It’s a pity…

Post #440,766 by rcareaga 1/26/22 6:44:19 PM 1/26/22 6:44:19 PM Reply	It’s a pity… that “social media” continues to bleed off our membership. DRL jumped ship years ago for the Book of Face, and even I spend more time on that vile platform than I do here, where I first landed going on two decades ago. I fear for the future of this venue, but I’m grateful for the participants—well, most of them—who keep it on life support. cordially,
Post #440,767 by a6l6e6x 1/26/22 10:58:01 PM 1/26/22 10:58:01 PM Reply	Agree. Too often a disagreement here wasn't handled in a decent way. One can put up with being insulted for only so many times. Alex "There is a cult of ignorance in the United States, and there has always been. The strain of anti-intellectualism has been a constant thread winding its way through our political and cultural life, nurtured by the false notion that democracy means that "my ignorance is just as good as your knowledge." -- Isaac Asimov
Post #440,769 by InThane 1/27/22 1:53:56 AM 1/27/22 1:53:56 AM Reply	I've burned the book of faces out of my life... ...and feel better for it. Still trying to wean my wife off of it, hoping one of these days she lets go of it... Ceterum autem censeo pars Republican esse delendam.
Post #440,771 by drook 1/27/22 10:14:55 AM 1/27/22 10:14:55 AM Reply	I'm only on FB to track events of IRL groups I belong to -- Drew
Post #440,770 by Another Scott 1/27/22 9:30:38 AM 1/27/22 9:30:38 AM Reply	This place is great. I'm not on FB or T, though I read several people's T via the web interface. These days I mostly hang out at Balloon-Juice but it's aggravating in its own way - one really has to be there almost in real-time to have any conversation, and threads turn over too quickly. And the lack of threading or "mark-read" makes it more like "conversation" at a noisy bar-hopping party than real give-and-take. This place is great because of its permanence. B-J keeps a decades long database of posts, but it's nearly impossible to search it (and there's no indexing by commenter), and one can't comment after a week or so. Here, one can restart a thread that's decades old if one wants. New blood is almost always welcome, of course. :-) Cheers, Scott.
Post #440,772 by malraux 1/27/22 11:39:07 AM 1/27/22 11:39:08 AM Reply	The network effect is real We could probably replace this site with a private group somewhere, but so long as people are around and using it I'll keep it going. Regards, -scott Welcome to Rivendell, Mr. Anderson.
Post #440,773 by boxley 1/27/22 4:34:28 PM 1/27/22 4:34:28 PM Reply	I use book of face to bs with ross and skip and see the latest from the grandkids "Science is the belief in the ignorance of the experts" – Richard Feynman
Post #440,778 by scoenye 1/28/22 6:45:43 PM 1/28/22 6:45:43 PM Reply	My last hangout There were also a motorcycle site and an astronomy group (for those trying keep their Meade LX3, 5 & 6 telescopes ticking over). I was the one to turn off the lights on the MC site, some years after Honda scrapped the model. The Meade group went belly up after Verizon buried Yahoo Groups. The cost of FB is too high for me to go there for any reason. If this group quits, I'll have to find something else to do with my time. But until then, it will remain my first and last port of call for the day.
Post #440,779 by a6l6e6x 1/28/22 11:26:55 PM 1/28/22 11:26:55 PM Reply	Re: The Meade group went belly up after Verizon buried Yahoo Groups. The same happened to the South East (US) area of "Lazy Daze" brand motor home owner group that I belonged to. But, I restarted the group at https://groups.io/ but only a fraction of people moved on to it. There is also an FB version of the group that I have nothing to do with. Alex "There is a cult of ignorance in the United States, and there has always been. The strain of anti-intellectualism has been a constant thread winding its way through our political and cultural life, nurtured by the false notion that democracy means that "my ignorance is just as good as your knowledge." -- Isaac Asimov
Post #440,784 by drook 1/29/22 8:29:58 AM 1/29/22 8:39:01 AM Reply	Were you able to point to the new board from the old one? If not, there's no way most of them would ever know it exists. -- Drew Edited by drook Jan. 29, 2022, 08:39:01 AM EST Expand All History
Post #440,788 by a6l6e6x 1/29/22 1:45:56 PM 1/29/22 1:45:56 PM Reply	I started the new one before the old one vanished. So I was able to send out messages to direct folks to the new site. Also, I moved many files to the new site. But, it did not make much sense to move messages. Alex "There is a cult of ignorance in the United States, and there has always been. The strain of anti-intellectualism has been a constant thread winding its way through our political and cultural life, nurtured by the false notion that democracy means that "my ignorance is just as good as your knowledge." -- Isaac Asimov
Post #440,789 by scoenye 1/29/22 6:10:20 PM 1/29/22 6:10:20 PM Reply	Deja vu The Meade group ended up on groups.io as well but we lost the file store. That put a serious crimp in the ability to help out new members. There was some effort to keep things going but traffic is pretty much 0 now.
Post #440,781 by CRConrad 1/29/22 6:31:42 AM 1/29/22 6:31:42 AM Reply	What happened to #4?
Post #440,790 by scoenye 1/29/22 6:18:34 PM 1/29/22 6:18:34 PM Reply	Marketing got ahead of engineering
Post #440,780 by static 1/29/22 3:35:13 AM 1/29/22 3:35:13 AM Reply	Replacing the functionality of a FB Group is difficult. I had a group that inadvertently tried it. We started with custom forum software that was paid for and being actively updated by the site owner. We used it for more than a year, but it was clearly inferior to Facebook's platform that when someone created a private group for us, the forum basically died within two or three weeks. I think the owner struggled with the idea that we wanted all (or most) of the features of Facebook. Even such simple things many people overlook like the information density on the page. Wade.
Post #440,782 by CRConrad 1/29/22 6:48:15 AM 1/29/22 6:48:15 AM Reply	I removed the FB and Twitter apps from my phone, earned back oodles of time. I rarely go to either of them on the Web. Well, FB at least, must be months since I did; Bird site see below. Unfortunately, it seems I've got myself wired to waste oodles of time somewhere on the Net anyway... Much more than I could here. So I probably spend (at least nearly) as much time on Hacker News in stead. (What little I see of Twitter nowadays is usually because something there is linked on HN ["The Orange Site"].) -- Christian R. Conrad The Man Who Apparently Still Knows Fucking Everything Mail: Same username as at the top left of this post, at iki.fi
Post #440,785 by drook 1/29/22 8:37:57 AM 1/29/22 8:37:57 AM Reply	Re: wasting oodles of time I'll bet lots of people who delete Facebook to "stop wasting time" end up spending that time on Wordle and Candy Crush instead. -- Drew
Post #440,786 by InThane 1/29/22 10:16:10 AM 1/29/22 10:16:10 AM Reply	I spend it snarking... ...on my wife spending time on Facebook. :P Ceterum autem censeo pars Republican esse delendam.
Post #440,787 by CRConrad 1/29/22 12:34:43 PM 1/29/22 12:34:43 PM Reply	At least HN has a bit more useful stuff than those. (Including some IWETheyers past and present.)
Post #440,791 by pwhysall 1/30/22 12:03:02 AM 1/30/22 12:03:02 AM Reply	Timely reminder... ...of the existence of iwethey.slack.com

Welcome to IWETHEY!