Phillip Hallam-Baker wrote:
The real story is less the death of Usenet than the death of the NNTP
protocol.

NNTP was designed to make it easier to read mailing lists and to
reduce the amount of bandwidth used. The problem is that it does not
scale, no newsgroup works with more than about 150 active members
and the reader / writer ratio tends to be at least 1 poster for 10
lurkers. So each group is a community of about 1500 people.

The problem with usenet is that every post is sent to every NNTP
server whether it is going to be read or not. It worked when the
average number of readers per site was 5. Today the average number
of times a post is read is about 0.1 on the busy servers and on the
small ones
0.01 times or less.

Weblogs and RSS feeds are dramatically more efficient than NNTP.

Its not only AOL that has dumped NNTP, my provider Comcast now wants
a separate payment for news. So I now read through google groups.

My interface with Comcast has not (yet) asked for more money for
newsgroups, Comcast uses Giganews, lately the connection has been very very
slow and I've been wondering what they have been doing - maybe just asking
for more money to speed up the service they have slowed down?

Are you able to read several newsgroups via Google without having to sign
in to each one?

Josie