Run for the hills! Microsoft is apparently going to fix Usenet. I didn’t even know it was broken…
I can just see their Newgroup Assistance Wizard now:
It looks like you’re writing a Usenet post! Would you like to:
- Quote 200 lines and say “me too”.
- Post a blank message
- Crosspost to five other unrelated groups
- Attach a 70-line signature
- Post in broken HTML
it difficult for the casual person to use effectively, but on the plus side that’s acted as a bit of a filter; you had to have at least some minimum amount of smarts to be able to use a newsreader, find the appropriate groups, follow proper posting procedures, etc. When AOL and WebTV provided simplified access to Usenet, posting from those domains quickly became a badge of dishonour because most people posting from them were, well, idiots. Not everyone, certainly, but enough that the trend was difficult to ignore.
It is a bit elitist to resent the arrival of ‘less worthy’ people, I suppose, but I do worry about its effect upon some of the more popular groups. The arrival of spam destroyed many perfectly good groups by making the legitimate conversations difficult to find among all the “MAKE MONEY FAST!” postings, and something similar could happen with a huge influx of clueless newbies. It’s already hard to follow some groups’ hundreds or thousands of new posts a day.
Then again this could all be the ramblings of an old geezer pining for the old “Golden Age” (if there ever was such a thing). :-) Usenet’s ‘death’ has been predicted over and over to the point where it’s become a cliche, and certainly everyone has the right to access it if they want, whether they’re able to contribute anything meaningful or not. About all I can really do is furrow my brow and go “Hmmm…”
And hey, it could mean more kooks for our amusement.
Damn you and your page title. Only here do I keep mis-entering my email address as “teh.one@shaw.ca”. :-)
I have spent most of the last 10 years bitching, screaming, pontificating, preaching, and generally annoying the piss out of everyone I know because I am proud to be elitist in this once-beautiful electronic frontier.
It’s all well and good to be fair and allow people the chance to be (so to speak), but there comes a time when those of us — as you so eloquently put it — old geezers have to fight to protect what little we have left of *our* world that the “less worthy” people have not only overrun, but taken over. I’ve had enough.
For those reading this that are Albertan, it’s time for an electronic version of Oka.
What’s a usenet and how do I get one? ;-) *duck*