🚀 go-pugleaf

>>>>> "Jeff" == Jeff Billman <jbillma@yahoo.com> writes:

  Jeff> Firstly, it tends to introduce people to online discussion.

Perhaps.  But the result is that you end up with a lot people who are
"new to online discussion", which tends to make for comparatively poor
dynamics of a newsgroup.  The Old Guard of Usenet tend to be more
interesting, and make for much more lively discussion.  Having a bunch
of new folks around can be nice for a while, but there's only so much
tolerance that one has for articles that are essentially unedited
streams of consciousness.

Take a random sample of 100 articles from various Web-based
discussions and compare that to 100 articles from various newsgroups.
(I was originally going to suggest looking at comp.lang.lisp or
something else "well established", but I think that would be unfairly
skewing the results to prove my point.)

  Jeff> Secondly, the rigor of registering newsgroups- even within the
  Jeff> alt.* hierarchy- does not spark interest in creating new
  Jeff> groups nowadays.

Well, that's because in order to justify having the traffic sanctioned
by news admins, there has to be some traffic there to show that
there's an interest.  Generally, the best way to do this is to start a
mailing list.  Once there's a mailing list with sufficient traffic,
starting a Usenet group isn't too difficult.

  Jeff> While a newsgroup on Ohio genealogy might not survive in the
  Jeff> Usenet jungle (even under oh.*), it stands a better chance on
  Jeff> a successful Ohio website where it is more highlighted for
  Jeff> newcomers.  Of course, this is assuming the website itself is
  Jeff> successful.

Interesting thoughts.  I'd like to learn how it actually goes in
practice.  I'm inclined to disagree, but neither do I hide the fact
that I'm really biased in favor of Usenet, especially at the expense
of "inferior" alternatives for exactly the same thing.

Of course, if you want to have local discussions, you can get some of
the "wins" of having everything work via NNRP without having the
overhead of being a part of Usenet Proper by running your own
hierarchy off of your own servers.  There are standardized ways of
doing this, and any client worth anything at all should grok this
without any problems.  (You'll still suffer some of the scalability
issues, but presumably for a comparatively small target audience like
this, that is a perfectly reasonable tradeoff.)

-- 
Matt Curtin cmcurtin@interhack.net http://www.interhack.net/people/cmcurtin/