp.lang.lisp;

http://www.math.union.edu/~dpvc/jsMath/

Now we have this, a port of a desktop app to the web:

http://teamalgebra.com/

It happened fast because http://qooxdoo.org/lets me program the Web
without bothering with HTML and CSS and browser variation as if I were
using a framework like GTk.

I learned about qooxdoo... on comp.lang.lisp.

The moral? If you look for the spam, you'll find it.

kt

 

[Steven D'Aprano]

The moral? If you look for the spam, you'll find it.

And if you *don't* look for spam, you can be sure that some goose will
reply to it and get it past your filters. Thanks for that Kenneth, if
that is your name and you're not a Xah Lee sock-puppet.

Followups set to a black hole.

 

[Kenneth Tilton]

And if you *don't* look for spam, you can be sure that some goose will
reply to it and get it past your filters. Thanks for that Kenneth, if
that is your name and you're not a Xah Lee sock-puppet.

Let me see if I have this right. Your technique for reducing unwanted
traffic is to openly insult one of the participants? That is how you
clean things up? Because most people on Usenet respond well to personal
insults and hush up? I have so much to learn!

Or was it this?

Followups set to a black hole.

That works? Amazing.

Here, I'll show you what spam looks like: my steadily-improving
revolution in learning Algebra: http://teamalgebra.com/

kt

 

[John Bokma]

fup2 poster

Let me see if I have this right. Your technique for reducing unwanted
traffic is to openly insult one of the participants?

Heh, or just ploinking them (done).

Or making them cry like a little baby:
http://xahlee.org/Periodic_dosage_dir/t2/harassment.html

(it had an effect for a while :-D )

 

[Ricardo Aráoz]

Let me see if I have this right. Your technique for reducing unwanted
traffic is to openly insult one of the participants? That is how you
clean things up? Because most people on Usenet respond well to
personal insults and hush up? I have so much to learn!

PLONK!!!

 

[Uday S Reddy]

I use comp.lang.lisp, comp.emacs since about 1999. Have been using
them pretty much on a weekly basis in the past 10 years. Starting
about 2007, the traffic has been increasingly filled with spam, and
the posters are always just the 20 or 30 known faces. I think perhaps
maybe no more than 100 different posters a year. Since this year or
last year, they are some 95% spam.

comp.emacs is pretty much just me.

gnu.emacs.help is not much better. It's pretty much the same
developers and the same few elisp coders, with perhaps 1 new face with
once-per-lifetime post every few days. gnu.emacs.help is doing a bit
better because it is connected to fsf's mailing list.

Doing "better" means having more posts? I don't believe that having a lot of
posts is necessarily a measure of goodness.

In my opinion, discussion forums do well when they encourage people to think
carefully and communicate clearly. In this respect, I think mailing lists do
worse, newsgroups better, and web-based forums the best.

Mailing lists seem to turn into talking shops where people get to know each
other over time and their "public" nature gets lost. Those who write a lot end
up dominating them, independent of whether they write any sense or not. The
other people get tired and stop reading. So, you can generate a lot of
traffic, but its value is dubious.

Newsgroups are much better because they are public and, visibly so. If
somebody says something stupid, a lot of people will jump on them. And, so,
over time, they develop some quality. (There is no guarantee, of course. I
have also seen a lot of newsgroups, especially in politics, really degenerate
with opposing factions fighting and dominating everything else.)

Web-based forums, especially those where people have to register, work the best
in my experience. They are very visibly public, discouraging people to write
nonsense. The difficulty of writing on the web instead of your favorite editor
hopefully provides some resistance to write. So, people tend to think more
than they write.

I used a forum called silentpcforum last year to help me build myself a new
computer. There was a lot of high quality information dating back to years,
which was easy to find and easy to use.

So, if newsgroups die and get replaced by web forums, that would be a move for
the better. If they get replaced by mailing lists, that would be a move for
the worse.

Cheers,
Uday

 

[Emmy Noether]

So, if newsgroups die and get replaced by web forums, that would be a move for
the better. If they get replaced by mailing lists, that would be a move for
the worse.

Uday has gotten the valuation of the three communications media - a
little wrong.

1/ Newsgroups are international, free and without censorship in the
true spirit of democracy.

2/ The forums are privately owned, serve private interests and the
most autocratic medium, you can be denied reading permissions if you
go against official line which is never described.

3/ The mailing lists are archived, so read permission is often
available and write permission can be denied. They are the second
best. Moderated lists are no good.

The quality of discussion in any of these media only depends on the
generosity of the members in sharing information. Take a look at past
archives of the newsgroups, and marvel at the quality of information.
They stand as a counterexample to anyone bickering about newsgroups.

Today, after monetary interests have attached to the software and the
internet, the whole game is about controlling discourse, about
marketing and creating hype towards sales and prominence without
giving anything of substance. The forums are an excellent tool for
this corporate control. The newsgroups are the ONLY NEUTRAL medium.

Its obvious about the spam going on here today that the OCCASIONAL
political messages are disliked by some groups and they start
MASSIVELY spamming with sex-viagra-xanax etc. to drown OCCASIONAL
political messages and hide them in a burst of spam. Alternatively,
some companies dont like discussion and they produce the spam. The
best method is to put some of these VIAGRA-XANAX words in the kill
file or spam filter or search filters.

Doing "better" means having more posts?  I don't believe that having a lot of
posts is necessarily a measure of goodness.

In my opinion, discussion forums do well when they encourage people to think
carefully and communicate clearly.  In this respect, I think mailing lists do
worse, newsgroups better, and web-based forums the best.

Uday presents a FACTOID on the order of "goodness". Forums are
generally against freedom. They appeared around 2001 to control
discourse and kill newsgroups, democracy and freedom of speech. Its
the same forces who wanted to institute the Patriot Law and who mailed
the ANTHRAX for that are the ones destroying the newsgroups by
spamming.

They operate on the principle of "provocation/reaction" cycle as
explained Lucidly by Alex Jones which you can learn in first 2 minutes
of this video

http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=5792753647750188322