From Newsgroup: alt.fan.usenet

On 2025-03-02, Salvador Mirzo <smirzo@example.com> wrote:

Steve Bonine <spb@pobox.com> writes:

Retro Guy wrote:

Also, I don't know why someone is posting short quotes, not opinion on the >>> quote, and links to Reddit. I, and I'm guessing some others, are not going >>> to visit Reddit to read the info.

This is an example of the opinion that re-posts of material from other
sources (mailing lists, newsletters, social media) will revive a
newsgroup. If your newsgroup is dying, you can revive it by posting
material from other sources. You have to admit that the article that
you are disparaging has resulted in a flurry of activity in the target
newsgroups.

I am not personally a fan of this technique. My impression is that
you end up with low-quality traffic that does not result in any
followups in the newsgroup, to the point where the group becomes an
echo of material available elsewhere. Is there value in consolidating
information from several sources into one place? Perhaps, but I
prefer to go to the source and not be dependent on someone else to
choose what I read.

I have no strong opinion on this, but on first glance it doesn't seem
too bad of an idea to bring to the attention of the group members
something that occurred outside.

Ben Collver in comp.misc often posts entire articles and I always print
them all without even reading a sentence because the Ben Collver filter
is of the highest quality. The printout comes out perfect because,
being plain text, there's no surprise to be found on the printout.

Without ever getting an explanation from Ben Collver, I've been assuming
that what he posts is what he reads and I consider that a great service.
I myself often look at Hacker News, for example, and fetch interesting articles I find there; then, using a print-friendly Firefox extension to clean up the messy HTML, I print them out to read them offline. I often don't repost anything here because it's a bit of work to clean up the
web articles. So if we post the entire article, it's a service we're
making to the community. (I'm aware the OP wrote ``short quotes'' and I think that's well observed---to be useful, I think the entire article
should be well-formatted here.)

In summary, if you post an article, I assume that you read it and you
enjoyed it, so there's always an implicit comment. There is a service
in that---it's a filter.

By the way, I think Hacker News is almost great---the problem is all on
ther the /web/ interface. There's nothing wrong with the interface;
it's just choice of medium that's the problem. I'd prefer to use a
terminal to search, for example, than to visit the web. I see no point
in web forums when we have NNTP.

Perhaps we should be talking about extending NNTP clients to be more
powerful and extending servers, too, but perhaps we shouldn't---perhaps
we should just extend NNTP servers to be used by a telnet or netcat
client, which is a lot easier. (Oops---I totally changed the subject.)

Also, HN has posting limits. With Usenet, unless you poke down the server
a lot, you can post tons of messages at once without any issues at all.
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