Now that I understand a little bit more about how it is organized, I may be able to put Usenet to work for me. I installed Thunderbird, which has an email client as well as a news reader. I used Google to search for the groups that I might want to subscribe to. Thunderbird is way faster than Google for flipping through lots of messages, because with Google, the browser page has to refresh each time you navigate to something new. Thunderbird does that instantly.

I found some interesting news web pages by following links that people posted to a group. I expect, too, that if I want to buy something I can find someone with experience who could comment on whatever I need to know.

I don’t like watching people verbally abuse each other, though; there is a lot of crude, and not too clever, writing there. I think that giving people the space to form communities built on common interests is one of the most powerful features of the web. Being able to search the archives makes this resource valuable.