Tuesday, April 12, 2005

My favourite newsgroups seem to be dying

At one time I was big usenet poster. I had very good reputations on different groups and was even referenced by people outside of usenet for their discussions of stealth aircraft (frex). My interests spanned from palaeoanthropology to history to fusion physics to military matters to the scifi. Since I started nonself employed jobs in the later 90s my posting decreased. Then I moved to Cali to work for NERSC. That decreased things further. Right now I am pretty much restricted to three newsgroups because of the interests of time: rec.arts.sf.science (discussing scifi science), soc.history.what-if (discussing alternate history), and alt.history.future (discussing the future direction of history). All three of them seem to be in trouble.

rasf has had deadish times in the past and had many rebirths. It seems to be going through a slow period again. ahf is suffering the same fate. shwi is suffering from being spammed by revisionists. I thought maybe it was a case that we were just seeing a slow period, but I went and looked at google groups 'about this group' tools. It's actually rather depressing. All three groups have dropped in the amount of posting. Not only have they dropped, its been a downward trend since 2002 for all three. Additionally, it seems that there haven't been a whole lot of new posters for them in, well, ages. With AOL cutting off access to Usenet except through third party means we might have some serious problems. :S

I hate to say it, but is usenet getting to be on its last legs? blogspace doesn't seem to have the equivalent easily accessible exchange of ideas...:S

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