In article <2m293dta714t7t5m79grsrr3sct13dpg7q@4ax.com>,
<Moxy@127.0.0.1> wrote:
> I get the impression that whenever I post, nobody else contributes.
> Am I missing some protocol, or am I in some lurker hell?
You're not missing any protocol. This time, Usenet really is dying.
moving away from the binaries groups in droves over the last ten years.
I doubt that there's much to be done about it. It is what it is, and
people will do what they're gonna do. There's Bittorrent for one
thing, and for pr0n there are also a number of quite good and
comprehensive web boards with tons of good stuff, using the many
file-locker servers for large files and the many image servers for
galleries of individual images. (And all of that tends to have a
retention time much shorter than that of a good Usenet server.) Folks
are not nearly as enthusiastic about the newsgroups as they once were.
There is a lot of DMCA takedown activity, and that definitely extends
to Usenet now, whereas (let's say) five to twenty years ago the
corporate droids who do that stuff generally had no clue what Usenet
was. That's one contributing reason, but it's not the only one.
I know that in addition to the automated takedowns (orders to all of
the major Usenet servers *and* Usenet-indexing engines to remove the
offending posts and send out cancel control messages), some posters
have been seriously harassed with legal actions and threatened with
fines. That results in what the courts and other legal people call
"a chilling effect".
FWIW, a combination of observation and suggestion: It would be a waste
of time, effort, emotions, etc. to try to recruit posters or to stage
sit-down strikes or to say "I'm gonna take my toys and go home if I
don't get any cooperation" and so on. It has all been done, dozens
of times, over the last N years. Thank you very much for posting!
Sincerely. I'm afraid that at some point it will probably stop being
rewarding for you, or at least the community feeling will have gone.
Yes, there are still many lurkers here and there. But is it feasible
to get them to start posting scads of material, whether that is new or
old material? IMO, not at all, and there would be no point in trying.
Let it be. One approach would be to look at the flip side and take
some pride in being a die-hard, one of a vanishing breed.
Was it you who observed a few months ago that many Usenet participants
have been aging out of the system lately? Very true. The more recent
generations of file-sharers *generally* don't know or care about
Usenet. Even if they are aware of it and try it casually for a while,
they have bigger and better fish to fry elsewhere.
It's just the way it is. It might sound like nothing but doom & gloom,
but actually it's not. Sort of like the geezer's observation that
"Any day I wake up is a good day", lately I've been pleasantly
surprised that *any* of this stuff still exists and functions even
minimally. Depending on what one is looking for (audio, video, images,
software, e-books), it *might* still be possible to find it in one
binaries group or another.
But possibly not in plain sight. There's also the relatively recent
strategy of using the binaries groups as a sort of temporary
file-locker for posts of various stuff, posted with apparently
meaningless subject lines, not directly searchable, and then having
an index and search engine for that stuff on a web site somewhere.
For instance, that has been going on a lot in some very
high-traffic groups like a.b.erotica (with one search engine at
<http://allfilled.bot.nu>) and a.b.sounds.flac. So that's one way.
I can't say that it appeals to me very much.
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