death of newsgroups (Microsoft closing their newsgroups)

[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.

On Jul 16, 1:22 am, Uday S Reddy <uDOTsDOTre... at cs.bham.ac.uk> wrote:
>
> 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


> 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.
>