gus grissom

On 1/20/2014 8:51 AM, Jeff Findley wrote:
In article ,
says...

On Monday, November 25, 2013 8:14:18 AM UTC-6, bob haller wrote:
yep this place is dead......

...Yeah, and you had a lot to do with its demise, Bbo. Hope you're
****ing satisfied with yourself, you pathetic, illiterate catamite.

That and the advent of web based forums where you could do things like
post pictures (gasp!) along with your text.

Still, I'll agree that most of Bob's posts were worse than worthless.
Endless criticizing of NASA for imaginary safety problems followed by
criticism that they weren't doing enough. Sorry Bob, but you can't do
anything in manned spaceflight without incurring some risk.

Jeff


IMO I agree with Jeff's first paragraph. Some folks point to the days
when AOL hooked up to Usenet newsgroups as the beginning of the end.
While that certainly increased the noise volume of noob posts, to say
that was the reason for demise of news given all the sophisticated
filtering clients available at the time, with that reasoning I have to
disagree. Also newsgroups always supported the ability to have moderated
groups. Many of the space groups (like sci.space.tech for example) still
are.

No, I believe the *real* demise of newsgroups in general was the advent
of web forums. Providing a more natural graphic format than is possible
with newsgroups and with moderation the accepted "norm" and with most
charging subscription fees, you don't get into the endless flame-wars,
and poorly informed or just plain wrong posts are quickly filtered away.
However sometimes what the actual determination of a "malformed" post
is, is subject to interpretation. Forum "editors" have enormous sway, to
the point of censorship. That is one of the reasons why I haven't
abandoned newsgroups, where anyone can post anything.

Usually it's just noise, but every now and then comes the rare gem from
some disgruntled ex or banned forum poster.

The advent of web-based forums though has pretty much sapped the life
out of the discussion newsgroups. I see it across the board, not just in
the sci.space.* groups.

Dave