I have been a long standing usenet user. My first post was back in 1993. I find that I really like the medium. People can communicate in a manner that fits an extended conversation, yet still can offer a better thought out response. It's almost, when done well, a blend of letters and essays with a sense of community tossed in. This seems to be especially true for the newsgroup soc.history.what-if: see sidebar. We have some very high and rigorous standards there that have stood the test of time. Well, at least the last 6 years or so, which is a pretty long time for anything online. Not all is shiny and bright though.
The only problem is that Usenet is dying. The readership and participant count is an ebbing tide. It's not a style that appeals to people in this day and age of YouTube, podcasts, The Web, and bitttorrent. Even blogs might be hurting in another few years. However, for Usenet, the style of discourse and quality of discussion from the better newsgroups will simply go extinct, I think. The vast majority of them are empty or full of spam, already left high and dry as the waters of human attention have withdrawn. There are a few refugia, but not that many and even those are in decline.
SHWI for example has had 2212 posts so far this month. An estimated 300 of those are spam (10%, which is very bad compared to olden times). There were a small host of threads this month about whether we should have an exodus of posters away from the less desirable types which seem to be overly prolific and, frankly, very obnoxious even to those that are polite to them. Those threads, which induced a plethora of rants by the usual suspects[1], generated something on the order of 200 posts of their own. That leaves some 1800 posts that are 'good' posts. That means an average of 62 posts per day. Except that seven years ago, it was five times that. The decline can be seen
here.
The question of what is to succeed it has come up. I've been putting in some serious '
skull sweat' about what to do. Carlos outed that fact. I have a plethora of notes on what I want from the high. Now I've started scribbling down the mechanics. I think I am going to do a number of prototypes first. This weekend, I am planning on standing up an old machine as a server for the project. The first lines of code will probably be written tonight for the first prototype.
I need to read a lot more details about the new models of communication that are out there. I am setting an informal goal of the first alpha for a year from now. We shall see.
1. As an aside, Google Groups has even produced a bit of character assassinations through an add on feature that most Usenet users can't see: Google Groups supports a rating feature for each post and this in turn allows some people who use this system to run around and mark people they don't like down as poor posts. It's not unlike slashdot's moderation system, yet isn't available to most posters to even know its there. Since Google Groups is likely to be the end resting place for the ultimate end-times Usenet archive, some people have been smeared without knowledge or way of correction after the groups are archived permanently.
