byebye AOL, long live usenet
Jan. 25th, 2005 12:44![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
piranhaAOL is discontinuing access to usenet. i'm seeing people celebrate the end of "eternal september". as if.
i, too, would like to go back to those days. but this is one of those "can't turn back the clock" things. AOL's influx at the time was bad for usenet, but it was certainly not the only bad thing that happened -- i think spam became much more destructive to it than AOL. its disappearance won't bring back the good old days. but neither will it become what the the author of the article linked above claims: But the Usenet will nonetheless become a smaller, less interesting place once AOL turns off its newsgroup servers. -- oh, bullshit. IMO when usenet was smaller, it was more interesting than it is now.
after more than 2 decades experience with online communication media, i think there is a certain range of contributors with which a community functions well, and a certain range of influx of newcomers that it can handle, and when those ranges are exceeded, the community suffers and becomes less useful. there's bound to be research by sociologists and maybe anthropologists about this, *heh*; i should look for that to see whether my anecdotal evidence is born out by it, or whether i am all wet.
i, too, would like to go back to those days. but this is one of those "can't turn back the clock" things. AOL's influx at the time was bad for usenet, but it was certainly not the only bad thing that happened -- i think spam became much more destructive to it than AOL. its disappearance won't bring back the good old days. but neither will it become what the the author of the article linked above claims: But the Usenet will nonetheless become a smaller, less interesting place once AOL turns off its newsgroup servers. -- oh, bullshit. IMO when usenet was smaller, it was more interesting than it is now.
after more than 2 decades experience with online communication media, i think there is a certain range of contributors with which a community functions well, and a certain range of influx of newcomers that it can handle, and when those ranges are exceeded, the community suffers and becomes less useful. there's bound to be research by sociologists and maybe anthropologists about this, *heh*; i should look for that to see whether my anecdotal evidence is born out by it, or whether i am all wet.