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On Fri, 15 Dec 2023 12:32:02 -0800
Tom Keffer <[email protected]> wrote:

> Kind of sad what's happened to Usenet. The feed comp.lang.c++ was a
> big part of my life in the 1980s and early 90s. Now it's a cesspool
> of spam.

To be fair, spam was part and parcel of USENET from early days.  It has
become worse during the intervening 30 years, but this is a
quantitative difference, not a qualitative one.  Newsreader software
evolved to cope by blacklisting spammers.  

LET IT NOT be said that the death of USENET is attributable to spam.
For one thing, USENET is not dead in spite of what Google wants you to
think:

> Much of the content being disseminated via Usenet today is binary
> (non-text) file sharing, which Google Groups does not support, as
> well as spam.

I find it ironic that Google's GMail is the largest source of USENET
spam by far — both by piece count and by bandwidth.

LET IT NOT be said that the death of USENET is attributable to
graphical newsreaders, either.

> Over the last several years, legitimate activity in text-based Usenet
> groups has declined significantly because users have moved to more
> modern technologies and formats such as social media and web-based
> forums. 

The whole point of continuing using USENET is to avoid the tracking and
hucksterism rampant on Szociál Media.

Google acquired the Deja News USENET archive in 2001 and promptly set
about making comprehensive searches of historical USENET traffic
inoperable.  Search of Google Groups remains problematic to this day.

+ https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Usenet

In that year (2001), Google debuted Groups as a direct competitor for
USENET even though its Web interface has always been inferior to the
various newsreaders which existed then and which have continued to
improve.

The story here is that, in spite of Google's best efforts to crush it,
USENET survived!  Decoupling Groups from USENET can only be seen as
vindication of the old store-and-forward technology from 1980.  Things
are bound to get better now that USENET moderators can finally feel
free to blacklist all GMail traffic.

- -- 
.. Be Seeing You,
.. Chuck Rhode, Sheboygan, WI, USA
.. Weather:  http://LacusVeris.com/WX
.. 54° — Wind S 5 mph

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