Postcards from the Bleeding Edge: AOL announces it's going to drop USENET... finally

Postcards from the Bleeding Edge

Saturday, January 29, 2005

AOL announces it's going to drop USENET... finally

From: ...[somewhere out of time]!brad!farber!bmc
Via: Brad Tempelton, via Dave Farber, via Brian Clapper and Evan Hunt

AOL announces it's going to drop USENET... Imminent death of USENET predicted!

The AP wire story on the subject claimed that fewer than 1000 of its 23 million subscribers even used the service.

Cynically, I snorted: "All of them, spammers". I well remember AOL's entrance to USENET in throughout 95 - I stopped reading USENET because of AOL's clueless luserbase polluting it... and the alt.binaries.* newsgroups taking out every server and T1 I had that could service it.

and I also thought - what a wonderful april 1 joke if it's true. I'll go back to using USENET if AOLHell gets off it. F*ck blogs and bloggers and all their broadcast natterings about conversations - USENET is where real conversations took place until it became too difficult to hear one another over the shouting...

It's no surprise, though they picked an ironic time for the move -- this month is the 25th anniversary of when we announced Usenet at the January Usenix conference. And of course, AOL is by no means the entire Internet.

Amen, brother.

USENET is still the best place where the asyncronous Net stays alive. LONG LIVE USENET. Think I'm gonna start reading comp.arch again...

¶ 9:37 PM

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