On 05/04/2013 10:55, Huge wrote:
Well, me too. I like Usenet, for all kinds of reasons, but someone
showed me a depressing graph of traffic analysis for the uk.* groups
(I wish I could find it again! Ah, here we go ...)
http://www.greenend.org.uk/rjk/spoolstats/
It's not so much the steady decline in volumes, although if continued, Usenet
will be gone by 2016(*), but the 'number of posters' figures. There are 40
million people on the internet in the UK and only 1500 of them post to
Usenet? (Actually fewer than that, given that a some of them will be sock
puppets).
Is there some way we could make Usenet more popular? (Not "Facebook"
popular, but if we could get some new blood in - I suspect most Usenet
users are getting on...) Hmm; Someone's just claimed the first post made
on a Raspberry Pi.
(* Likely before that - if volumes fall too far, the existing providers
will drop out. Still, we could carry on as a hobbyist "service", I suppose.)
I hate to say it, could there be a DIY-banter style web interface - but
one that did not have all the crap associated with the existing web
interface sites? In fact, simply a recreation of a typical news reader
on a web page.
Or a Facebook Usenet page? :-)
Or feed uk.d-i-y into Twitter?
I was very sad few years ago - an alt.support group lost large numbers
of posters due to a combination of:
A ludicrous family spat where several of the extended family saw fit to
post masses of very unpleasant stuff.
A huge wave of spam many of them saw - which was largely blocked by Berlin.
A particular very odd individual who posted in a way that some found
deeply upsetting. He was permanently on medical marijuana (seriously)
but had a habit of putting the blame for being unwell on the posters
themselves.
The removal of usenet server access from many in the USA.
Add onto that the travesty which was Google's handling of everything to
do with Usenet...
Now we see at most a dozen posts in a month and most of them are without
any real reason - sort of keep-awake posts with the odd response.
--
Rod