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.
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.