07-30-2004, 02:57 PM
Hi,
Good point, overall. There are still a lot of good groups and there is still a lot of good discussion on those groups. But that can be said about web fora, and even web sites. The problem with the Internet is not that there isn't any good material on it. It is that the good material is, by and large, drowned in a sea of junk. And there is no good "filter" to attenuate the noise and let the pure goodness through.
Now, admittedly the newsgroups are, for the reasons you gave, a lot better than average. And for someone who has been around and has his favorite dozen or so groups he's subscribed to, there doesn't seem much change. However, if a newbie wanders into newsgroups, and downloads the list with 3x thousands of names (I no longer even look at the total :) ), it could take him a minute or two to find the good stuff.
I can't remember the last time that I subscribed to a non-gaming related newsgroup. Even with a good reader (I use Agent) the effort of downloading a few hundred messages and then skimming them to get an idea of the value of the group, and repeating the process daily for a couple of weeks is usually not worth the result.
So yeah. There are pockets of goodness left in newsgroups, as there are in all parts of the net. And the partitioning is nice, keeping most of the spam out of any given group. But I think here, too, the noise to signal ratio is very high. And the ability to find that signal is too small.
--Pete
Good point, overall. There are still a lot of good groups and there is still a lot of good discussion on those groups. But that can be said about web fora, and even web sites. The problem with the Internet is not that there isn't any good material on it. It is that the good material is, by and large, drowned in a sea of junk. And there is no good "filter" to attenuate the noise and let the pure goodness through.
Now, admittedly the newsgroups are, for the reasons you gave, a lot better than average. And for someone who has been around and has his favorite dozen or so groups he's subscribed to, there doesn't seem much change. However, if a newbie wanders into newsgroups, and downloads the list with 3x thousands of names (I no longer even look at the total :) ), it could take him a minute or two to find the good stuff.
I can't remember the last time that I subscribed to a non-gaming related newsgroup. Even with a good reader (I use Agent) the effort of downloading a few hundred messages and then skimming them to get an idea of the value of the group, and repeating the process daily for a couple of weeks is usually not worth the result.
So yeah. There are pockets of goodness left in newsgroups, as there are in all parts of the net. And the partitioning is nice, keeping most of the spam out of any given group. But I think here, too, the noise to signal ratio is very high. And the ability to find that signal is too small.
--Pete
How big was the aquarium in Noah's ark?