Newsgroups

Just Bill

There used to be something called newsgroups. I belonged to one called alt.machines.cnc. It was a discussion group like this except it was a bunch machinists talking about machining related stuff. This was probably in the late 1990's. It was very simple. Someone posted something. If you added a comment it would be connected to the post and it would be called a thread. So a post might have 50 threads or comments added to the original post. Simple easy to follow. You could easily track threads as they added on to the topic tree. What killed it was the evolution of something called a troll who would just disrupt every conversation making it suck for everyone who enjoyed the environment. Then they were moderated. The moderated discussions kept the trolls out but you were censored. Then 2 things happened usenet died and facebook was born. That is why we are doing newsgroup type stuff in a facebook environment. Evolution of discussion groups.