8 May
2018
8 May
'18
7:53 p.m.
On Tue, May 8, 2018, at 10:27 AM, Dan Cross wrote:
I was lamenting the (asymptotic) death of usenet to a
colleague the
other day and asked, "where are all the cool kids these days?" I was
only half joking: back when news was the main nexus of interaction for
technical communities, it really was where you'd go to find things out
and where you could reasonably expect to interact with experts. For
example, occasionally the likes of Dennis Ritchie would even post in
comp.lang.c; Ken Thompson's MiG-29 flight story posted to rec.aviation
is a classic. But those days are long gone, so where do technical
communities communicate electronically? I'm told Reddit is the new
hotness, but it's just not the same (if for no other reason than that
it's totally centralized under the control of a single corporate
organization).
I think a lot about the death of Usenet, the reasons for it, and what
we've learned. I don't know if I've come to any insightful conclusions,
but I do greatly miss it. In so many ways we've gone backward. We lost a
truly decentralized message board system where one log-in allowed you to
read anything about any topic, and replaced it with a mess of
incompatible systems. On one hand we've got phpBB forums scattered all
over the web that don't talk to each other, each of which requires its
own login and password. On the other hand we have walled gardens like
Reddit and Facebook that offer much of what Usenet did, but with clumsy
user interfaces and centralized control and massive privacy concerns.
There's just nothing like Usenet.
I find more and more communities moving to Facebook, which worries me
greatly. I'm not a fan. Other than that, mailing lists seem to continue
to cling to life as the gold standard of technical communication.
- Dan C.
-Seth
--
Seth Morabito
web(a)loomcom.com