in loving memory of Usenet

The next book that popped up in my reading queue is Silicon Snake Oil by Clifford Stoll. Written in the mid-90s, it's a little blast from the past. One thing that Stoll talks about several times in this book is Usenet.

I miss newsgroups. Blogs and web forums just don't feel the same to me. Maybe this is just me being a crotchety old lady, screaming at those damn kids to get off my lawn. But neither blogs nor web forums seem to facilitate the same kind of conversation that happened on newsgroups.

Blogs are more of a one-way conversation. I make a post to my blog. You can comment on my posts, but your comments are secondary to my post. Lots of people won't see your comment because they always have to click to see your comments. For RSS users, they have no way to know whether there are comments without opening up my post. It’s difficult to have a conversation in the comments, especially between commenters. It happens, but it’s not as easy or friendly.

Web forums are generally a two-way conversation, but it's too fractured to be really effective. Back in my day, you whippersnappers, you opened up one piece of software and read the newsgroups that you wanted to. Finding new newsgroups was trivial, and there wasn't that much overlap in discussion topics. Now, you have to know where to find the web forums. Since anyone can set up a new web forum for whatever topic they want, some web forums feel pretty clique-ish. (Not to say that some newsgroups didn't also get that reputation.) But it also feels like the conversation isn't in just one place, but rather split up amongst several different locations. I either have to devote more time to get the same level of debate, or I have to suffer through a lesser debate because fewer people are participating.

Maybe there's not actually a change, maybe it’s all just me. Maybe I've mellowed in my old age. (Those of you who have met me in person can contemplate what I must have been like then, if this is mellow now.) Maybe I'm being a cranky old woman who's looking at the past through rose-coloured glasses, and isn't willing to learn how to effectively interact with these new forums.

Comments

• Anonymous
  April 09, 2007
  You're not alone. I find web groups to be too fragmented to do any good, and difficult to wade through...

• Anonymous
  April 09, 2007
  Keep in mind that back in the old days centralizing discussions made more sense since there were not too many people online. Today there are millions more online.  Meaning that, in order to scale, conversations end up being more decentralized. There are singular web forum sites today that have more posts per day than the entire usenet space did 10 years ago.   So, yes, people are no longer concentrated in one location, but there are more people in each discussion area because a much higher % of the population is online.   It was also bound to happen. If you look at offline communities as a model for online then the online communities where destined to fracture around tastes and personalities. More options means more of a chance to find like-minded people.

• Anonymous
  April 09, 2007
  The comment has been removed

• Anonymous
  April 09, 2007
  Hmm... http://groups.google.com ?

• Anonymous
  April 09, 2007
  I'd be more inclined to use my ISP's Usenet server if I were to go that route, since I'm not terribly impressed with Google's web interface for such things.  But access to Usenet isn't the point.  The point is that most of the newsgroups that I'm interested in get little to no traffic anymore, having been supplanted by web forums and blogs.  

• Anonymous
  April 09, 2007
  Run `tin' was always my first command logging into a Sun workstation in undergraduate days. Ah, memories...