On Jun 18, 10:40 am, Mark & Steven Bornfeld
<bornfeldm...@dentaltwins.com> wrote:

I know - I follow your picks and do a Costanza and pick just the
opposite.  I'm loaded!  ;)

Two newsgroups I frequented died ignominiously.  One had a major
league flame war and one of the flamers was the top all-time poster.
When he dropped out it slowly dwindled to where now there's only a few
posts a week.  In another one, most of the posters drifted over to a
more active newsgroup with an overlapping topic, and the first one
just kind of shriveled up and died.

I think that there is a critical "mass" of postings required for a
newsgroup to survive.  Unfortunately, what generally happens is the
outside questions dry up for a spell and the regulars start shooting
the breeze about all sorts of off-topic stuff or just don't post very
often.  Then, when a newbie with a question drops by to investigate,
they don't find an active give-and-take, just an old boys' club.  The
newbie may or may not stick around to post a question.

Probably the only way to prevent that scenario on a low-volume
newsgroup is to have the regulars actually discuss stuff that is on
topic during the slow periods.  In this newsgroup that would entail
discussing cases, procedures and approaches.  That would attract more
professionals, which would in turn attract more newbies (aka fresh
meat!).

R

    I don't know that one! ;-)
If tenth is mourning the loss of Joel, Hans, John and Ninetta, Stovie,
he's been in mourning for a lot more than 2 weeks.  Truth is, it's been
going down a long time, and it may be entropic, in the sense that so
many ISPs have dropped their news feeds.  But you're also right that
most of the newsgroups go through paroxisms of spam, porn, etc.
    And sci.med is actually much worse.  Most of the newsgroups seem to
require a critical mass of involved regular posters to keep things from
getting overrun.  And those that are still relatively healthy are not
necessarily the ones I'd think would survive.  But then, I'm a lousy
stock picker too.

Steve

This too shall pass.  But there is an entropic death of Usenet in the
making.  Twitter and it's ilk are a near perfect substitute and
they're as close as your cell phone.  Instead of long winded questions/
answers/diatribes, there are 140 characters.

It's like the old joke:

83!

R

What has happened to our newsgroup? Where are all the interesting
questions that were once posed about actual, everyday, dental
concerns? Why is it that someone(thing?) named Jan Drew can monopolize
our NG. Freedom of the 'net I guess. And of course this NG is free/
gratis/no charge/kostenlos yada yada.  But see what happens...
thoughtful participants disappear and real patients are intimidated by
these internet bullies and never post again! Actually, 10 years ago
this NG was great. I only ever heard about Boyd and the NTI on this
NG. I've tried to warn about PerioProtect. What happened to Hans
Lenros, Stovepipe, John & Ninetta, Joel Eichen, USW? But some internet
denizens (sharks?) like (whoever the hell she/he/it is) Jan Drew have
screwed it up for all of us.

I'm just really bummed out because I really liked this NG until about
2 weeks ago.