Topic drift: The death of Usenet

[Sam Trenholme]

> Life isn't perfect...  You can move from the distant past into the future
> without losing much, and gaining modern befits while you're at it, or you can
> keep trying to hang on until there's nothing left for you.

I agree that Usenet is the "distant past"...and, as I blogged before,
Usenet was far from perfect:

>>>In truth, Usenet really wasn't that great. There was no moderation, so no way to keep flame wars or spam under control. It was a place with a lot of arrogance and elitism; a place where experienced users took a sadistic delight in flaming newbies (this was even worse in IRC, the 1990s version of MSN and instant messaging); a place where finding an answer to a technical question was a hit-and-miss affair. A place without graphics or multimedia; the interface was nothing more than ugly fixed-width text on an 80-column screen.<<<

> It is a bit of work finding a good RSS reader, and  may cost
> a few dollars, but it's a one time deal, and you just can't keep the old
> Model-T going forever.

I don't think either Remmy or myself are arguing that Usenet is in any
way thriving.  I hope we're not the kind of dorks I have seen on
online board who say "Usenet isn't dead because comp.lang.python still
has a lot of traffic.  ¡USENET 4EVER DOOD!", or, in classic Usenet
fashion, "How can someone be so clueless as to think Usenet is dying.
What an idiot."

Where I'm going is this: Is there a way to get people who are still
comfortable using the old Usenet software to be integrated in a web
forum?  Leafnode can solve the problem of having to remember a dozen
usernames and passwords.  There are things NNTP has that RSS doesn't
have: Offline reading, and the ability to use "references" headers to
have a fully threaded discussion.

NNTP is a solution to the problem of "we want a forum anyone can post
to and participate in" and the obsolete problem of "we can only
connect to a couple of computers but want to get and receive data from
many more computers".  RSS is a solution to the problem of "We want to
quickly scan a lot of news headlines to fetch interesting articles"

I think a good RSS reader can have most of the good things NNTP has:
By remembering usernames and passwords, it can make all of the data
handy.  It would not be too hard for a RSS reader to pre-fetch
articles, giving it the ability for someone to catch up while on a
train or airplane or otherwise temporarily offline.

RSS, on the other hand, has a very different relationship between the
content creator than NNTP/Usenet had.  Usenet was for an era when the
Internet was purely non-commercial, and where the users had to provide
all of the content.  RSS is for an era when all of the big newspapers
are online, as well as countless bloggers; it is for reading, not
creating, content.

Things *are* much better today.  I don't have to trudge through yet
another pointless Usenet flame war (or risk being flamed myself) to
figure out how to configure my wireless card in Linux.  I have just
downloaded and am trying out FeedDemon.  It looks pretty good, but I
don't like how it uses MSIE's "Trident" engine to render content, so
I've already set it up to open links in Firefox.

- Sam

P.S.  RSS-to-NNTP can also work nicely.