From: "Keith F. Lynch" <kfl at KeithLynch.net>
To: WSFA members <WSFAlist at KeithLynch.net>
Subject: [WSFA] Re: "magazines have finally killed blogs"
Date: Fri, 29 Mar 2013 20:46:43 -0400 (EDT)
Reply-To: WSFA members <WSFAlist at KeithLynch.net>

Tamar Lindsay <dicconf at yahoo.com> wrote:
> The article assumes that Usenet is dead.  It isn't.

Indeed.  Its volume has never been higher, and has never been
increasing faster.  (And no, that isn't mostly spam.)  But I'm not
surprised that a "news" story on a website is spectacularly clueless.

I'm most active in the rec.arts.sf.fandom Usenet newsgroup.  There
have been more posts there so far this month than there have been here
in the past two years.  And it's been a fairly quiet month.

I dislike web forums.  Not only are the user interfaces dreadful, but
you don't own your content.  And many of them are infested with ads.

A friend of mine was recently kicked off LiveJournal for bogus
reasons.  Not only did his own LJ -- years of content -- instantly
vanish, but so did all his comments in other LJs, making threads all
over LJ-space unreadable and incoherent, like listening to one side
of a phone call.

Also, forums rapidly come and go.  Much of the Internet suffers from
ADHD, abandoning each new shiny toy whenever they spot a newer and
shiner toy.  I don't understand how anyone has any product loyalty
when everyone knows that every product will be discontinued and
abandoned very rapidly.  Whether your investment is in money or
"only" in time and effort, it is guaranteed to go bust.

Usenet newsgroups are unowned.  Nobody has the power to block any
user, delete any postings, or shut down any newsgroup.  Even when
there's a consensus that a newsgroup has outlasted its usefulness, it
continues to exist.  The rasff newsgroup replaced alt.fandom.cons over
20 years ago, but the latter still exists, empty.  Anyone can still
post to it if they like.

> I have to do weird workarounds to get to it, but Usenet is still there.

Move to a better ISP, such as Panix.