Re: KDE Killed This Newsgroup

Michael Heiming wrote:
In comp.os.linux.misc Tom Newton <tom@xxxxxxxxxxxxxx>:
I've been looking through the archives of this newsgroup
at google groups.

The graph of its decline is the mirror image of the graph
of KDE's (and Gnome's) rise in popularity.

I do not know when Tom started with this newsgroup, but I started with Linux
in mid 1996 with Red Hat Linux 5.0. It came with KDE and Gnome. I did not
like KDE, so I went with Gnome. Whatever the desktop manager was, I did not
like it, but Linux was so much better than Windows 95 that I switched over
to it.

I have noticed that according to my implicit standards, all the newsgroups I
have participated in have declined in quality as the quantity has increased.
(So we could conclude that it is not KDE or Gnome, but my participation that
leads to the decline in these newsgroups, if you wish to.)
But this decline seems unrelated to Gnome or KDE. In fact, quality was quite
high when there was no Linux (IIRC). I have been using what is now UseNet
since the 1980s or perhaps before. Whenever it was run over UUCP instead of
TCP/IP. And the link to Australia was by magnetic tape carried on airplanes.
(You get a lot of bandwidth sending tapes on airplanes. Not as important now
that we have fibre-optic links.)

BS, nothing to do with KDE. Firstly this ng isn't dead at all.
Secondly if anything is an annoyance it is the amount of spam
posted through groups.google.com in addition to quite some
groups.google.com users who don't take the time to search the
archives. Or read our newreader FAQ, but demand answers as if
people would be paid by google to serve them. Very likely they
don't have much if any concept what usenet is about.

When I first started, the UseNet was not even called that. It piggy-backed
onto ARPAnet, and by improvised connections from some machines to others by
dial-up or T1 or coax networks using UUCP. The decline in quality started
with the commercialization of this.

The multi posting habit of groups.google.com users is another
annoyance. So I have kill filled anything posted from G2, though
you get a clear view back it leaves more or less nothing to
answer. Of course there are for sure exceptions, but the majority
of G2 users suggested this behavior to me.

It seems the http interface google provides to nntp took away the
little border which kept all those people away from usenet?

It reminds me of the comments of John Fitch (a race car designer) at a
conference on passenger car design and highway safety. He wondered if
automobile safety would be increased if passenger cars were designed like
race cars, with 6-speed manual transmissions with no synchromesh and
grabbing clutches. He figured that if the automotive industry did this, some
of the completely incompetent drivers would not be able to drive at all and
getting them off the road would be a good thing. Not politically or
short-term economically viable, so it was never considered.

--
.~. Jean-David Beyer Registered Linux User 85642.
/V\ PGP-Key: 9A2FC99A Registered Machine 241939.
/( )\ Shrewsbury, New Jersey http://counter.li.org
^^-^^ 11:00:01 up 4 days, 17:04, 2 users, load average: 4.03, 4.14, 4.12
.

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