Slashdot Mirror
Duke To Shut Down Usenet Server
DukeTech writes "This week marks the end of an era for one of the earliest pieces of Internet history, which got its start at Duke University more than 30 years ago. On May 20, Duke will shut down its Usenet server, which provides access to a worldwide electronic discussion network of newsgroups started in 1979 by two Duke graduate students, Tom Truscott and Jim Ellis." Rantastic and other readers wrote about the shutdown of the British Usenet indexer Newzbin today; the site sank under the weight of a lawsuit and outstanding debt. Combine these stories with the recent news of Microsoft shuttering its newsgroups, along with other recent stories, and the picture does not look bright for Usenet.
No, that isn't a stretch. Google bought out dejanews to kill it off. Nowadays google groups doesn't work at all, with them not even bothering with spam (i.e., they don't do anything about the countless complaints regarding Google spammers and spam in google groups) along with them burying any search result that involves Usenet from their groups search. This has become so bad that Google's top search hits on programming topics frequently consists of sites that shamelessly mirror Usenet content to try to pass it off as their own forums, while it completely ignores any hit from the very same newsgroup.
Then there's Google's inability to find even popular newsgroups such as comp.lang.c++ when you even when you explicitly search for the group
If that wasn't enough, Google's newsgroup archive has since been eroding, which is a major blow to one of Usenet's most valuable use, humanity's best and most successfull attempt at an expert system.
So it isn't a stretch to claim that Google is the one responsible for killing newsgroups. The company eliminated the established service for newsgroup search, it has gradually destroyed the service and has been actively hiding Usenet from the public.
Slashdot, fix your code or at least hire someone who is competent at it to do it for you.
Those were good times. Thanks guys.
I don't think Usenet's in much trouble, it's just that the huge level of traffic, and usage relative minority among all Internet denizens is making it into a more specialized area that you have to pay to access. Take for example Giganews, they've been around for quite some time, and they keep upping their retention. Right now they offer 650 days binary retention, 2,522 days text retention, 109,000+ newsgroups and have servers in North America, Europe and Asia. They also just recently added a VPN service free for the top tier accounts, which also get unlimited downloads and SSL encrypted Usenet traffic. All that for $30 a month, the VPN alone is probably worth that, much less all the other stuff. To pull all that off they have to have invested tremendous amounts of money into storage alone, so they're apparently not hurting for money any.
And Giganews isn't alone in offering paid access to Usenet, there's tons of other companies doing it, and it seems that new ones pop up every day. So I think saying Usenet's dying is premature. It may die eventually, but it's not happening now.