Is it time to abandon Usenet for Usenet II?

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Rich Kulawiec (rsk@itw.com)
Tue, 21 Oct 1997 14:17:11 -0400 (EDT)

Like many (most?) of you, I've been involved with Usenet for a long
time; in my case, since I became pur-ee!rsk in 1981 and was thrilled
with the idea that I could bug the people at Berkeley CSRG directly. :-)
About 8-9 years ago, I thought that widespread dissemination of FAQs
could do something to halt the increasing ... well, let's call it
"entropy" for lack of a better word ... entropy of Usenet. I came up
with the "List of Periodic Informational Postings", which I handed
off the Jonathan Kamens a few years later, and which is now a 20-part
FAQ in its own right. And I've written more than a few FAQs over the
years, some active, some not.

But I think it's time we FAQ maintainers take a good look at where
our efforts should be directed. No, I'm not going to pronounce the
death of Usenet -- I already did that in 1987. :-) But I am going
to suggest that whether Usenet lives or dies, maybe we are all putting
way too much time into it for way too small a payback. ("Payback"
in the sense of "providing useful information that prevents repetitive
postings and discussions and/or which spells out newsgroup charters
to the benefit of the community using the newsgroup" Or however
you'd like to phrase it.) Usenet's a mess, and with spam and
cancel wars and about 10,000 alt.* newsgroups that weren't adequately
thought out (if any thought was involved at all) and all the other
sheer unadulterated *crap* that we now all put up with...

Maybe it's time we lead the move to something better. Maybe it's
time to deep-six the entire FAQ system on Usenet and move it to
Usenet II. This would be good for us, because Usenet II's organization
is such that maybe of the annoyances of Usenet won't be there; this
means less aggravation for us. It would probably be good for Usenet II,
because a massive show of support like this would help its growth
and acceptance (though I can't claim to speak for Usenet II).

Usenet's been fun, but just as delivermail yielded to sendmail
and gopher to the web, and so on, maybe it's time to let it go
and direct our collective efforts to the new kid on the block.

There's a web site for Usenet II at

http://mushi.taronga.com/usenet/

I'm CC'ing this to Peter da Silva, who is one of the Usenet II
folks, just to see if he has any comments.

---Rsk
Rich Kulawiec
rsk@itw.com