Slashdot Mirror
Is Usenet Dying?
TNLNYC writes "The Washington Post has this interesting article about the status of Usenet. It talks about the decreasing number of people using it and at the same time, the increasing amount of traffic. Overall, an interesting quick overview of the current state of Usenet." I'll note for the record that slashdot doesn't have a "Usenet" topic - thus the Spam can. My personal experience is that almost no one coming online these days even knows Usenet exists.
Death of USENET predicted! Film at 11.
But you have to know where to look. There are particular newsgroups where world-class experts congregate, where the latest news breaks, etc.
comp.arch
comp.lang.c++.moderated
sci.space
rec.running
misc.fitness.weights
etc..
So all the newcomers to the 'net aren't using Usenet. This doesn't worry me in the least! The web-based chat boards are, frankly, tiresome. The SNR on IRC is near zero.
So. Us oldtimers are quite happy commincating with NNTP, thanks.
Honestly, I am begining to suspect that the net has very few options in defending itself against what is becoming increasingly obvious: Let the world communicate, and a small percentage of them communicate nothing but garbage particularly loudly.
Slashdot has escaped the worst of those consequences utilising the cooperative moderation system, condeming most of the spam and junk to their own little world that people using 1/2 moderation levels rarely see. Various IRC channels have managed by either being particularly unknown, or in the case of one channel I'm a member of, simply having a very low kick threshold.
Usenet similarly, has adapted in several ways, some groups are small and targetted so specifically that they rarely recieve spam or don't attract people who are liable to argue a point well beyond having lost it. Others are moderated, the IRC kick equivalent, and some users have killfiles, the Slashdot moderation equivalent.
Unfortunately, the sheer freedom of usenet is working against it. Killfiles are the responsibility of the user, and most users are not willing to put much effort into filtering. Cancelbots do a good job against the worst offenders, but even cutting the spam down by 25% still leaves way too much.
But the very worst thing in terms of junk is the timespan. On slashdot, a story lasts a day. Shit flies for a day, then its gone, consigned to the archives for people doing searches. On IRC, the conversations are too rapid and too realtime to last long, but on usenet a political or value argument can last weeks, with people reading daily, replying, branching out into huge unweildy threads of disinformation and mistakes. Worse, their persistence means that if a user who hasn't read for a week or two fires up their client, they'll see all the articles in a discussion dead days, they post, and boom it starts all over again, constant non-ending argument. it hops threads, it hops newsgroups via common users, and pretty soon your signal to noise ratio has gone to hell and you flinch every time you see a new post just in case it starts up another diatribe.
I don't have solutions, but the problem is all too clear, and for those websites implementing discussion forums, beware, such a fate is not limited to usenet.
You can't win a fight.
After all, almost no one coming online these days even knows that DNS exists.
;-)
"The question of whether machines can think is no more interesting than [] whether submarines can swim" - Dijkstra
As others have stated previously, newbies think that Internet == Web, and they don't know that Usenet exists. So what? Does it really matter, that Usenet isn't a place where newcomers gather?
In my opinion, no. Usenet is a nice little service where some people feel comfortable, and those that don't can go elsewhere. I started out on BBSes back in '92 (yes, I'm a "newbie") and enjoyed the discussion taking place in various groups. Some BBSes carried international networks (RIME springs to mind) and that made us able to talk with people in other parts of the world.
When I first came online in '95, starting my college education, I didn't know about Usenet. I quickly got to know about IRC though, and #chatzone (or some other chat-channel) was my starting place. Around new-years '96 I found out how Usenet worked, and was happy to know that it was more or less like my old BBSes. Since then I've been an irregular poster to various newsgroups (mostly Norwegian ones).
I've tried participating on various web-based message boards, and there's always something I miss. Threading, ease of reading, and Gnus' incredible score-capabilities spring to mind. Things I am used to having around, things that make my everyday Usenet experience better. Not to mention that once those message boards reach a certain size it's fairly impossible to quickly read through it (in my opinion). Browsers (and the web) wasn't created with message boards in mind, I think.
The newbie/experienced ratio on Usenet is probably somewhat consistant, but those newbies are still easy to notice. I understand those who feel that Usenet has lost its usefulness because there's too much spam and clueless newbies. Trying to educate the general public is somewhat difficult, but it can probably be done (but lets not get into that discussion here).
I think Usenet is going to be around for quite a while. In Norway the traffic on Usenet is slowly but surely becoming larger. There's room for this kind of service.
In the meantime, those of us who have been using it since the 80s can continue to do so in peace and quiet.
It's like the CB craze in the 70s. It used to be a self-regulating anarchy, populated by a close knit community. Then it became popular, the common idiot came into it, made it useless, and then left. Now you still have a small number of CBers that use it a lot and it's gone back to what it was in the old days.
May usenet suffer the same fate. The world can naff off. The greater the intelligence needed to find usenet, the better for all involved.
Uhhhmmmm... what are you comparing?
/. cannot even begin to carry the wealth and breadth of expertise that washes over Usenet every day. The reason they can't compete is the sheer volume of material. If you think the /. effect is bad, just imagine the consequence of every current Usenet user hitting the same site at the same time. Any replacement for Usenet must be distributed.
If everyone in the world visits the same Website to pick up their technical advice and chat, then that Website needs stupendous bandwidth, which costs a lot; which means that if it is to be provided in a capitalist environment it has to be covered with flashy adverts. Furthermore, that website is a single point of failure, and a single point of control - AKA censorship.
Usenet works (and will continue to work in the long term) because it distributes the cost of transmission of news across a very large number of nodes. Its store-and-forward method of propagation means that it is invulnerable to intermittencies in service. Each individual connection is relatively short distance, limiting congestion at network choke-points. It's easy to be selective of the groups you will cover on your own node, and, if you want groups which aren't available on your upstream node, it's easy to peer with another to feed them.
Furthermore, it's a profoundly subversive technology. It worked originally over dialup networks using UUCP; although we probably wouldn't use UUCP again, if the corporates succeed in getting control of the network backbone and deciding what we can transmit over it, Usenet would be incredibly easy to get working over other links.
Usenet will evolve of course, and ultimately will be supplanted by something else (RDF hints at some possibilities). But sites like
I'm not really at all disappointed that new Net users aren't adopting Usenet in droves. Usenet has always had a problem with acculturating large numbers of newcomers at the same time (it's always September...), and, as the people who are joining the Net are increasingly drawn from a broad, non-technical, non-academic public, the proportion who really have something to contribute (and who are able to express that something clearly and eloquently) declines. If Usenet were to dwindle into the hangout of the hardcore techies of the Net, that wouldn't worry me at all.
This may happen. But what won't happen is that Usenet will just die. Enough of the people who use it and care about it have the ability and resources to maintain it that you can guarantee it's survival for a long time. I first used it fifteen years ago; I will still be using it fifteen years into the future - not as my only information source, but as one of my information sources.
Simon, aka control@scot.news-admin.org
I'm old enough to remember when discussions on Slashdot were well informed.
It's easy to dismiss UseNet as an unwieldy, overblown relic of the times when people didn't zoom along over cable modems, viewing everything at 32bit colour on their 19" monitors. However, many people still live in that era. UseNet is enormously useful, if:
- You don't have graphical access to the internet. Yes, text-based browsers make many things perfectly usable, but have you tried using board-type discussion forums using Lynx lately? Sites such as Slashdot are usable - but when you want to rapidly check on cross-references, determine posting status, etc, a newsreader such as 'tin' beats web browsing any day.
- Secondly, a newsfeed is local. You browse articles on a local server, usually either on a campus/office network or just at the other end of your modem. I know many people praise the cheap and available nature of ADSL, Cable modems, etc, but in many places, individual high-speed access is just a dream. Take China and India, for example. What do you think is more realistic - millions of people clicking 'Read followup' in their Netscape/IE window, or selecting 'next article', thereby quickly retrieving a local article to their screen?
- Guess what. Newsreader interfaces right now are superior to anything I've seen on the web for discussion forums. They're also much faster, but that's just a snide remark. Even the somewhat crippled newsreader in Communicator beats any configurability and power that, say, Infoworld's forum's offer. This really isn't mean to be a cheap shot at web forums - but newsreader interfaces have had more than a decade or two to mellow and be improved. Sure beats the 'Submit' and 'Preview' buttons, doesn't it?
- Yeah, the binary problem is rampant. But so what? If your sysadmin has any clue as to what he's doing (and this means doing more than just configuring INN to auto-subscibe all), he'll be able to filter out anything he wants to. This specifically means binary postings, for instance. If a user desperately needs them (and I'm sure many do
:), then www.deja.com remains an option. - This is probably a moot point to many, but UseNet has become a global cultural archive of our age. From the days of clear, simple, useful inter-governmental discussions, through the university glory days, finally when AOLers became the most maligned force on UseNet, and ultimately entering our current stage, UseNet has become a cultural mirror of society. Larry Wall's postings from more than a decade ago are still *somewhere*, and the Wall Quote Archive is a damn good proof of that
:-) - Perhaps more importantly - UseNet is distributed. Yes, this means that a ridiculous lot of spam and other junk is moved around the net daily. But so what? I know that no site admin can censor what I want to read - there will always be open news servers, or even - oh dear - web interfaces like Deja.com. I will never ever have to fear that Andover and then VA Linux will mess with any freedom. I can create a new group, if peer approval is given. The people I want to talk to can subscribe to the group. Ultimate, anarchic freedom. Isn't this what the Internet is supposed to be all about - and what we're celebrating on Slashdot? We seem to believe that Slashdot is the ultimate free anarchical net community. Nonsense. UseNet is. Has been. Will be.
- I remember reading through the 'Zen and the Art of UseNet' years and years ago, my mind lighting up with the pure joy at the realisation that UseNet was truly self-governed. So what if spam innundates the unmoderated groups? You can set up a moderator, if enough people care about your topic. Even create a new group and get rid of the old one. Spammers can't always get to you, but the information will always get out to those who want to reach it.
Personally, I believe that Usenet will continue existing long after those who're predicting its death right now have gone away. Maybe it'll be a beautified Usenet, with lots of graphics tacked on top, the way Deja is trying to turn it into a 'community-based' collection of 'forums'I don't see anyone predicting the death of e-mail or the web, yet both are full of spam and useless junk. But similarly to Usenet, both are based on extremely simple principles, and remain usable with an extremely low technological investment. Everything IE/Netscape/Outlook/Eudora/etc. may throw at you, from Templates to Style Sheets to embedded video, is just eyecandy. The underlying backbone, the information, survives.
God, that was sentimental. Now if that wasn't the pinnacle of geekdom - coming close to shedding tears over the beauty of bits and bytes and a text interface...
Alex T-B
IMHO Slashdot needs the ability for people to subscribe to moderators, or to killfile someone's moderation. By clicking on a message that I think has been properly moderated, I should be able to have Slashdot automatically use that person's moderation in the future, and the reverse when I think someone has been marked down unfairly. Then we'll choose who we let help us cull our choices.
I'm going to dust off one of my favorite soap-boxes, and try to introduce a few people here to a fond place in my memory. It's called FidoNet
FidoNet is a network of independent, dial-up bulletin board systems. You connect with a modem to a PC running in some guy's basement. Everything is text. "Graphics" means color text with line-draw characters. Almost none of these systems are connected to a permanent network other then the one run by AT&T. Every night, all these BBSes call the BBSes in the next towns over, and exchange mail and files. It isn't far wrong to say FidoNet was designed primarily to cheat the phone company.
For a long time, this was the only way for someone like myself, living in rural New Hampshire, USA, to get "online". The Internet was something to be found at universities. But FidoNet was everywhere. It had over 40,000 nodes when the Internet hit the big time and started killing it off. It's still alive, but slowly dying out as the 'net makes it obsolete.
What does this have to do with anything? Well, FidoNet had open discussion forms, like Usenet. Fido's "newsgroups" were called "echos". Like Usenet, FidoNet was largely self-regulated. The "coordinators" were a loosely-knit group of system operators who tried to keep everyone on the same sheet of music. But, unlike Usenet, Fido had controls in place to keep things like spam from getting out of hand.
Every Fido echo (discussion group) had a moderator. Not like a Usenet moderator, but more like an IRC "op". The moderator was responsible for keeping the echo in the echolist -- if noone cared about an echo, it would automatically remove itself in about six months. Moderators were free to implement whatever policy they chose. Anyone was free to start their own echo if they didn't like any of the current ones.
The big thing was: People were held accountable. If someone started making an ass out of themselves, the moderator would warn them. If the twit didn't listen, the moderator could mail the sysop of their board and get them removed from the echo. If the same guy kept getting kicked out of echos, the sysop would generally cut their echo access entirely.
But wait -- it gets better. If a particular board was a frequent source of twits, spammers, and the like, a coalition of moderators could contact the local network coordinator (NC). The NC would warn the board, but if it did not improve, it's FidoNet feed would be cut completely. There were ways for this to progress up the chain of command so that entire networks (local areas) could be cut.
If you are used to the loosely regulated anarchy of Usenet, this seems drastically different. But it did work, for the small population of Fido at the time. In effect, FidoNet has a cabal, and is better off for it.
Of course, we'll never know for sure if FidoNet would have scaled as well as UseNet has (and Usenet scaled, just not as well as we'd like). However, a system like FidoNet's might be something to consider for those looking to "replace" Usenet with something "better".
*climbs back down off soap-box*
Just my 1/4 of a byte. ;-)
dragonhawk@iname.microsoft.com
I do not like Microsoft. Remove them from my email address.