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Maybe "killed" is a strong word. My feeling is that when Google exposed that part of the internet to the web, it became interesting for spammers to target USENE
by antirez 8y ago
Maybe "killed" is a strong word. My feeling is that when Google exposed that part of the internet to the web, it became interesting for spammers to target USENET much more than in the past, which was a very strong contributing factor for USENET to die. Moreover once no longer an "hidden gem" many felt exposed posting to USENET, now that it was trivially web accessible.
- klodolph 8y agoMy feeling is that the web was becoming larger and more accessible every year, and that while Google probably did that more than anyone else, you could equally blame AOL for providing NNTP access to the general public in 1993, or Deja News for starting their archive work in 1995, or Google for their indexing work starting in 2001. That's just assigning a name and face to economic forces, though. It's the underlying economics that killed Usenet—experts hang out there, so it’s valuable, so non-experts start hanging out there, until the experts leave because there are too many non-experts. This happens to every internet forum; Usenet was just older. Travel back in time and any randomly selected person on the internet was likely to be some kind of expert.
- antirez 8y agoYes, what you say surely makes a lot of sense. Maybe there is to start some form of forum that is very unpleasant to use, like, just having a command line interface to access it... and vim as editor :-D