usenet about to die?

[FoulDragon at aol.com]

In a message dated 11/22/2005 10:29:22 PM US Mountain Standard Time, 
technomage-hawke at cox.net writes:

>I've been hearing rumblings from folks I know that Usenet is going to be 
>dropped by most (of not all) of the broadband providers. On top of this, the 
>same providers will simply not tell their customers anything about it.

What's troubling is that Usenet is an extremely valuable resource for three 
key reasons:

-It's bidirectional

-It's efficient

-It's (for most groups) unmoderated/unmoderatable.

I note there's a trend towards discouraging anything which allows people with 
an "end user" class service contract to contribute.  No server clauses, 
massively assymetrical dl/ul speeds, filtering ports which might allow service 
provision.  Usenet though is designed to be contributory from the beginning, it's 
assumed people will post and read.  It flies against the "internet as TV" 
mentality.

It seems like people want web-based forums to be the 'replacement' for 
newsgroups, but I'd bet 30 percent or more of the transfer of such pages is 
formatting rather than content.  Considering the complaints about wasted bandwidth, 
how come we're keen on wasting loads of bandwidth to provide formatting when 
Usenet has the info to reconstitute formatting built in efficiently.

Furthermore, the danger of web-forums is that they're easy to moderate.  
While this means you can control trolls, it also allows easy censorship.  I recall 
a major split in the community of users of a specific mainboard brought 
because of a banning in a web-forum of discussion about its possible defects; half 
the community pulled up stakes and moved elsewhere, many people were annoyed, 
we all lost.

The only reason Usenet has withered is because it's not, and has never been, 
sexy.  AFAICT, the primary draw of web-forums (from a user-standpoint) is that 
they're pretty.  I could imagine a series of client extensions (since some 
already parse HTML) which would give Usenet all the sexiness it lacks, easily.  
It would just need.

-A regularly posted message suggesting colours and links to images for title 
and logo, in a machine-readable format.
-An X-field specifiying addresses for the user's "avatar" graphic (so the 
download is optional)
-Machine-readable tags in message titles would allow a heirarchical structure 
to be imposed (optionally, of course, with all nontagged messages shown in a 
"unclassified" area)