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RemarQ.com Shutting Down
ZeroLogic writes: "RemarQ.com, is shutting down! According to the message on the home page, it looks like they want you to use their pay service instead. It's a shame since RemarQ was the only good Web based usenet reader I could find." ...and the free stuff will keep going away as IPO money runs out all over the Web industry. Expect a feature on this soon.
Rusty didn't charge for the site, he put ads up. And not to pay his salary, to keep the site going. Sometimes something is done for fun, or for good. But there are many immature people who like the power of destruction, but don't know the passive joy restraint can bring. (I like fire, I like explosions, I like guns. But I live in a forest, and I will kick your butt if you leave a fire unattended. I'm an engineer, so I know the joy of building, and the pain of loss an explosion can bring. And I'm human, so I aim my guns at paper targets up against really heavy backdrops.)
Louis Wu
"Where do you want to go ...
"Why do so few free services appear these days? What happened to, 'I'm doing it for fun, and if I make a few bucks, then that's icing on the cake?'"
Simply put, because there ain't no such thing as a free lunch. It'd be nice to have plentiful free services on the web, but remember, the guy behind neato-free-crap.com has to pay the bills too.
--
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The real Raunchola isn't cool enough to have any imposters
WHAT archive?
Deja's ENTIRE archive of Usenet prior to May 1999 has been removed for the past few months, while Deja 'moves its servers'. Taking long enough, isn't it?
With RemarQ gone, does this leave anyone else as a Usenet webportal or search capability? And if Deja now decides not to bring its archive back... well, I guess there's no proof that there was a vibrant civilization on the 'internet' prior to the Web after all.
I for one am glad to see Deja's pre-99 stuff broken down. I wish they'd switch their entire site over to consumer advocacy, or whatever their business model is this week, and get rid of the Usenet archives entirely.
I wouldn't mind seeing C|Net's help.com, which posts messages to Usenet without the poster having a clue as to what Usenet is, die off as well.
Shaun
Thanks to the War on Drugs, it's easier to buy meth than it is to buy cold medicine!
More precisely, its a winner-take-all market. The leading ad-driven site stands to make piles of cash.
Its entirely possible that within a few years, a well-placed ad on a the leading ad-driven site will command superbowl-like fees.
I for one love Usenet archives. It saves me from posting a question that's been asked and answered a 100 times.
Now C|Net's help.com is another story. That just pisses me off. They're making money (banners) off of people's niceness. If they want to make money by answering tech questions then hire some people to answer them! Don't leech off the newsgroups.
- Apple Computer......proudly going out of business for over twenty years.
Of course, one coudl always revert to a standard news reader, get onto usenet, and forgo the middleman altogether, couldn't they???
The thing I use dejanews most for is its ability to do a search of all their carried newsgroups for terms I want and give me only the results I want. I dont' want to have to have the bandwidth required to do that on my own machine.
Are there any services (or newsreader software) which allow me to ask a server to search and give me the newsgroups and articles which contain the terms I asked for?
Yeah, I know what you mean, I fall for TV advertising all the time but I've never bought anything because of internet banners. But that's because of the kinds of stuff being advertised. For starters, it's almost always online stuff or computer hardware etc. When was the last time you say a coke banner? Or a banner for pizza hut telling you their latest price? Or any advertising for the same sort of products that get advertised on TV? When big non-online companies get into internet advertising in a big way, there will be heaps more advertising money around.
I think people are forgetting that one thing that is contributing the fall of services like RemarQ is excellent online discussion board software such as Infopop's Ultimate Bulletin Board (UBB), which can be accessed from almost any Web browser that can run graphical mode.
Many major web sites with discussion boards use UBB for their discussion board inteface. UBB is pretty good because it does allow pretty tight moderation control over posters, and UBB allows for quotebacks and graphical smiley emoticons, which are more easily understandable than the ASCII-based "smileys."
Raymond in Mountain View, CA
Pizza probably wouldn't work because the adverts would need to be geographically targetted
Oh, don't worry about that.
First, large chains (Domino's, Pizza Hut, Papa John's) don't need to do much targeting.
Second, Doubleclick can target you geographically -- I recently noticed a banner ad advertising "AAA Michigan". Given that I live in Michigan...
Steven E. Ehrbar
I don't pay anything for television programs, yet I'd be surprised if NBC went out of business.
Then Coke took to sticking a text area directly on their cans, on every can. I've seen it used for special promotions (like 'win a trip to Disneyland') but 99.99% of the time it was the same advertising blurb- and a horrible one! Hopefully I will soon entirely forget this, but it went, "By now you've probably opened it already. The taste. The fizz. It's all there (bits of ad blurb already forgotten, thankfully deleted- culminating in) Coca-cola enjoy.
I could not get away from this freaking, drooling idiocy. It spoke to me every time I tried to drink Coca-cola- I'd lift the can and boom, there was the blurb, "By now you've probably opened it already. The taste! The fizz! It's ALL THERE..." I took to reciting it to friends with GREAT SERIOUSNESS, verbatim, to illustrate just how horrible the blurb was. And then, finally, fed up, I taught myself to like Mountain Dew, knowing it was another caffiene-rich soda beverage much smiled on by geek types- and ever since, I get both, the Mountain Dew in 24-packs.
They have ceased running the blurbs, but the damage was already done. I never wrote to Coca-cola and explained, "You guys are making me _embarrassed_ to hold a can of your product in public, and you are un-selling me from it". Seemingly someone did- how many other people went and started drinking Dew or Pepsi or jynnan tonix, however?
Advertising can be damned dangerous. If you annoy people badly enough you UN-SELL them from your product. And it really, really doesn't matter if people remember the name- if they remember it in order to never buy it again!
What if Remarq had a form where you could enter a credit card number and give a donation in whatever amount you deemed appropriate? Or how about Slashdot? Would you donate? Do you think an appreciable number of people would donate?
No?
Well, that's what happened to generosity.
I'm a little suspicious. There's only the story on the front page, and it is chock full of type-o's. What's more, the graphic with the article links to a completely unrelated discussion. There is absolutely no discussion of Remarq's closure in the remarq newsgroup (discuss.remarq.remarq.status), or at fuckedcompany.com. And to top it all off, Remarq is hosted on Windows IIS. Couldn't someone have just hacked the site and posted this? Well, maybe that is naive on my part, but it just seems a little suspicious.
Archives are crucial to a culture. We need to pay money to maintain them because otherwise they are at the mercy of our "benefactors" like Deja, Inc. of the "Echelon II" building within walking distance of the NSA's MCC and its spinoff, Cycorp (procer of one of the better technologies for mining natural language feeds).
Seastead this.
Because our context has changed. Skip back a few years to when webpages were grey backgrounds and Time New Roman everywhere, and where all images that were links had huge blue borders round them. In effect, the infancy of the Web. At that time, you couldn't make money out of the net if you tried. There were a few big companies giving it a go and on the whole losing money hand over fist (Yahoo, Amazon), but that was OK because everybody thought it was impossible to make money out of the net.
:-)
At this time, if there is little point in throwing money into setting up an on-line presence because you aren't going to make profit for 10 years+ then you may as well establish a presence but make it all free. The setup costs are lower (no merchant accounts, secure servers etc.) and because you're not going to make money anyway.
There was also the greatest scam ever pulled over the public and website operators at this time - security companies were shouting about how unsecure the Internet was. It was just as secure to send your credit card details then with SSL as it is now with SSL. The only difference is that a few hundred million has been spent with the security companies.
If we now move forward to today, website operators are thinking that they should be seeing revenue covering their costs if not making profit within 2-3 years from startup. Customers are happier to send their credit card details over the Internet. The market has become more competitive and there is far more content people are prepared to pay to see these days. In short, the world has found the Internet an acceptable but new and original way of being able to satisfy their greed.
With regards to those amongst us who are winging about bandwidth charges and costs of servers, etc. all I have to say is that co-location is now so ridiculously cheap that if you're shifting more than your allocated bandwidth, the revenue you could generate from banner ads will actually cover your costs. Honestly. Yes, even on a 0.3% click-through rate.
"Okay, it takes you an extra 3 seconds per page."
Actually, before I installed Ad Filter on my machine, some pages I regularly visit would take nearly five minutes to load, because the stupid ad server had to force the banner on me. And this was all on a T1 too. Waiting three seconds is no problem, waiting five minutes is.
"It gives them 1/10 of a cent, and might let them survive."
That's only if someone clicks on the banner ad in the first place.
"Is doubleclick really so horrible that you have to go out of your way to kill websites with your ad-filtering proxies and your mutated hosts files?"
Yes it is. When an advertiser subverts to trying to track me without me knowing, I get suspicious. Where I go online is none of Doubleclick's, or anyone's, concern. If one rotten apple in the class fucks it up, everyone has to suffer.
--
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The real Raunchola isn't cool enough to have any imposters
-legolas
i've looked at love from both sides now. from win and lose, and still somehow...
"You mean I can no longer expect to enjoy a grossly overinflated market cap for my unprofitable, $200-million-in-debt Internet start-up? That's not fair!"
Help me through college please!
Why do so few free services appear these days? What happened to, "I'm doing it for fun, and if I make a few bucks, then that's icing on the cake"? Like Slashdot, for instance, and photo.net, for another. Everything now has to make millions of bucks, or else it's not worth doing, apparently.
Switch the . and the @ to email me.
I think you mean VC money, since RemarQ hasn't IPOd.
Really, all it means is that the web as matured to the point where you just can't throw something up, try to attract a bunch of eyeballs, and then try to figure out how to build a business model later.
Ad revenue based sites are always going to have trouble making it... look at Salon's problems recently (not that I can't think of anyone who doesn't deserve it more..) Look at the magazine industry.. Very high failure rate, pretty low profit margins.
DrLunch.com The site that tells you what's for lunch!
ok,
let me get this straight.
I'm going to give you a product or service. And, in return you dont have to give me anything. And later, everyone's gonna act all shocked when I don't make a profit and have to stop giving everything away?
"I mean, All you can definately say about a fellow who thinks he's a poached egg, is; He's in the minority." James Burke
Sites that are ad-driven will always be free - to not be free would be instant suicide for an ad-driven site.
If sites are not using an ad model, then its wide open. Admittedly, these models have tended not be very fruitful, and it simply reinforces the strengths of those few sites who can be profitable on ad-based revenue.
I would have thought it was obvious that the market for ad-driven websites is obviously winner-take-all (AOL is not in this category - they are a subscription service). The portals are a clear indication - within five years, Yahoo outlasted its competition, who have all signed on with partners through acquisitions.
While over time the amount of choice on the web will drop, the leaders in ad-driven sites will always be free services.
I dunno, but a lot of my favorite seem to be going down due to poor ad revenue (most likely due to poor click through ratios). People seem to forget that people have to pay for bandwidth and servers, and unfortunately don't go out of their way to help the free services.
Whenever I'm at a free site I believe is done well, I always turn off WebFree for a second and click the banners to do my bit of support. I even might buy something from some of their banner ads and give the sites I visited from them moderate attention, instead of just clicking-and-closing. If people knew how much the webmasters do just to keep the server running and free, they'd probably be more open to clicking and whatnot. But unfortunately they don't, and so the free stuff on the web doesn't survive. *sigh* now we can just buy all these services from corporate ameri-co =\
Help me through college please!
I guess it follows JWZ's line of thinking, "Linux is only free if your time is worth nothing."
Me, personally, I just ignore the banner ads and let the companies earn their pittance. Why are some people so afraid of that?
- A.P.
--
"One World, one Web, one Program" - Microsoft promotional ad
"Remember when the U.S. had a drug problem, and then we declared a War On Drugs, and now you can't buy drugs anymore?"
So yet another usenet portal bites the dust. That doesn't bother me nearly as much as the number of major usenet sites that are looking for peers. Last week I got a message from my best feed saying that that they are closing down their own nntp server becuase they only have a few customers that use it and thouse tend to like the alt.sex.binarys.isoimages and wares groups. Now most isps aren't running their own news servers anymore and just farm it out to someone that just takes care of it. So much for distributed news. Thouse ISPs that do run news tend to just have one usenet feed from a backbone provider that is only running news because some sysadmin somewhere decied they needed it for their own use.
:-) Too bad the modern net isn't based on lots of people tring to help each other for the common good.
I've been running usenet (or netnews) servers since 1987 and I'm thinking that usenet as it was is slowly going away. I remember back in the days were spam didn't have a name. before it was invaded by C&S and sciencultology. when sept was when all the newbies showed up. Them where the days
So if anyone needs a news peer that only will carry about 600 groups email me
The Boston Globe reports that fiction writer Harlan Ellison is suing Critical Path, owner of Remarq.com, for copyright infringement. Trial set to go to court next month.
Surely this has nothing to do with Remarq going off the air. But it does indicate the depths to which Usenet has fallen. I remember when Usenet used to be civil and productive, and it is a shame that it has become like CB radio.
According to the report, "in June, he [Ellison] won a judgment against Stephen Robertson of California, who admitted posting Ellison's stories online and agreed to pay Ellison's legal fees." Ellison, it says, uses a manual typewriter. Evidently he also has some strong ideas about art and technology.
It takes time or money to build a business. If you think there's going to be a network effect -- in that the first person in, wins -- then money is cheaper than the time.
-russ
Don't piss off The Angry Economist
I can't say I'm disappointed that Remarq's free service went bye-bye. Not only was its pay service not known for being among the best in either retention or group availability, but its free service was, IMHO, a mockery of USENET. It didn't carry many of the active groups, and it catered mostly to people who don't really understand USENET or the many ways to access it. As such, I think it dameged "real" USENET providers, by allowing Web users to go to USENET and stay there without learning even the simplest basics about it, and by providing a free alternative just barely good enough to keep newbies there and keep them from joining up with real providers--thus making it harder for real providers to stay in the black.
It's hard for me to make that last statement, since I'm very much in favor of Free Software, but there's a major difference between the big software companies and the big USENET services. Even the "big" USENET services are relatively small, and many have trouble staying afloat; RemarQ cut into an already lean profit margin for some providers, and the cost to the public of the important USENET news services shutting down is, dare I say, more grave than the cost of losing this free and limited RemarQ service.
Also, as I said, services like Remarq allowed people to get onto USENET without learning any of the basics involved, many such people never even realizing that they're not on the Web any more. While I'm a champion of ease-of-use, there comes a point when the ease-of-use of RemarQ does more harm than good. You end up with most of the free RemarQ users--not all, but most--not contributing to the newsgroups they're accessing, never bothering to read the FAQ because RemarQ does all the work for them, and littering them with "me, too"s the likes of which haven't been seen since the horrid AOL invasion of yore. Most of the senseless wastes of bandwidth I've seen on USENET recently, all the "me, too"s and clueless newbies who won't read the FAQ even after you tell them twice, have come from RemarQ.
The loss of RemarQ isn't even that bad, since great premium USENET access can be gotten for between $5.95 and $14.95 a month. Personally, even though the NNTP connection is limited to 33Kbps, I prefer Altopia's service: $12 a month, they have every single newsgroup, and a minimum of a four day retention for binaries (up to 8 days, depending) and longer for text (usually about 7). If you have a cable connection, and down/upload binaries, you can pretty much leave your connection on all the time to make up for the slow connection cap. They also offer 128kbps access, but at a hefty $48/month. One reason I support them so much is that Chris at Altopia seems to be big on freedom and very against censorship--Altopia has never dropped a group, for any reason, that I know of. As long as you're not uploading anything illegal (yeah, *you*, wArEZ d00dz and pedos!) Altopia doesn't care what you do, and is very conscious about not keeping records longer than necessary to prevent abuse. I like their privacy policy, it's absolutely the best. To be fair, I also hear good things about uncensored-news and usenetserver.
But that's just my 2 cents; support a free (as in -dom) USENET by subscribing to a good provider. Please, they need as much help as they can get to keep the news free and uncensored, unlike the Web.
"The more corrupt the state, the more numerous the laws."--Tacitus, *The Annals*
Note that not all succesful companies heavily advertise - you'd be surprised. Ever see a Napster ad? Even coke from time to time will essentially stop or drastically reduce advertising and instead focus on packaging and product placement to increase sales (the former coke marketing guru was recently quoted as saying he essentially thought advertising was a huge waste of money and packaging was a far more impactful way to increase sales).
...that they're shutting down the free service. Do you know how much it costs to keep these servers running?
(from netcraft.co.uk)
www.remarq.com is running Microsoft-IIS/4.0 on NT4 or Windows 98
-http://MSD.dyndns.org
I'm not surprised much by this.. I remember when remarq was new and basically a clone of dejanews.. at least then you could find a newsgroup on there (comp.pda) but since about a year or two ago they revamped their web site... I absolutely hate flashy web sites like remarq because you can never get anything done! Remarq is basically just a glorified forum now.. They shot themselves in the foot, people don't want to navigate their mess of a web site (at least I don't).
At least dejanews still provides the service that they started out providing, it is easy to navigate or type in your fav newsgroup there.. and there are bunches.. like ones for your fav pda or newsgroups for your fav game, etc
-since when did 'MTV' stand for Real World Television instead of MUSIC television?
- A.P.
--
"One World, one Web, one Program" - Microsoft promotional ad
"Remember when the U.S. had a drug problem, and then we declared a War On Drugs, and now you can't buy drugs anymore?"
I remember using USENET back in '89. I was subscribed to about 50-75 newsgroups and could read them all (all articles, all newsgroups). It took about an hour/hour and a half a day. No SPAM, alt.flame was actually funny...
Last time I read USENET was maybe a year ago. SPAM everywhere, little actual news in any of the newsgroups, flamefests, bunches of questions with no answers.
*sigh* sad to see it go that way...
-- Ever notice that fast-burning fuse looks exactly the same as slow-burning fuse? I didn't... (Edgar Montrose)
Remarq is a good example -- nobody really uses USENET anymore, and the site's readership was probably decreasing rapidly. It's funny; we usually think of Internet companies as only growing, but some of the older ones are actually going to find their market share shrinking (Yahoo vs. Google, for example). Simply put, not every Internet service is one that's going to be successful with consumers. For every eBay or Amazon.com, there's a WebGrocer or Boo.com.
As the Internet continues to become more and more a part of mainstream culture, we'll -- surprise! -- see mainstream opinions dictate what appears on the Internet more and more. Look at the rise of corporate homepages and useless Shockwave animations as an example. Joe Sixpack may like to buy stuff on eBay and browse pr0n, but he could probably care less about a text-based discussion feature like Remarq -- which is used mostly by the so-called Internet "elite."
What's to do be done about this situation? Not much, really -- it's more of an inevitably than anything else. You can't have both "mainstream" status and economic freedom. In this case, the Internet is drifting towards the former, and that's not necessarily bad -- it's just a situation we'll have to get used to.