ISPs, Newsgroups, etc. ...OH MY!!!

[Leo Mauler]

--- On Sat, 6/28/08, Jeffrey Watts <jeffrey.w.watts at gmail.com> wrote:

> A few legitimate folks still use USENET, but let's be honest 
> here - it's been 8 years or so since it was relevant.

Which is a statement about as accurate as "640k is enough for anybody."  Usenet may not have been relevant to *you* for eight years, but many thousands of people use the text-only portion of Usenet.

It's the last kind of text-only message board on the Internet, and if you say that web-based message forums are a drop-in replacement then you've clearly never used (or supported a user of) a screen reader for the blind.
 
> If you're going to pick a cause to fight for, it
> shouldn't be to save USENET, especially since I doubt 
> many of you here actually use it any more (unless you're 
> looking for porn, but then again most of those folks have 
> moved to Torrents).

I'm sure the rich and vibrant community on rec.arts.sf.tv.babylon5.moderated would be somewhat insulted to discover that we're just there for the "porn" (right now we're mostly there for the current "Battlestar Galactica" discussions, and the fact that JMS and other SciFi writers pop in from time to time).  I've seen web message boards which would be happy for 100 new interesting (the key word is "interesting") messages a week, but rec.arts.sf.tv.babylon5.moderated gets over 600 a month.

The fact is that Usenet thrives (among people who may not even know about the alt.binaries.* hierarchy) precisely because it is text-only.  Not everyone wants to have to upgrade to broadband just to discuss stuff on a graphics-intensive and Flash-intensive web-based message board.  If you leave out the alt.binaries.* hierarchy there's still a lot of active text-only Usenet left over, which many thousands of people still use on a regular basis.