What ever happened to......

Lordy pops his head in every few months with a cutting remark or 2 :) Elder, Skodapilot and Meatball turbo are the pseudonyms of Carl Robson, who still haunts this ng :) Dervy hasn't been seen regularly for quite a few months now. Rob ? Posts in here every few years with some ridiculous "project" that only he thinks he has a chance of completing. SteveH gave up on life once he received his new Prious. Astravanman posts still, only every few months.

More to the point, where did Tanuki the raccoon dog go ? :)

Usenet's dying on it's arse across the board from what I can see :(

"Tony \(UncleFista\) Bond" gurgled happily, sounding much like they were saying:

He still hangs around uk.rec.motorcycles

And a handful of other newsgroups and web forums.

What he said.

Sadly.

I now have occasional contact with folks I knew from 'here' on Facebook.

It's not the same though.

So why did everybody abandon usenet?

I still look in here regularly, but if nobody posts or answers threads, there seems little point in actually posting yourself.

If this thread gather many posts, I'll be proven wrong. If it dies quickly, well QED I'm afraid.

A lot of the better groups I used to use suffered a major falling-out by some of the regulars or a troll invasion that drove everyone away. Once enough people leave the volume of posts drops below a level at which it's worth reading a group, more people leave and so on.

Just as significantly, cheap fast broadband has played it's part. When I was on dial-up or even 512k, usenet was a much more accessible place than web forums but that's no longer an issue.

Many ISPs don't carry it anymore, and some can't be bothered signing up to one of the free news servers. And also forums have become more popular - gawd knows why.

LOL!!!! :-) :-) :-)

Insert massive sig here.

Gold star member since 1876

We've got usenet -> forum gateways, what might be more interesting would be a forum -> usenet gateway. Strip out the sigs, convert pics to links, ignore the "avatars" (hint - a crappy picture is even less of an avatar than a giant smurf), and the average huge page would reduce to just a few lines of text and might even be usable. Though you'd have to get pretty good skipping through the dozens of AOL posts...

I think a combination of things:

NG proliferation - too many groups, with no one quite pinning down what a user might want. This leads to crossposting, which multiplies the effect of:

Antagonistic postings - some post to stir, offend, blatantly market for example. I suspect that drives people away.

Devoted time is too great. I usually skim a selection of groups each day as part of my media fix, only a few minutes. But I can see that some people give a lot of time and energy. Maybe they just reassess, domestic pressure, personal circumstances change.

Lack of peer acknowledgement and the 'worth of usenet'. it's nice to relate the source of information to people around you (according to usenet . . ). Usenet doesn't carry any currency, because most people have never heard of it. I work in a research environment. Nobody I've spoken with even knows about usenet - let alone uses it. These are people who are supposed to know every nook and cranny of the social world. I've just done a course on online communication - usenet is barely mentioned. Blogs, facebooks, linkedins - oh yes. To some, usenet when explained just sounds like an unconnected bunch of unmoderated oddballs using some archaic means of communication. Not far from the truth :-) Related to this is that:

Use is going down because people leave, and few new people join. But there are people like me who rarely post except to ask the occasional question - so it may be that people don't necessarily abandon, they just don't participate in the same way. And:

Usenet is still fairly lively IMO. The 5 or 6 groups I subscribe to get maybe 300/400 posts a day.

Well, my view FWIW.

Rob

There were 10s of thousands of groups when I started using Usenet some 15 years ago. The title of most give a clue what they're for.

Excessive spam in un-moderated groups

Moderated groups that saw a meeting or other social activity as off topic.

Changed to new low cost broadband ISP, lost access to USENET, wasn't worth paying extra for.

ISP declared USENET an unsupported service and didn't fix broken news server that dropped 50% of all posts.

Free text news servers up and down and liable to vanish.

Have you tried using Google groups?

Not specific enough. What good is a general car group with only one other owner of the model you need specific advise on that's only available from the user manual? What's the torque for a 944 flywheel bolt?

Went out got a life. Went out to gym lost 20lbs. Went out, didn't come back.

Me? You?

Yes of course :-) The title defines field of interest, but the focus might not be quite what the poster wants - a marque for example.

I'm not saying proliferation is a sole reason for anything, simply that it's a variable. In fact it could explain why usenet use is still increasing, although not because of an increase in numbers using it.

Rob

I've got aioe and news eternal september here - one as a backup for the other, and both free - after Pipex dropped its free news feed. Have only had one outage - aioe - and that was soon fixed. Rather better than Pipex managed.

I'm still here, I poke my head around the door every so often, have a quick look, then usually bang it shut again. The standard of argu...

*cough* "debating" on Usenet went spiralling down somewhat (imo). Plus life marches on, work responsibilities increase and all that, and I don't really have the same amount of disposable time I used to.

You can usually find me biking somewhere in the Peaks at the weekend if you really need to... :)

Ever since SteveH left we've had no-one to argue with.

Fraser

Your mother wears army boots.

Spam principally, and idiots morphing so they can hurl insults. Too much posturing by fools of limited interlect.

Good example of why it's no longer worth participating.