[tptacek]

I don't agree. In fact, the flood of new Usenet users corresponded to an overall flood of new people from all walks of life learning to use the Internet; it wasn't all bad. Also, the structure of Usenet is like that of very-modern Reddit, while the "Eternal September" hypothesis of its demise is premised on an early-Reddit model. I'm sure alt.drugs suffered, but "comp.security.unix" did OK.

The fatal injury from Usenet came from piracy. I ran a competitive† server for the ISP I helped run in Chicago††. The amount of effort it took to host binaries feeds was unbelievable and only got worse as time went on. Usenet is just about the dumbest imaginable way to distribute binaries†††. Unsurprisingly, fewer and fewer ISPs offered full-feed Usenet. When an ISP opted (sanely) to go with no-binaries Usenet, their Usenet consumers bolted. Usenet centralized and became less and less available. Usenet software because less and less lucrative to build. Then blogging hit.

This is a little off topic, I know, but I'm bitter about what happened to Usenet, because I really loved it.

† (we hit the top tier of the Freenix list several times; I believe we were one of the first 3 providers to come up with the INN history cache)

†† (EnterAct)

††† (imagine an Akamai that had no control over whose content was hosted, but instead had to mirror every bit of porn and warez from every server everywhere to every ISP in the world)

[ijk]

Google Groups didn't help, since the interface went from decent to degraded to useless to now-I-can't-find-it over the past decade.

There are still active newsgroups with regular postings, it's just nearly impossible to find them from the web. (And the spam is still a problem.)

[tptacek]

By the time Google bought Deja, Usenet was already dead.

[ijk]

I disagree--Usenet was mostly dead. As I said, though it's not like the old days, there are still newsgroups that I follow, and topics that still have active discussion via Usenet. The bulk of my Usenet reading took place post-Google, so active discussions continued long past that point.

Actually, checking it just now, Google's updated the interface yet again, and this time seems to be an improvement, at least on the spam-fighting front.

[unimpressive]

What newsgroups are still alive? Just knowing where to start would be a huge help.

[ijk]

I can't really speak to general interest. As I said, discoverability is terrible, so I only know of stuff that either I've been following since the '90s or I've seen mentioned by others. So this is a very eclectic list. But they all have recent discussions going on.

  rec.arts.sf.written
  rec.arts.int-fiction
  rec.games.int-fiction
  rec.games.roguelike.development
  rec.games.roguelike.nethack

And a few more active ones I found while searching:

  rec.games.pinball
  rec.games.bridge
  rec.arts.books.tolkien
  rec.arts.comics.strips
  rec.arts.drwho
  rec.arts.drwho.moderated

If you know the usenet hierarchy, you can enter the start of a set of groups (e.g. "rec.games") and the current Google Groups search interface will pop up a list of Usenet subgroups after a sec...but only if you're not already within a group. But the results look to be roughly sorted by recent activity, so that's at least helpful in revealing which of the groups are pretty much dead. (Undead spam threads are pretty common too, unfortunately.)

Note that Usenet quality has always varied (it's the place that more-or-less introduced trolls, viruses, spam, and flame wars). I really can't tell if the quality of the posting has gone up or down. I definitely can't guarantee what you'll find.

[oddthink]

Usenet also didn't have a good way to deal with spam, at least not one that I knew about. It steadily became harder to find the signal in the noise.

It still had the best reader experience. I don't know why modern email clients, for example, don't look more like trn.

[DanBC]

Usenet had a strict definition for spam, which meant a bunch of stuff got through.

It was also under active attack from Hipcrime and similar.

And no matter how good the killfiles were there were people who wouldn't use them.

I agree about the clients - I really liked slrn.

[derleth]

> Usenet also didn't have a good way to deal with spam

Nobody really does. The only way you can keep a channel spam-free is to have humans spend time monitoring it to keep the spam out, which is a huge cost asymmetry in favor of the spammers. Anything algorithmic gets gamed and, eventually, broken entirely.

[derefr]

> imagine an Akamai that had no control over whose content was hosted, but instead had to mirror every bit of porn and warez from every server everywhere to every ISP in the world

You mean CloudFlare? (They really do have problems with people using them as a large-media/warez CDN.)