David E. Ross sent the following on Fri, 22 Mar 2013 16:02:48 -0700: > On 3/22/13 12:56 PM, Jim G. wrote: > > Ant sent the following on Wed, 20 Mar 2013 22:40:14 -0700: > >> On 3/19/2013 12:40 PM PT, Jim G. typed: > >> > >>>>> Yep. And what time is devoted to things will probably be on the email > >>>>> side of things, as most people under 35 have probably never even heard > >>>>> of USENET. Once in a while, I take a look at the web boards on a place > >>>>> like Reddit and laugh that "kids today" think that that's a better way > >>>>> to communicate and exchange ideas online. Oh, well... > >>>> > >>>> Please forgive my ignorance but what's Reddit?? ;-) > >>> > >>> The new(er) Digg. It's basically a big news-gathering and -sharing > >>> playground for 20-something-year-old guys and other guys who wish that > >>> they were still 20-something. > >> > >> I used to use Digg until they went downhill withi its v4 and revamped > >> the whole thing. I switched to Reddit like most Diggers. I still use > >> newsgroups/usenet, /., IRC, text based programs, SSH2, etc. :) > > > > USENET and the old Compuserve with its venerable forums pretty much > > guaranteed that I would never be happy with web-based interactions. To > > me, this sort of thing requires an offline reader and some really good > > filters, neither of which is available on most web forums. > > > > Another feature of NNTP (which includes USENET and other newsgroups) > missing in Web-based forums is the fact that non-propriety newsgroups > are not tied to a particular host. A list that was updated less than a > year ago has over 70 stand-alone NSPs (news service providers), most of > which cover the Big8 hierarchies (comp.*, news.*, sci.*, humanities.*, > rec.*, soc.*, talk.*, and misc.*). Some NSPs are even free. > > If I post a message to a newsgroup hosted at reader.albasani.net, > someone else can read it and reply to it at news.eternal-september.org. > And a third person can also read and reply at news.giganews.com. We do > not all have to be logged in to the same host. > > When I cite "non-propriety newsgroups", I mean newsgroups generally not > controlled by some enterprise. Mozilla's news.mozilla.org hosts > proprietary newsgroups.
Yeah, USENET was definitely set up in the days before proprietary concerns and profit and user profiling and targeted advertising and many other lovely things were a part of the deal. It was, plain and simple, a way for people to communicate. And it was/is awesome. I remember using it back in college in the early '80s in the computer labs in Urbana, but there was a gap there between college and my first machine of my own in the late 80's, at which time C-serve and its forums (after testing the waters with GEnie and Prodigy) somehow managed to snag me before I revisited USENET. Then AOL came along and killed C-serve, making my next move an obvious one. -- Jim G. [Insert your favorite clever tagline here.] _______________________________________________ support-seamonkey mailing list [email protected] https://lists.mozilla.org/listinfo/support-seamonkey
