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R.I.P Usenet: 1980-2008
CorinneI writes "In a way inconceivable in today's marketplace, Usenet was where people once went to talk — in days before the profit-centric Internet we have today. The series of bulletin boards called 'newsgroups' shared by thousands of computers, which traded new messages several times a day, is now a thing of the past."
Just like MTV is now Youtube, USENET is now Google Groups.
Same thing, different name.
please stop posting the opinions of bloggers as fact.
Stupid headline. Usenet is still there. Stupid idiots who are slaves to only what their ISP spoon feeds them may drop off. So what.
Except that no Web 2.0 forum comes close to matching the features that any decent USENET client had 15 years ago. Things like real threading, filters, kill files, etc.
Give me Classic Slashdot or give me death!
I don't think either explanation really matches reality. Usenet started to seriously deteriorate to the point most people I knew who were regulars started to drop it around 1995-1998. At that time, while there were web forums, they were still in the teething stage and no replacement for Usenet. That, for me, is the time Usenet "died". It began to be re-invented as a binaries distribution network shortly thereafter.
Why did it die? Spam. Spammers began to make swathes of Usenet unreadable. After a few managable carpetbombs, the serious spammers first attacked in earnest the alt.sex hierarchy (it's an interesting fact that comes as a surprise to many that back in the early nineties, alt.sex contained some of the most respected newsgroups in Usenet. alt.sex.bondage, for example, was originally started after a prank revealed massive interest in such a group, and it became one of the more respected groups thereafter.) The groups became unusable within two years, with a few migrating to "safer" areas out of the alt.* hierarchy. After that the rest of Usenet started to get similarly hit.
A few attempts were made to protect Usenet, from serious attempts to hold ISPs to account for their users (which caused more damage than it helped, as the legitimate customers of those ISPs were cut off from Usenet too and as a result drifted away, reducing the S/N ratio even further) to attempts to introduce various forms of moderation that, ultimately, also caused more damage.
People just gave up. Even the spammers started to give up after a few years largely because it wasn't worth their time any more, but by that time Usenet was dead anyway.
What's dying today isn't Usenet, at least not the network in operation back from 1980. It's a binaries distribution system, the one that took over from the mid-nineties onwards.
And frankly, I don't know about you, but I don't care about that one.
You are not alone. This is not normal. None of this is normal.
Don't bother reading the article. It is a non-interesting opinion/blog piece with very little supporting data.
My own little anecdote, I was on usenet (rec.windsurfing) earlier today. If it wasn't for the overwhelming spam, I'd continue to use some of the other groups as the people who are left are a pretty committed and knowledgable group.
This post brought to you by your friendly neighborhood MBA.
Oh, and look, they have all the alt.* forums there too!
So, unless the entire Usenet network gets taken offline..which is unlikely, then no, it's far from dead.
"Leo Fender was in a 'state of grace' when he designed the Stratocaster." -- Paul Reed Smith
Holy Shit! Usenet is dead. For some reason my Xnews, open right now, seems to not have noticed.
Death Of Usenet has been predicted since its birth. Nothing to see here.
Supporting World Peace Through Nuclear Pacification
Yet here we are, on a web forum, and not on USENET. Makes you wonder whether those features were just a crutch to get around USENET's design flaws.
"The year of linux on the desktop"..
"The next search engine to beat google"..
"Windows is dead"..
"Usenet is dead"..
It seems like more and more people are making more and more outrageous predictions & claims.
I guess with all the noise out there people need a way for their blog to stand out.
If they're wrong its a case of "oh well, maybe next year" but if they're right they'll claim they're prophetic or something and use it to get more advertizing/readers/whatever... and yet nothing changes, the internet goes on.
Hold on.. http://tech.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=08/07/31/1316257 OMG!! the internet is gonna end.
I am a free slashdotter. I will not be modded, blogged, DRM'd, patented, podcasted or RFID'd. My life is my own.
If you read the article you'd realize the writer was speaking "metaphorically"
it's hard to completely kill off something as totally decentralized as Usenet; as long as two servers agree to share the NNTP protocol, it'll continue on in some fashion. But the Usenet I mourn is long gone, anyway, or long-transformed into interlocking comments on LiveJournals and the forums boards on tech-support Web sites.
For some reason my Xnews, open right now, seems to not have noticed.
But have you checked the date? It's finally October 1st!
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eternal_September
It probably went down, because there's a whole generation that thinks PHP forums and Google will help you find *all* the answers when, in fact, early internet engineers were pretty smart guys and designed something in which you would go to one place to concentrate your searches. Furhtermore, the posting would be replicate to all servers.
Personally, I think googling for a technical answer in particular regarding programming languages is a PITA. Too many forums to search for. Usenet makes it much simpler, but witness the moronity level when Ubuntu and Apple don't propagate their mailing list to Usenet (which just about every other self-repecting OS crowd does - Debian, FreeBSD, etc.)
Main difference between the BSD license and the GPL license: one is from California and the other is from Massachusetts