TWNMM: Usenet: Shut it down!

Usenet: Shut it down! A modest proposal..
Created: June 24, 2002

Usenet is dead. All hail Usenet.

When I first tenatively wandered onto the Internet in the late 80's, the net was certainly a different place. For one, the World Wide Web wasn't around yet. AOL was a small service called "PC Link", and was primarly servicing Tandy computer customers, and a small number of C-64 users. I had access through a local university by dialup.

Rather quickly, I discovered the wonders of Usenet. A chance to carry on discussions with people that might live hundreds, even perhaps thousands, of miles away. I was excited at the possibilities. Within a few short months, I had even managed to get a small UUCP feed of Usenet onto my wimpy BBS.

Time went on, and the Internet advanced. Usenet was there, too. At my first "online" job working for Kaiwan, I spent probably a good 1/4 of my time reading net.news. As the web started creeping upon us, it went from dialing in to Kaiwan's Sanar machine to reading news over Forte's FreeAgent.

But news was there even then. DejaNews started archiving it, and we could now read news over the web, and a permanent record of our exchanges were forever written to disk.

Now, things have changed. The Internet has become something other than a playground for the educated and computer literate. It's gone Main Street. And Usenet is rapidly becoming a seemy back-alley, where one is more likely to get mugged or propositioned than anything.

It's happened slowly, for sure. And, part of the reason for it's decline is the Gee-Whiz factor of the World Wide Web. But, as tempting as it is to blame the W3 on all that ills, we actually have only ourselves to blame for Usenet's demise.

We have allowed Usenet to become the way it is because we have been poor stewards of our neighborhoods. System administrators no longer take Usenet complaints seriously, partly because we haven't demanded that they do (I, as a sysadmin, have been guilty of this neglect myself). And, whenever the decent citizens of any neighborhood abandon it, the sleaze and negatie element comes in.

I recently rediscovered just how bad it's become recently on a visiting of some of my formerly favorite newsgroups. They are all now a complete wasteland of trolls, inappropriate crossposts, and absolute crap. It's a shame. It's a shame because newsgroups like alt.religion.wicca used to be interesting discussions.

Here's an example of what I'm talking about. Back in 1996, I posted the following query to alt.religion.wicca:

From: Chris Sullivan (hllerith@delta1.deltanet.com)
Subject: Wicca.. behind the Orange Curtain? 
Newsgroups: alt.religion.wicca
View this article only 
Date: 1996/11/18 

Subject says it all, really.  I'm curious in contacting Wiccans who live
behind the Orange (County, CA) "Curtain", perhaps to start up some kind 
of local community group, or at minimum, an E-Mail list.

Contact me at the E-Mail addresses below.

and, amazingly enough, I recieved exactly one response: an intelligent, well-worded reply directing me to some resources in the Orange County Area. Here is Google's Record of that exchange.

Today, a quick scan of the same newsgroup shows it literally swamped with irrelevant crap. There are a few relevant messages in there, but by in large, it's all just a bunch of nonsense.

And that's a newsgroup that is supposed to carry "legitimate" traffic. Just descend the alt.binaries hierarchy sometime if you want to see just how sleazy the Internet's Back Alley is. Child porn? That's the least you need to be concerned about.

And who's made it this way? Criminals, that's who. Decent citizens have left this ghetto and gone on to parts of "town" that are patrolled, where they don't necessarily have to worry about some cyberbully barging into their conversation and monopolizing their public space.

So, my proposal is: TURN IT OFF! It is, by in large, a waste of resources, populated by losers and malcontents who think violating the laws of common courtesy (or even, for that matter, the literal laws of society) is some kind of twisted adventure. Usenet is a wasteland of detritus, a mere shell of the powerful communications tool it once was.

Write your ISP and ask them to TURN OFF USENET. Ask them to dedicate the resources towards a communications medium (like mailing lists and webboards) that those who want to discuss certain topics can build a commuity free from the fear that some pedophile from Virginia will take over with his spews and rhetoric, or some teenage punk kid with no life will respond to all posts with flames, regardless of their relevance.

Like most dark alleys, decent citizens won't miss it. They may not even notice it's gone. In preparing this article, I discovered that my own ISP dosen't even have it's own news server, nor do they contract out for it. You are officially on your own.

And I commend them for not wasting resouces on something that, by in large, perpetrates crime and hate.

i like honey

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