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Re: Ghost of Usenet Postings Past

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On Tue, 25 Feb 2014, Dave Garland wrote:

> On 2/25/2014 7:54 AM, Shadow wrote:
>> On Sun, 23 Feb 2014 22:55:04 +0000, RS Wood <rswood@therandymon.com>
>> wrote:
>>
>>> Anybody remember this cartoon from 1996?
>>>
>>> http://c2.com/cgi/wiki?GhostOfUsenetPostingsPast
>>>
>>> I first saw it attached to this Salon article about the geeks who saved
>>> Usenet (by helping Google archive DejaNews and other archives a while
>>> back).
>>
>> 	Google killed DejaNews. Absolutely none of my postings from
>> 1994- 1998 can be found on Google searches. I think they archived
>> Usenet and sold it to the intelligence agencies.
>
> I would think that the intelligence agencies already had their own
> news servers and archives. And wouldn't want an archive that had been
> mangled by Google.
>
> One of the clauses of
>> DejaNew's sale should have been that Google kept the older posts
>> available to the public.
>> 	As to Usenet now, the NSA scandal has killed the more serious
>> groups. Alt.comp.freeware has been reduced from a thriving community
>> to half a dozen troll posts. Nobody likes "chatting" with someone
>> looking over their shoulders. The ones that don't care are too stupid
>> to use Usenet. They sms,  whattsup, twitter, FaceKook or whatever.
>
> Hrmph. There have always been lurkers in newsgroups, one must assume
> far exceeding those who posted. At least it's that way with web forums
> (where the proprietor has ways to actually count). Just the same as
> one must assume there have always been web crawlers that don't honor
> robots.txt. Those who want anonymity need to stay behind proxies and Tor.
>
Though oddly, in retrospect I would argue that the single shot posters or 
the newcomers to the newsgroup were a key part of those newsgroups. Yes, 
you have the people around forever, but the newsgroup stagnates if nobody 
new comes in.

That's some of the problem, the newcomers stopped coming so there wasn't 
much for the oldtimers to talk about, except off topic stuff.

> Usenet suffered because it didn't have the eye candy (for the naive
> user) and the ability to stuff adverts onto every page (for the
> corporations), and because ISPs didn't want to be bothered maintaining
> news servers.
>
But it's also suffered from people who turned out to not be interested in 
the medium.  Too many people left when they could find discussion 
elsewhere, leaving even less.

   Michael

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Ghost of Usenet Postings Past RS Wood <rswood@therandymon.com> - 2014-02-23 22:55 +0000
  Re: Ghost of Usenet Postings Past bad sector <forgetski@postit_INVALID_.gov> - 2014-02-23 18:19 -0500
    Re: Ghost of Usenet Postings Past Aragorn <thorongil@telenet.be.invalid> - 2014-02-24 08:33 +0100
      Re: Ghost of Usenet Postings Past RS Wood <rsw@therandymon.com> - 2014-02-24 23:29 +0000
        Re: Ghost of Usenet Postings Past RS Wood <rsw@therandymon.com> - 2014-02-25 10:27 +0000
          Re: Ghost of Usenet Postings Past Aragorn <thorongil@telenet.be.invalid> - 2014-02-25 16:05 +0100
            Re: Ghost of Usenet Postings Past RS Wood <rsw@therandymon.com> - 2014-02-25 15:22 +0000
            Re: Ghost of Usenet Postings Past Conceited Jerk <cj.speakeasy@AAARGHgmail.com> - 2014-02-25 15:42 -0600
      Re: Ghost of Usenet Postings Past Michael Black <et472@ncf.ca> - 2014-02-26 13:34 -0500
    Re: Ghost of Usenet Postings Past Chris J Dixon <chris@cdixon.me.uk> - 2014-02-24 07:39 +0000
      Re: Ghost of Usenet Postings Past "tdk" <forum.tdk@squte.com> - 2014-02-24 03:52 +0000
        Re: Ghost of Usenet Postings Past RS Wood <rsw@therandymon.com> - 2014-02-24 23:30 +0000
          Re: Ghost of Usenet Postings Past Aragorn <thorongil@telenet.be.invalid> - 2014-02-25 16:06 +0100
    Re: Ghost of Usenet Postings Past Michael Black <et472@ncf.ca> - 2014-02-26 13:27 -0500
  Re: Ghost of Usenet Postings Past Shadow <Sh@dow.br> - 2014-02-25 10:54 -0300
    Re: Ghost of Usenet Postings Past Dave Garland <dave.garland@wizinfo.com> - 2014-02-25 13:32 -0600
      Re: Ghost of Usenet Postings Past Shadow <Sh@dow.br> - 2014-02-26 11:12 -0300
      Re: Ghost of Usenet Postings Past Michael Black <et472@ncf.ca> - 2014-02-26 13:48 -0500
  Re: Ghost of Usenet Postings Past Ant <ant@zimage.comANT> - 2014-02-25 06:03 -0800
  Re: Ghost of Usenet Postings Past Michael Black <et472@ncf.ca> - 2014-02-26 13:22 -0500

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