In article
"David Hare-Scott" writes:

I have been using usenet for decades now and regularly on these two NGs for
about 12 years as far as I recall. I have learned much and I hope sometimes
taught something useful. At times it has been real fun and I felt a
comradeship with people who I will never meet in the flesh. There has
always been some noise, a background of posts that were a waste of time and
some posters who were always or nearly always a waste of time. On the whole
it was worthwhile.

But usenet is dying. The number of posters reduces every year. It seems
there are too few good ones left to maintain critical mass. There has
always been the ignorant the foolish and the arrogant but now the proportion
has grown in the population and so the signal to noise ratio has declined.

Usenet has certainly gone through many rounds of transformation.
I am a little taken aback to do the math and find that I've been
posting to Usenet for 30 years (plus a month or two, I guess). And
I don't really think of myself as an old-timer (just an old-fart).

There have been many waves of "personality" (for lack of a perfect
term) as to who is coming in and who is leaving.

In retrospect, I guess it was a generatoional thing in ways. It
rose with a one group, transformed with another and then got more
and more grafitti on the walls.

As for dying, I can't really draw a line. Both it and I will die
in this century. I'm just not sure which one of us will go first.


I still think it is a medium superior to web forums, and for exactly
the same reasons that Facebook and such don't like it -- no one owns
Usenet.

--
Drew Lawson | If dreams were thunder,
| and lightning was desire,
| This old house would have burnt down
| a long time ago