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.