| "User interface woes" is my guess. I found USENET and associated newsgroups to be better than the WWW, especially for discussions of software. I once even promoted the use of internal newsgroups w/in a corporate environment, where a history of topics (discussions, problems, and decisions) would have IMO proven extremely useful. But the idea never got traction: people were unwilling to participate because newsreaders were too different from the browser and they'd had enough trouble learning to navigate the WWW. Once blogs and browser-based "newsgroups" and forums began showing up, the handwriting was on the wall. In the end, the WWW browser's low bar to entry ate USENET. I still value the treasure trove of information stored in the archives. And some people still actively participate in USENET and other newsgroups, just as some still participate in IRC (Internet Relay Chat, which also is fading). I think these are valuable tools with a lot of greybeard expertise held in reserve. There's a sort of Gresham's law of the Internet: "The browser drives out every other interface." |
I enjoy the idea that if all discussions in a support forum are on the NNTP protocol, I can archive them all, so I hardly have to open up a browser to search through years (decades?) of threads to see if anyone else has had the same issues as me. Imagine something like Stack Overflow all of a sudden at your finger tips without any internet access. It's a really nice thing, sometimes the internet just dies on you when you need it most.
As for IRC, people are willing to use it, if you put something useful on there (support for a project, or a community that people are interested in). If you want adoption from users who are just browsing the internet, maybe a web client / desktop client combination that makes IRC a lot less seamless to the average "I don't know" type of user.
[1]: http://forum.dlang.org/ [2]: http://vibed.org/ [3]: https://github.com/rejectedsoftware/vibenews