> So, if newsgroups die and get replaced by web forums, that would be a move for > the better. If they get replaced by mailing lists, that would be a move for > the worse.
Uday has gotten the valuation of the three communications media - a little wrong. 1/ Newsgroups are international, free and without censorship in the true spirit of democracy. 2/ The forums are privately owned, serve private interests and the most autocratic medium, you can be denied reading permissions if you go against official line which is never described. 3/ The mailing lists are archived, so read permission is often available and write permission can be denied. They are the second best. Moderated lists are no good. The quality of discussion in any of these media only depends on the generosity of the members in sharing information. Take a look at past archives of the newsgroups, and marvel at the quality of information. They stand as a counterexample to anyone bickering about newsgroups. Today, after monetary interests have attached to the software and the internet, the whole game is about controlling discourse, about marketing and creating hype towards sales and prominence without giving anything of substance. The forums are an excellent tool for this corporate control. The newsgroups are the ONLY NEUTRAL medium. Its obvious about the spam going on here today that the OCCASIONAL political messages are disliked by some groups and they start MASSIVELY spamming with sex-viagra-xanax etc. to drown OCCASIONAL political messages and hide them in a burst of spam. Alternatively, some companies dont like discussion and they produce the spam. The best method is to put some of these VIAGRA-XANAX words in the kill file or spam filter or search filters. On Jul 16, 1:22 am, Uday S Reddy <udotsdotre...@cs.bham.ac.uk> wrote: > > Doing "better" means having more posts? I don't believe that having a lot of > posts is necessarily a measure of goodness. > > In my opinion, discussion forums do well when they encourage people to think > carefully and communicate clearly. In this respect, I think mailing lists do > worse, newsgroups better, and web-based forums the best. Uday presents a FACTOID on the order of "goodness". Forums are generally against freedom. They appeared around 2001 to control discourse and kill newsgroups, democracy and freedom of speech. Its the same forces who wanted to institute the Patriot Law and who mailed the ANTHRAX for that are the ones destroying the newsgroups by spamming. They operate on the principle of "provocation/reaction" cycle as explained Lucidly by Alex Jones which you can learn in first 2 minutes of this video http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=5792753647750188322 > Mailing lists seem to turn into talking shops where people get to know each > other over time and their "public" nature gets lost. Those who write a lot > end > up dominating them, independent of whether they write any sense or not. The > other people get tired and stop reading. So, you can generate a lot of > traffic, but its value is dubious. > > Newsgroups are much better because they are public and, visibly so. If > somebody says something stupid, a lot of people will jump on them. And, so, > over time, they develop some quality. (There is no guarantee, of course. I > have also seen a lot of newsgroups, especially in politics, really degenerate > with opposing factions fighting and dominating everything else.) > > Web-based forums, especially those where people have to register, work the > best > in my experience. They are very visibly public, discouraging people to write > nonsense. The difficulty of writing on the web instead of your favorite > editor > hopefully provides some resistance to write. So, people tend to think more > than they write. > > I used a forum called silentpcforum last year to help me build myself a new > computer. There was a lot of high quality information dating back to years, > which was easy to find and easy to use. > -- http://mail.python.org/mailman/listinfo/python-list
