Welcome to the Infrablog

I just heard from my cable company, who is also my ISP, that they are retiring their Usenet servers this month. AOL dropped support for Usenet nearly a year ago. Microsoft.public.* groups are dwindling. ISPs across the net are dropping Usenet from their feature list. Now if I want to boot up TIN and read comp.lang.ruby, well, I guess the days of using TIN are over, and I’ll just have to point my browser at groups.google.com.

Never mind that reading Usenet via Firefox and Google isn’t the same experience at all.  It’s not just the ads trying to be inconspicuously conspicuous over at the edge of the page. There’s no way to cycle through messages on groups I’ve subscribed to. No automatic quoting for splicing my comments in reply to someone else’s. I could go on. If you’ve been reading Usenet since the days when Usenet was the Internet, or at least that’s what the press and the rest of the world thought, you know what I mean. I’m sure I could find a Usenet server somewhere that I could use the “right way”. But it would be pointless, because the great global discussion that was Usenet is no more.  Or rather the discussion is happening, and more intensely than ever. It’s just gone elsewhere.

There are several factors that contributed to the downfall of Usenet, but ultimately this is another case of the “tragedy of the commons”.  Like email, Usenet promoted free, easy communications to any and all. And the same scaling capabilities that allowed it to grow so big left it defenseless against abuse. At its peak, Usenet spam easily outnumbered legitimate posts on many groups. A spammer with an anonymous re-mailer could flood the channel with noise at near zero cost, and with impunity. That opportunity proved too tempting and since it only takes a relatively small number of spammers to choke the system, over time Usenet succumbed. Readers and posters went elsewhere. Web-based forums flourished, equipped with their own login systems, and importantly, moderators.

I’ve no problem with the migration to web-based forums. In some ways, Usenet as über-forum was unworkable at large scale; even if spam wasn’t a problem, the sheer volume of popular groups was such that it was impossible to keep up. But for many “long tail” subjects, Usenet was remarkable in its ability to aggregate interested parties from around the world.

Why does this matter? Maybe it doesn’t. But I couldn’t help thinking about some of the worst days for Usenet several years ago – before everyone left and when spammers were really in high gear there -- when I looked at some trends and stats for content coming through weblogs.com recently. Vigorous growth and participation, being vigorously exploited by those who understand that the system is nearly defenseless against abuse.  Another commons has developed in the blogosphere, and is beset by toxins.

I suspect things may be different this time around with the blogosphere, though. The formats and specifications are still very much in development in this space, so the blogosphere isn't doomed to being defenseless. I think many have learned the lessons from the problems that email and Usenet encountered. There's a lot of energy being dedicated right now at VeriSign and elsewhere to enabling open standards that provide means for the commons to defend and police itself from abuse.  Identity, reputation and content management frameworks are emerging that can provide a good measure of defense from spam and abuse, and at the same time keep the "commons" the "commons".