Google Groups DOES have reply-any but it is well hidden

Google Groups DOES have reply to any for USENET posts

The feature of replying to any post in a USENET thread does exist in Google Groups, but it is confusing. You get reply only to the lead article if you hit the big red reply button at the top of the page, but you can reply to the current reply. You must use the left-arrow icon at the right side of the page. This is confusing UI design. It may be there to discourage multiway replies while still sticking to the RFC design of USENET posts. This may be misleading.

So, possibly the reason Google Groups is panned by USENET users may be because of the low number of newsgroups offered, and there are free NNTP newsgroups out there.

On Facebook I said that if a domain owner is reluctant to accept the full load of text-only newsgroups from other NNTP sites that it could at least create its own private hierarchy.

I owe Google an Apology!

Google Groups has USENET-Style posting ability, after all

Maybe the feature is new, maybe not, but I was able to post a reply to a recent message posted to a USENET newsgroup with contextual reply from Google Groups. The thing I accused it of not having. So, I may have made that remark in error. In any case I acknowledge the error now in case I don't remove the earlier posting.

Stanford is to blame for the excesses of Social Media

Even though I am an alumnus of Stanford Univ. M.S. Geology, 1973, I will not give to the university and I think that its political and social inclinations are much to blame for the failings of Social Media and for the political decay of this nation.

Freedoms are under threat because of the Conservative ideology that comes from many groups at Stanford and particularly in the business applications of technology from Stanford Engineering and Computer Science by the School of Economics and their result in the social use of "signals and codes" by companies like Google and Facebook. People who work for those companies should search their souls for if the way they have used technology is ethical. Ethical lapses have already been documented at Facebook and to a lessor extant at Google and Apple e.g.

Stanford Economics and Business have fostered too rapid monetization of technologies without tutoring people who manage and invest in Silicon Valley business as to their ethical responsibilities. It is bad enough that one action of a "Democratic Socialism" politics would be to apply sanctions to decisions made by leaders and venture capital and investors that have resulted in damage to the public. Engineers should endure liability when it can be determined that a design would have a negative effect on people. An example is the textarea comment box on Facebook, the engineers who maintain that know full well how it restricts what people can say and do. Facebook's business model is not sufficient justification or defense of that decision. Those engineers should be sued for damages even if they use the Nazi defense, "My boss told me to do it that way."

How Blogging helps Terrorists

I have been mounting criticisms of the technology and aims of Social Media using it to express my beliefs knowing full well that what I say will not get noticed or replied to. This is most likely due to a combination of social engineering and the incentives to have a presence on social media in the first place, most people are promoting something, either their business or themselves, and are not aware or don't care how the technology is shaping what they do and don't do. 

There are self-selected communities everywhere and this is one of the sinister results of the business model for social media. I believe that it has helped terrorism flourish and that some approaches to interacting with people that I had access beginning back in the days of the ARPNET may be remedies for the flaws of blogging and social media particularly in combating mass shootings.

Viewed at from a marketing prospective, social media is a perfect tool for terrorism. Just like marketers want to appeal to self-selected groups of consumers, hate groups look for people who are susceptible to their form of sales. Business people of all sorts want their customers isolated from the competition and "locked-in" to a mind-set to a meme. The goal is the same, to control people.

The promoted headline style of social media feeds into this process as people tend to see topic lines that fit a set of prejudices and read only those stories, again part and parcel to marketing, PR, and propaganda.

There is an easy way to fix this and it goes back to the ARPANET and it is anti-blog. It is the USENET style of article with the ability of readers to change the topic line and to quote from and reply to another's posts. The blog is too much of a one-way form of communication driven by the blog owner or the editorial staff of the website. Even sites like Reddit and Slashdot which have the context reply features in Markdown Format, which hardly anyone uses, use a social promotion model of topics. The old USENET style of a fixed topic hierarchy gives a more neutral emotive structure to the communication that is more obvious than subreddits or editorial board promoted stories on most web blogs.

The result of all this is that if the postings of those shooters last week, and indeed of any of the disaffected people who do the same type of crimes having no religious motive at all, others not in their circles would have been able to challenge them by quoting from them and addressing what they say directly, something that can't be done on many blogs and social media sites, easily. That may at minimum distracted them from their plan or given them second thoughts.

I have been calling for Facebook to run text-only NNTP servers free of charge for their customers with a web-based interface that models USENET readers on the web, and not a blog javascript textarea widget. At minimum it should allow for use of Markdown Format and for creation of new threads by users.

In this election cycle it is important the people start to learn to write to one another directly in public and to have complex public debates in which people can be challenged to explain themselves. The blog has promoted isolation of views, much like the opinion segmentation of broadcast media, and the blog does not give people convenient means to really address one another. If those young terrorists had been exposed to withering criticism from which they could not hide on-line, maybe they wouldn't have done those awful crimes. Any social media company, such as Google, such as Facebook must share some of the blame for what happened, indeed, for the generall poor level of public discourse in our world.

Chrome refuses to render XML to HTML with XSL

But firefox latest will.

Look up the bug report. I am not going to bother to do the research for you because I am ANGRY about the way it has been handled. A security flaw is claimed, that looking at a local XML file with a XSL file on a different machine is somehow a security flaw when all the XSL does is to generate STATIC HTML. I am pissed because I went and created lots of XML files that now I have to remember do not render with Chromium. I may remember to use Firefox so well that I will make it my default browser and warn visitors to my site that they can't look at my files with Chrome and to use any other browser, since Chrome is the only one with this policy. Tell me, why am I always angry with Google? Is it because it has become the 600 lb. ape in the room? And I feel that way about Apple too.

Oh, and here is the real kicker. Chrome won't let you save the static HTML that is generated. That may be a web standard, to keep the product separate from the source, but to not allow one access to the result when a security decision has been made not to allow for possibly dynamic results goes too far when those results are static.

And on top of that, Chrome is so rude that it doesn't even issue an error. It gives the type of message that suggests that your web server is broken or misconfigured. When I use Mozilla with the same local serer and my files reside on the same disk as my home dir, I get no such misleading message. It is as if I should sue chromuim.org for time lost because some engineer is too lazy to say "Sorry, Chromium doesn't render XML to HTML with XSL, anymore."

Most People on Reddit and Slashdot do not use Markdown

In urging people to use Markdown format when it is available I must admit that only about 1% of people have ever used it. It is there but not a prominent feature of the experience on these sites. I think this is the case because most people who post nowadays are used to mobile devices whose designers have simply not chosen to make advanced features available.  Maybe when mobile device begin to look more like desktops of old and something like  a 40 line X 80 character text area becomes more common they will begin to realize that they have more choices.

But clearly most people don't know any better. Is the reason that the business model for social media sites as marketing platforms is intentionally designed to restrict what people can effectively say? Oh, I know that people will assert that social media does not practice censorship, but I think otherwise. If people whose main goal with their on-line presence is to market themselves, they are not looking to be engaged in political debates, and because of the limitations of the usual blog format, they react badly to distractions like that. The designers of the sites they use, such as Google+, know that and that is intentional.

I don't trust business people to protect my right to free speech, especially when they cater to people who not only don't care about it, but who want the one-way channel of a marketing scheme.

Social Media Needs a Formal Topic Hierarchy

I have analyzed how the blog restricts discussion, how a discussion forum and something like the original USENET is a much better way to hold a discussion on-line than any blog.

But there is another element which gets to the keystone of social media theory in its anthesis. It is the stupidity of crowds, and the failure of the ad hoc social promotion of topics.

Reddit and Slashdot have many of the discussion features the rest of social media needs, the use of Markdown format at least inside a textarea. That should be adopted as a standard for all blog software. But Reddit especially suffers from a useful structure. The top-most breakdown of topics is too broad to be useful and the subreddit is too specific and not intuitive enough.

There needs to be topic hierarchy. And it must be orderly. There is another lie in social media that some orderly structure of knowledge is not needed, it is. There is a reason knowledge is broken down into sections. It is because the structure can be taught and it has some logic. That is lacking from sites like Reddit and Slashdot who are otherwise tending to discussion forums. Even if the flash-in-the-pan structure is useful to topical "hot", read impressionistic topics, a relative static topic structure should exist along side. This change and discussion forum features in blogs would go a long way to repairing the failings of Social Media as a medium for discussion.

Social Media is the ruin of Civil Discourse and Debate

And the people who run social media want it that way.

I began considering the effects of social media by complaining about the things sites like Facebook and Google+ do not allow, like quoting from one another's posts and sustaining long and involved and possibly contentious conversations. This is also related to the poor handling of bullying and trolling in Social Media and how, because of the lack of features to control conversations, people who run blogs resort to self-policing and other social pressure, their trolls, to police their sites.

This is a damper on healthy discussions and leads to Political Correctness, and censorship.

But, this is what the business people who run and profit the most from social media want. It is also one of the factors in the poisoned and dysfunctional political system in the United States and to poor political dialogue and problem solving in the rest of the world. The people who invest in social media for a marketplace full of nice-nice do not realize how much they are playing with fire and how it could blow up in their faces.

Greed in fueling a political reaction, and it is in addition to the failings of the world economy and finance, it is discontent with the quality of the discussion and the lack of opportunity for it to really solve problems. There are many who disagree with me, but they too often don't know any better as their platform to communicate has been restricted to the blog.

The biggest offender is Mark Zuckerberg, by Google is not far behind, trading effective communication for marketing opportunities. Even though Facebook looks like it is still growing as it expands into "emerging markets", one's experience on the website is one of diminishing returns as the urge to turn everybody into a marketer begins to down everybody out. People will use it less and less as it goes the same way of broadcast and increasing on-line media drowning us in advertising. The idea of a Facebook share is the abused feature that turns everyone into a marketer and given that people often don't write anything original in their shares and many shares don't allow for reply; Facebook is like every other one way marketing scheme. In that one choice not to allow for wiode open reply to shares, Facebook is a censor.