Date: Sun, 15 Feb 2004 17:19:38 -0500

September ended a long time ago but no one ever noticed.

For all the bitching and moaning when Usenet was flooded with the clueless, their absence has been met with silence. And now there's no new blood on most newsgroups, no new posters, and the old hands are slowly falling off as they give in to the pressures of daily life, or get disgusted at trying to be heard over racist trolls, crossposted spam, leftover feuds, crossposted feuds, narcissists and raving lunatics.

Overall there are fewer and fewer voices with anything to say, and no one to listen to it anyway.

A lot of the problem does spring from September 1995, when the newspapers and TV shows discovered this thing called the Internet and illiterate morons arrived to piss in the pool as they learned to newgroup alt.i.m.a.retard and as admins gave up trying to filter out spamtrap groups. How can new posters come to Usenet when the first 763 groups they check out want to increase the size of their penis, refinance their house, and give them a secret Nigerian business deal with sexxxy teens? Those articulate enough to have survived in a text medium on Usenet might very well have given up after their first try.

The second problem? The proliferation of crossposting trolls and feuds and loonies, racist and otherwise. How many newsgroups that used to be full of good posts and proper punctuation have now been filled with the sewage that makes up most of Usenet these days? No one has yet found a reliable way to stem that tide. Killfiles work for some, for a little while, but trolls morph addresses and spammers fuck with spelling and punctuation, and someone is always fool enough to follow up. Top posting and failure to edit have become misdemeanors, compared to the rest of it.

Do I have any solutions? No. None that I can implement. I only know enough to identify the problem, if I've even done that correctly. But I miss having a place to come and read real posts, and I see fewer and fewer of those here but I still come back and check.

Just thought I'd kick the ruins.

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