In article ,
plutchak joel peter wrote:
nicholas peter dempsey wrote:
In article ,


More active, certainly. More useful? I'd argue not. There's
even more anonymity, there's more dilution of good, informed
information, and now the biggest ("most active") sites are run by
the kind of people whose egos prevented them from spewing over
USENET without being called on it. (Some more so than others,
of course.) You get much, much more noise with the signal.
I still get more useful information from people whose opinions
I trust from USENET.

These days, a posted question on usenet frequently waits a couple of days
for an answer at all, and usually gets answered snidely. I can't speak to
other sites, but on ratebeer, answers come quickly and are generally
knowledgeable. And the "noise" is generally confined to an "off
topic" forum. Cursory browsing of BA suggests that things aren't much
different in that parallel universe. Kind of like what things were like
here up until a year or so ago.

What do we have, 4 or 5 people here who really know their beer? And how
often do they check in?

Where's the "signal" here right now? All I see is a crossposted rant about
waitresses in English pubs. That's been about it for a week.

I miss usenet; it's a much nicer interface than web forums if you learn
how to use it. Unfortunately, there are few decent groups anymore, as
nobody takes the time to learn what usenet is about.

--NPD
--
___________________________
Nicholas P. Dempsey
Department of Sociology
University of Chicago