Via Jo Walton, Russ Allbery has a wonderful piece on the glory that was Usenet:
I've strongly disagreed with the idea that Usenet is dying. I still do, I think. I think things ebb and flow and shift around, but up until now I haven't really thought about how my interaction with Usenet has changed, whether Usenet has died a little for me. But I'm sitting here, trying to capture how I feel about newsgroups and the communities in them, how I feel when I post, what threads I participate in, and... there's That Hierarchy, there's a sense of attachment to the technology and to a bunch of technical newsgroups, and there's some combination of dogged persistence and obligation attached to news.groups. But... friends, connections, common causes, play, passion for a cause... that all used to be there, that's all in those old messages, and where did that all go? Did I change, did it change, what happened?
I remember the stress too. I remember getting so angry I couldn't see straight, I remember losing hours to trying to salvage some thread that I started with some idiotic half-baked comment, I remembered seriously burning out a few times on trying to get through to people. And then every once in a while, I would just nail it... I'd manage to write something that just captured a moment, that just rang in my head like a bell, and when I posted something like that, there were people to echo it, there was e-mail from people who I respected more than I ever expressed saying "good job," and the messages wouldn't just be about the future authentication strategy or how to balance AFS servers or even about my opinion on some random book. They'd be part of a discussion, about hopes and dreams and politics and religion and belief, that dug down into the meat of what other people believed, that came off my fingers raw and contradictory and impassioned, and they weren't like everything else I did.
Now, when I post something controversial, I'm worrying afterwards about whether it's just going to start a long thread that I'll feel obligated to respond to and produce a lot of stress. I think about how to extract myself from pointless debates. I worry about energy levels. I write much more reasonable stuff, but you know, I also don't write about the same sort of thing any more. I wrote a response to Dave Hayes about community ownership and responsibility intermixed with the words of a Toad the Wet Sprocket song. I can't remember the last time that doing something like that even occurred to me.
Did I just change? Or did something change about the environment that would helped me write like that, feel like that?
I get nostalgic about different groups than Russ does, but the basic experience is the same. I was heavily involved in a couple of Usenet groups all through grad school (1993-1999), but drifted away from it in 2001 in favor of blogs and, you know, gainful employment as a college professor. For six or seven years, though, it was a defining element of my life. I met my wife through Usenet (should've mentioned that in the nerd-off, I guess...), I made a lot of friends through Usenet, I flew across the country to meet peope I knew through Usenet.
And yet, when I upgraded my computer a couple of summers ago, I didn't even install a newsreader. The last time I looked in at my old stomping grounds was shortly after Septermber 11, 2001, when I checked in just to see how people were doing, and I stopped reading again a few weeks later.
Blogging scratches the same "bloviating on the Internet" itch that Usenet used to, but Russ is absolutely right that the sense of community isn't there. You can find pockets of that sort of thing-- the comment threads at Making Light are about as close as I've seen to the best of Usenet-- but I'm not really part of it any more. I don't have the time to keep up with the handful of comments posted at my own site, let alone maintain the level of interaction needed to fit in there.
I'm not sure about the exact cause-- some linear combination of my getting a real job, and the community evolving away from where it used to be-- but whatever I had with Usenet is gone. I miss it sometimes.
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I think a lot of self-sorting happened. Conservatives and liberals quit reading the same newsgroups, scientists and woo-woo types quit hanging out in the same places, Kirk and Picard fans drifted to private forums. Usenet was a great place to experience new ideas and viewpoints, and what it taught most people was that they really hate being exposed to new ideas and viewpoints. People want the comforting embrace of an echo chamber, and that's what Web logs provide. (With the occasional drive-by trolling in the comments, which only increases the sense of community by providing a common enemy.)
I'm not blaming people for this; I do it myself. Most of my online reading is 'blogs written by people I more-or-less agree with. Usenet was like the Somme, sometimes -- a constant, grinding battle against those Picard morons, Creationists, and people who dared to vote differently. Nobody ever learned anything, or changed their opinions, or even changed their arguments. It got tiresome.
The danger, which we're starting to see already, is that people are starting to inhabit different realities. If you spend all your time reading, say, Creationist 'blogs, your world starts looking very different from a biologist's. You hear about Creationist victories, "Darwinist" defeats, and a (mostly mythical) "growing dissatisfaction among scientists" with evolution. Meanwhile an evolutionary biologist reads mockery of Creationists, legal victories over Intelligent Design, and patient demolitions of Creationist talking points.
All well and good, but when they come into contact they can't even agree on basic facts. Their realities are different. This feeds conspiracy thinking -- how can those other guys not know the obvious TRUTH? It also encourages everyone to feel like part of an oppressed, put-upon minority of lonely guardians of all that is right and good. (The way commenters on right-wing and left-wing political sites condemn the mainstream media is indistinguishable.)
I'm not sure if there is a solution, or if this problem is as serious as it appears to me. But I'm sure I can find a Web log where all the readers agree with what I've said.
Cambias
I remember when a post like this would have gotten lots of responses.
Those were the days....
I find a few blogs that keep the general flavor of Usenet. Making Light, Crooked Timber, Fanatical Apathy, and Whatever all have active commentors from a variety of backgrounds. There is that mix of humor and passion, plus some truly clueless comments. But I don't miss spending far too much time at the computer and the amazingly pointless flamewars.
I'll echo Cambias' comments, and add a few of my own:
There has been a rassortment of correspondence, as former Usenet habitués fled the flame wars and the spam.
And there's posting fatigue. I've been a regular reader of soc.history.what-if since before it was, and after 13 years, there seems to be a whole lot of "why are we treading this ground, *again*" going on. I first noticed the boredom six or seven years ago, and I find the conversations, and the rhetorical tics of Usenet correspondents become ever more repetitive.
Blogs break that up a little, but the threading is missed.
Many eminent bloggers who frequent this and related fora also came from Usenet. They left after murderous flamewars. To read you, or pnh or tnh or James Nicoll, or any of the other former rasff posters who migrated to the web, is to read you outside of a conversation, and to read you speaking alone. That does get a little boring.
To Cambias:
Oh, Jim, how are the kids? You still in Mt. Holyoke?
You know me from CSSS.