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By JACK KAPICA
Thursday, November 17, 2005 Posted at 1:15 PM EST
Globe and Mail Update
On Dec. 15, Rogers Communications will stop Usenet service to its
Internet customers. Subscribers began receiving notices of the move with
their November invoices.
There has been some distress on-line, especially on a blog called Dump
Rogers, which urges Usenet fans to leave the cable service because "if
you are tired of paying Rogers more money for less service, then Dump
Rogers is just for you."
The departure of Usenet from the regular schedule is sad news, if not
entirely unexpected. A number of Internet service providers have been
quietly dropping Usenet as a quaint, little-used relic of a dimly
remembered digital past.
Usenet - that odd agglomeration of some 50,000 active or ghost
discussion groups — was founded in a fit of idealism, a dream of
communities inhabited by like-minded people seeking comfort or
information. The word "democratic" was often invoked to describe a
system based on interest, not location, offering relief to a world
chafing at geographic constraints.
But it started its slide to irrelevance with the arrival of the World
Wide Web in the mid-1990s, when the graphical interface changed the
Internet from a text-driven medium into a visual one.
Aside from being based on the written word, which many game-playing kids
would rather not make the effort to compose, Usenet is deeply flawed.
Its democratic dream offers no defence against viruses, spammers,
criminals, hucksters or deranged individuals. Rummaging about in Usenet
is like slumming through the tenderloin district during the plague years
— your chances of catching a computer virus or a handful of invitations
to unspeakable sexual acts is much greater than finding what you were
looking for in the first place.
Usenet eventually gained a reputation as a refuge for pre-civilized
thugs with a penchant for imbecile grammar and vicious talk. The antics
of juveniles and troubled people started scaring off others — democracy
still needs laws, after all, so that its mechanisms are not hijacked by
people in serious need of psychiatric help. I recall one incident, in
which a bunch of high-spirited kids decided to invade another newsgroup
as a prank. The prank effectively destroyed the target group.
Some democracy.
All this is true mostly of the Alt newsgroups, which were designed to
have few inhibitions. Other groups, such as Comp, Sci, Soc and
Humanities, fare much better, largely because they can be moderated.
They contain lots of valuable stuff.
But the rise in the signal-to-noise ratio among the Alt groups has made
combing through the chatter a tedious process. So useless has Usenet's
reputation become that a Rogers representative tells me that less than 3
per cent of its subscribers use it, which makes for a very strong
argument to drop it in favour of blogs, instant messaging, non-Usenet
groups and personal Web pages.
There is, however, some merit in the criticism that Rogers is removing a
service without changing its rates, suggesting subscribers turn to
portal technology controlled by Rogers/Yahoo, or to subscribe to an
outside Usenet service — at extra cost.
I'm not so sure Usenet should be as dead as a 3-per-cent user rate
suggests. Maybe the drop in users is just the result of a bad reputation
or a too-high noise index. Perhaps there could be a digital makeover, in
which nntp news servers can be configured in such a way as to select
which hierarchies of groups can be offered to subscribers, or
subscribers could select which groups to subscribe to.
If this were done on a global level, it might scare off less-constrained
users who will know their words are only diminishing their potential
audience. That would also allow the remaining groups to thrive in a
field not choked by weeds.
Usenet — which no one owns, so no one can fix it — is surely something
that can survive a little judicious surgery at the server level, where
no harm would come to the "democratic" basis on which it was founded.
Perhaps I'm just being sentimental, but Usenet still strikes me as
useful.