I'm looking through usenet today to see who or what still posts there. I think it might be a great venue for distributing information on my various projects (like Headline Prophet), but in checking it out it seems like the entire venue has been abandoned. Nobody is using it. Last posts trail, in the best cases, into 2009 while anything at all from 2010 is rare. Of what does exist, much of it appears to be spam.
I'm trying to imagine what happened. It's not so much that I don't get that web forums pretty much replaced this odd far-fetched usenet protocol for conversation. That's certainly a large part of it, sure. But even when the web was starting to take off and this migration from usenet was just beginning, I figured it wouldn't matter all that much in the end. There was after all a "core" of usenet conversationalists that existed before the consumer web. I thought that after the population of new users swelled and retracted, that core would remain and usenet would thus stay interesting. In looking at the various news groups today, I find that hasn't happened. Everyone is gone, tech and casual users alike.
Oddly, the one active usenet group (which perhaps serves as best motivation to continue looking for others), is my old hangout alt.misc.transport.urban-transit. I can't figure out why this group among so many remains active except for the possibility that there has been a never-ending debate between pro and anti public transit foes that has gone on for over 15 years. I don't think parties on either side are willing to leave the group until they've definitively trounced the opposition. It's just that heated an issue.
I'm continuing to scope things out. I understand that, for all this emptiness, usenet is still the preferred method for large binary files like music and -- other things, which I have no real interest in. I'm just looking for some of that good ol' fire of debate in the form of plain old text, in the classic format that is easy to organize and assimilate. Google Groups, after all, effectively provides an interface to the "old" usenet. But to me it is clumsy and convoluted. They've taken their Google Group community and integrated it with usenet, all while using its usenet archive library (purchased from a service called DeJa News some years ago) as some sort of foundation for both. Trying to access a classic newsgroup through this cacophony is overly complicated and strangely hit and miss. I'm not really sure Google is into it nor wants anyone else to be. After all, they are kind of touting "groups" as the managed and thus preferred alternative to the non-moderated newsgroups they otherwise allow access to. Sadly, while Google's interface could have served as some sort of savior for mainstream newsgroup access, it clearly does not.
For my nostalgia and exploration, I've signed up with GigaNews and am trolling around to see what's up. Two bucks a month for some old time fun seems about right.
