Are Public NNTP Servers a Thing of the Past?

JPawloski asks: "When I bought this computer, it came with 6 months of AOL for free. Being notoriously frugal, I have used AOL and will continue to until my free time expires; however, the one disadvantage is it does not have a NNTP server. I find using Deja by Google cumbersome and have a number of problems (updating every 9 or so hours is one of them). I started a search of public NNTP servers on the Internet, and tried literally 50 of them, but none of them work. I even looked a directories of public news servers and fared no better. Are public news servers a thing of the past now that most ISPs offer it standard? Does anyone else out there still use a public news server, and, if so, how does it work compared to the alternatives (deja.com, etc.). Any other recommendations?"

Comments

Re:Lame question ?

[gi-tux]

Yes, it is a part of the culture change that has occurred on the internet since the general public started getting on-line. The internet is just like the rest of the world (take, take, take). Everyone wants to get everything for free but not contribute. Well, except for spammers, and they want to give for free so that they can take from the idiots that respond.
When I first got on the internet, everyone contributed and shared (at least information). Usenet was a great resource for information and WWW didn't even exist. There were a handful of good FTP server where you could get software and data, etc. But now, you can't find anything because everyone wants to be on the top of every search engine search. Some sites spend more time trying to get to the top of search lists that don't even pertain to what the site is about than they do providing good information, services, or products.
And unfortunately we can't blame this on Bill Gates. The internet was getting bad before he even got interested in it in a serious manner. Maybe we should blame Al Gore.