On Wednesday, September 19, 2007 at 6:42:58 PM UTC-6, jt august wrote:
> In article <1190196942....@57g2000hsv.googlegroups.com>,
> The Space Boss <drsmi...@aol.com> wrote:
> Oh, please. "Use Google groups, and turn the gallant entity the
> newsgroups into another web forum." Usenet has been a forum of end user
> customizability. You can choose your own news reader to suit your OS
> and taste. You can set the preferences to how you read news posts.
> But you, Dr. Space Guitar 666, want us to use one of the clumsiest web
> based forum systems as our access point for this perennial service just
> because you want us to read usenet the way you do. That sir (and I use
> this term liberally), is another example of why we don't generally care
> for your pathetic nature.
> > It's free, and, I imagine, just about the best.
> I use MT-Newswatcher for Mac OS X. It's free, and having tried Google
> Groups to access this newsgroup, and can say I find MT-Newswatcher far
> superior.
> jt

Some people like to utilize USEnet for different uses. Most if not all newsgroups servers don't let you see past a pretty small chunk of within a date range, regardless of what you want at the user interface level. I like that there is an archive out there I can type a search term into and see what people were thinking and discussing in 1994, rather than iPhone and coronavirus spam from the six months.

The Google Groups hate was there a long time ago, but now a day even the dime-a-dozen PHP user forums from the early 00's aren't even really active anymore, so where does that put Google Groups? Better, worse? Or at the very least a hardy archive of stuff going back to the 80's. ISPs ditched news servers 20 years ago and the eccentrics still haven't figured out why (maybe it was all the illegal activity that took over the whole network)

Most of these people are vehement against Google Groups and its posters because they're not running some x32 program newsreader to participate in discussion, but decades ago they decided that participation was closed