Another experience here from a long-time former user of Usenet, overlapping yours to some extent.
comp.sources.* was made obsolete by the web and cheap disc space. The binaries newsgroups also, except for legally questionable content that no-one wanted the exposure of personally hosting. (I understand the binaries groups still play this role to some extent.)
I dropped sci.logic and sci.math years before I dropped Usenet altogether, and for the same reason that if I was looking today for discussion on such topics, I wouldn’t look there. There’s only so long you can go on skipping past the same old arguments over whether 0.999… equals 1.
rec.arts.sf.* took a big hit when LiveJournal was invented. Many of its prominent posters left to start their own blogs. Rasf carried on for years after that, but it never really recovered to its earlier level, and slowly dwindled year by year. Some rasf stalwarts mocked those who left, accusing them of wanting their own little fiefdom where they could censor opposing viewpoints. They spoke as if this was a Bad Thing. It’s certainly a different thing from Usenet, but if you want a place on the net for pleasant conversation among friends, a blog under your own control is the way to have that. Rasf was that, for many of its members, for many years, but blogs do it better.
Usenet was never designed, it just grew. There were various bodies and people involved with managing it, but they generally played King Log, leaving it up to the users to manage the creation of newsgroups and stamping the resulting consensus. Kill files didn’t come from a design team, they were invented one day by Larry Wall), and taken up by everyone because they saw what a brilliant idea it was. That everyone had to manage their own kill file was, from the point of view of what Usenet was, a virtue, not a flaw. Everyone could speak, no matter what they had to say, but no-one had to listen. The libertarian ideal of free speech. I say this not particularly to defend it, but just to say that that is how people saw these things, that was the animating spirit of Usenet.
Then spam was invented, eternal September began, blogging developed, and mass public access arrived. Usenet managed to respond to all of those things, but it couldn’t change what it fundamentally was, because what it was was what those who loved Usenet wanted it to be.
Of course, all of this could have been fixed. But they weren’t fixed in time, and so Usenet stagnated and died.
Here I disagree. Usenet could not and cannot be fixed, any more than we could have brontosauruses roaming around the modern world. Usenet was a creature of the technology of its time and the spirit of its participants. There may be some lessons to learn from the history of Usenet, or some ideas worth taking up, but in the present world there is no place for Usenet.
Another experience here from a long-time former user of Usenet, overlapping yours to some extent.
comp.sources.* was made obsolete by the web and cheap disc space. The binaries newsgroups also, except for legally questionable content that no-one wanted the exposure of personally hosting. (I understand the binaries groups still play this role to some extent.)
I dropped sci.logic and sci.math years before I dropped Usenet altogether, and for the same reason that if I was looking today for discussion on such topics, I wouldn’t look there. There’s only so long you can go on skipping past the same old arguments over whether 0.999… equals 1.
rec.arts.sf.* took a big hit when LiveJournal was invented. Many of its prominent posters left to start their own blogs. Rasf carried on for years after that, but it never really recovered to its earlier level, and slowly dwindled year by year. Some rasf stalwarts mocked those who left, accusing them of wanting their own little fiefdom where they could censor opposing viewpoints. They spoke as if this was a Bad Thing. It’s certainly a different thing from Usenet, but if you want a place on the net for pleasant conversation among friends, a blog under your own control is the way to have that. Rasf was that, for many of its members, for many years, but blogs do it better.
Usenet was never designed, it just grew. There were various bodies and people involved with managing it, but they generally played King Log, leaving it up to the users to manage the creation of newsgroups and stamping the resulting consensus. Kill files didn’t come from a design team, they were invented one day by Larry Wall), and taken up by everyone because they saw what a brilliant idea it was. That everyone had to manage their own kill file was, from the point of view of what Usenet was, a virtue, not a flaw. Everyone could speak, no matter what they had to say, but no-one had to listen. The libertarian ideal of free speech. I say this not particularly to defend it, but just to say that that is how people saw these things, that was the animating spirit of Usenet.
Then spam was invented, eternal September began, blogging developed, and mass public access arrived. Usenet managed to respond to all of those things, but it couldn’t change what it fundamentally was, because what it was was what those who loved Usenet wanted it to be.
Here I disagree. Usenet could not and cannot be fixed, any more than we could have brontosauruses roaming around the modern world. Usenet was a creature of the technology of its time and the spirit of its participants. There may be some lessons to learn from the history of Usenet, or some ideas worth taking up, but in the present world there is no place for Usenet.