death of newsgroups (Microsoft closing their newsgroups)

[Xah Lee]

• Death of Newsgroups
  http://xahlee.org/UnixResource_dir/writ2/death_of_newsgroups.html

plain text version follows.

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Death of Newsgroups

Xah Lee, 2010-07-13

Microsoft is closing down their newsgroups. See:
microsoft.public.windows.powershell.

I use comp.lang.lisp, comp.emacs since about 1999. Have been using
them pretty much on a weekly basis in the past 10 years. Starting
about 2007, the traffic has been increasingly filled with spam, and
the posters are always just the 20 or 30 known faces. I think perhaps
maybe no more than 100 different posters a year. Since this year or
last year, they are some 95% spam.

comp.emacs is pretty much just me.

gnu.emacs.help is not much better. It's pretty much the same
developers and the same few elisp coders, with perhaps 1 new face with
once-per-lifetime post every few days. gnu.emacs.help is doing a bit
better because it is connected to fsf's mailing list.

comp.lang.perl.misc is dead few years ago. It's filled with just
snippet of FAQs that's posted by machine. There's perl.beginners since
2002, and it's a moderated group.

The one newsgroup that i use that's still healthy is comp.lang.python.
Part of the reason it's healthy because it's connected to a mailing
list, and python has become a mainstream lang. Though, it is also
infected by a lot spam in late years.

I did a study of language popularity by graphing newsgroup traffic
thru the years. See: Computer Language Popularity Trend. I thought
about updating it now and then, but it's useless if the majority of
posts are machine generated spam.

For vast majority of people who is not a regular user of newsgroups in
the 1990s or earlier, i suppose newsgroup has been dead since perhaps
2002.

It's somewhat sad. Because newsgroup once was the vibrant hotbed for
uncensored information and freespeech, with incidences that spawned
main stream public debate on policies, or change of nations.
(scientology being one famous example, then there's Cindy's Torment
censorship, then i remember also several cases of political dirty
secrets being released in newsgroups ) These days, much of this
happens in the blogs and there's Wikileaks.

  Xah
∑ http://xahlee.org/

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