Apparently not yet, but as far as my usage of it is concerned, it’s on life support. As the article points out, it doesn’t help that ISPs don’t support it properly. I gave up on AT&T once I realized that they’d outsourced it, and basically didn’t care whether it worked for their customers or not, and use GigaNews now.
Anyway, my biggest use of Usenet is sci.space.*, but I’ve cut way back on my participation there, because the signal/noise ratio has gotten so low, with many of the best long-time members of the newsgroups having gone to greener pastures (for example, Henry Spencer hasn’t posted there in many moons, which is a little ironic, considering that whenever I used to point out that Usenet was dying, he would reply that people have been predicting the death of Usenet for decades). It’s mostly loonytunes now, like Brad Guth and Ian Parker, and the Elifritz troll, with little substantive space policy discussion. I do think that the center of gravity of serious space discussion has shifted to the web, regardless of whatever else is still happening with NNTP.
As a long time S.S.P usenet reader I have to agree — I don’t bother reading there anymore. You find the usual characters like Henry, et al on the web.
Speaking of usenet… Perhaps I should code up a webservice “Killfile”.
Cheers
Is Maxon (either/any incarnation) still trolling on s.s.history?
Is Maxon (either/any incarnation) still trolling on s.s.history?
Yes, but not as much as in the past.
In the economy, bad money drives out good money. On Usenet, crazy people drive out sane people.
Dave Cooper made the phosphor on your screen glow to indicate:
That reminds me: Is Joseph “Futuristic! Shocking! Mindblowing!” Michael still posting there? What about Oleg “Tourette’s syndrome” Zabluda?
Also, whatever happened to Jim “Free Yourself” Davidson?
I haven’t read usenet in a long time, never mind posted there.
Someone once said about punk rock “It’s not dead, but it’s beginning to smell real bad…”
There are still holdouts within Usenet where moderation is still going on, and the system still functions, but I suspect there are fewer and fewer people willing to do that moderation, and the up and coming moderator types are all running web forums.
Sadly, the biggest use of Usenet these days seems to be for posting download links for bit torrent users.
There are still holdouts within Usenet where moderation is still going on, and the system still functions, but I suspect there are fewer and fewer people willing to do that moderation, and the up and coming moderator types are all running web forums.
Actually, that was the death of sci.space.tech and sci.space.science. George Herbert found better things to do with his life than moderate them (not a criticism of him), and no replacement ever showed up.
I used to be a pretty heavy usenet poster for the better part of a decade, mostly in the sci.astro.*, sci.space.*, and rec.arts.sf.science groups. I even helped create a new big-8 group. But the S/N kept going down and down, good people left, more good people left, I got distracted by other things and never came back to it.
Eventually the spammers and the trolls took over. In part I blame myself:
http://groups.google.com/group/sci.space.shuttle/msg/655c93966a7841d7?dmode=source
It’s a shame really, when it was good it was excellent. Nothing has entirely replaced it yet.