From Newsgroup: rec.arts.books
On Thu, 9 Jul 2026 11:37:00 -0400, Mickey Lane <
chiliwhiz@yahoo.com>
wrote:
I got in a bit of a kerfluffle on Facebook the other day and was
lamenting my inability to fluffle. I recalled the old days of alt.peeves >when true artists held forth.
I've not used the word usenet in decades. This morning, I went looking
and after some stumbling around, got a bunch of text-only newsgroups
from eternal-september.org presented in Thunderbird on Windows.
And behold: alt.peeves. My number one group back in 1989 or so. I even >recall responding the the call for votes for alt.peeves although you
can't actually vote for alt. groups. Must have been 1990ish.
My peeve - and in the beginning, all posts must have a peeve - is that
the feed I have only has a half dozen or so posts.
My peeve is that when Facebook came along a lot of people on Usenet
proposed abandoning it for Facebook, and did so, with the result that
virtually the only people left on Usenet were trolls, cranks and
fanatics.
And the substitnure forums they started on Facebook were subject to
Facvebook's algorithms, so unless you "liked" everything that everyone
posted, you would gradually stop wseeing posts, and threads became
difficult to follow.
About half the denizens of rec.arts.books moved to Facebook, where
they called themselves "the praciing halfwits", where they now prace
no more. And the half who remained were no longer a critical mass, and
so there are not enough people left in rec.arts.books to hold a decent conversation.
And so it is with most other ngs on Usenet.
--
Steve Hayes from Tshwane, South Africa
Web:
http://www.khanya.org.za/stevesig.htm
Blog:
http://methodius.blogspot.com
E-mail - see web page, or parse: shayes at dunelm full stop org full stop uk --- Synchronet 3.22a-Linux NewsLink 1.2