[gurps] Re: End of Pyramid newsgroups

[All Hail Discordia]

Gerald "roguebfl" Grenier wrote:
> On Tue, Nov 11, 2008 at 10:53 PM, Ben Finney
> <bignose+hates-spam at benfinney.id.au> wrote:
> 
>> Whether people want to continue using a cumbersome interface for
>> whatever reason, is irrelevant to me, to the extent that I'm not
>> impacted by another person's choice of access method.
> 
> Where as I Call NNTP the cumbersome interface. Web forums software has
> the ability to plug in an external editor so being "forced to use a
> bad editor" is not true. But on the Other hand it Extremely hard to
> moderate, even moderate group can stop all the spam, no with out hand
> approving everything, which means it cant handle volume that way. and
> if something slip though, it next to impossible to get rid of it. Face
> the main thing that "killed" Usenet is spam. Usage dropped off long
> before ISPs stop caring news feed, the stop carrying it because the
> customers were not using them, and the usage to spam content turned in
> spam's favor. (basically it was costing them bandwidth for no gain)
> 

You can not blame spam alone (and my service filters), the sudden influx 
of newbie users who could barley cope with the WWW AND Email, with no 
education from ISP's, coupled with the rise of brain dead easy web 
forms, is what has nearly killed off Usenet. To this day no OS ships 
with a decent newsreader.

The same newbie+WWW+flash+ICQ, AOL & MSN ushered in the near extinction 
of the talkers and text muds too. Though none of them have yet reached 
the expressiveness that NUTS 3.x let you have.