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From: Steve Bonine <spb@pobox.com>
Newsgroups: news.groups
Subject: Re: 3rd RfD: Mass-deletion of moderated groups without a moderator
Date: Thu, 20 Mar 2025 14:23:23 -0500
Organization: A noiseless patient Spider
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Marco Moock wrote:
> On 15.03.2025 17:50 Uhr Steve Bonine wrote:
> 
>> [news.groups.proposals removed from the newsgroups list because my
>> previous post was refused because "you can't crosspost between
>> news.groups and news.groups.proposals"]
> 
> This has been fixed. If it is still not working, please contact
> board@big-8.org.

Since I see items crossposted now between the two newsgroups, I assume 
it is working.  I don't quite understand the "has been fixed" phrasing. 
When I was a moderator for several years, humans actually read the 
submissions.  This is apparently no longer true.

>> It's not like removing 100ish dead groups from the list is going to
>> affect anyone.  There are vanishingly few people wandering around
>> Usenet looking for places to post.  The folks who are here are using
>> the groups they know and it is excruciatingly rare that they find
>> themselves wanting to post outside of those groups.
>>
>> New users . . . Wait.  There are none.
> 
> Some are there - I was one of them, even when 3 years ago.

Use your discretionary time as you wish.  For years I spent significant 
time on Usenet.  I felt, and still do, that it was time well spent. 
These days, I do not understand spending time doing things that have no 
meaning.  The latest example is comp.sys.wearables, which two months on 
has three posts - the "MODERATOR FOUND:' announcement, a "welcome back" 
from the new moderator, one followup to that, and then nothing.  And 
yet, people continue to believe that newsgroups that have been dead for 
more than a decade will suddenly spring to life, or that removing a 
bunch of dead groups from the newsgroups list will affect something.

Usenet was once an extremely valuable part of the online landscape.  Its 
contribution to the evolution of what we now call "social media" is 
immense.  But it is not the beast that it was at its peak ...  hierarchy 
administration was important then, but the time for that is over.  Let 
it decline in peace.