🚀 go-pugleaf

On Feb 11, 1:24 pm, Tim May <timc...@removethis.got.net> wrote:
> In article <45B8C078.3C3A5...@earthlink.net>, Arne Adolfsen
>
> <adolf...@earthlink.net> wrote:
> > Hello,
>
> > Just as I typed in the subject line, it's over -- la.eats is dead.
> > There haven't been actual messages for well over a month, and before
> > that there were sparse to non-existent messages for *well* over a year.
>
> Fact is, Usenet in general is declining, as "blogs" and sites like Yelp
> and Chowhound are getting a lot more traffic.
>
> Especially with younger people, who were the ones most active on Usenet
> 15-20 years ago (when people our age were active in the smaller number
> of newsgroups then available).
>
> I'll bet most 20-30 year-olds are oblivious to the existence of the
> Usenet. Some of my 50-60 year-old friends certainly are...they've been
> hearing me mention Usenet for the past couple of decades. None of them
> really knows how to get to it, except through Google Groups. (Which
> many seem to think _is_ the Usenet, complete with all of Google's
> chatrooms and "groups" jumbled together with the other 110,000 or so
> newsgroups.)
>
> And considering how sparse the postings on la.eats were even _before_
> the explosion of "foodie" blogs and sites, it's not hard to see why the
> posting volume is even lower now.
>
...
> But even this will likely not staunch the exodus to other kinds of "Web
> 2.0" sites.
>
> --Tim May

Ten-fifteen years ago if you went to a computer cluster at Stanford,
and at maybe every other university, you would see students using
either unix Pine or Elm on their screens.  For the past few years now,
they all seem to use gui webmail.  This is a real dumb-downing of the
internet.  Webmail seems to have made its way because of faster
computers, faster home connections, and the AOL clueless consumer
culture of their parents.  But compared to Pine and Elm, webmail is
still slow.  The only advantage might have to do with attached photos
but I vaguely remember seeing an x11 app that automatically booted up
images directly from Pine.

And so, webmail and fast gui's for viewing listserv postings (eg.
yahoo groups) must have caused the decline of the Usenet that is
otherwise best viewed in unix text based apps like tin, pine, and the
rn's.  First, you need a shell which most ISP's don't provide anymore,
and which most middle class pigs don't feel they need and are too
stupid to learn on their own boxes.  For reading the usenet, I use
Darwin, Pine, and a free news server.  I don't have money to rent
anymore for posting, so for posting I'm temporarily using web-google.