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Date: Tue, 21 Jun 2011 15:16:43 -0700
From: Peter Duniho <NpOeStPeAdM@NnOwSlPiAnMk.com>
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Subject: Re: Traffic down?
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On 6/21/11 11:56 AM, Jeff Higgins wrote:
> I'm recently back to clj*.
> I took several months break from it.
> The traffic seems down.
> Is this a summertime lull?

As others have noted, Usenet in general is suffering a decline.

This has been especially true since about a year ago, when Microsoft 
decided to abandon them in favor of the MSDN forums, and their close 
relationship with the Stack Overflow web site.  While Java is not a 
technology Microsoft cares much about, since Stack Overflow does in fact 
carry a fair amount of Java-related traffic, their promotion of that web 
site has the side-effect of also shifting traffic from this newsgroup to 
there.

Traffic has been declining even before that, so one can't blame the 
entire phenomenon on Microsoft, but their policies certainly had a hand 
in accelerating the process over the last year or so.

I haven't looked to see if there's been a similar decline across other 
non-tech newsgroups.  It's entirely possible that similar factors are 
causing a decline across the board.

Pete