Path: utzoo!attcan!utgpu!watmath!looking!brad
From: brad@looking.on.ca (Brad Templeton)
Newsgroups: news.admin
Subject: Is USENET stagnating?
Message-ID: <40056@looking.on.ca>
Date: 29 Oct 89 02:15:26 GMT
Organization: Looking Glass Software Limited, Waterloo ON
Lines: 69
Class: proposal

USENET is perhaps the world's largest computer conferencing network, and
I've been on it almost since the beginning.  At the start, USENET was a
bold and successful experiment in human-computer networking.  I think
that field is one of the world's most exiting -- the cutting edge of
the story of society and technology.   As such, as with the hardware and
software industries, we should be watching a whirlwind of change.

But we're not.  Recently I've had to ask, "what's new in USENET?"
It's not that there's nothing, but all I can say is that it's a
slight breeze and not a whirlwind.

In particular, what's new in a networking sense?  There have been some
new readers recently, and new net software for new machines, but they
only change one person's view of the net, unless they get real wide
acceptance.

And many of the recent developments, such as C news, don't attempt to
do anything new.  It's highly useful to have the same thing done much
faster (I make my living from that, after all) but it doesn't change
what the net is.

The "References:" and "Supersedes:" fields were implemented over 4
years ago, but they still can't be used.  Indeed, change in the
netwide transport mechanism seems impossible.

RN changed the net a fair bit, but it's over 4 years old now too.
4 years is a lifetime in software.  The basic inews tools and their
format aren't a lot different from their origins 8 years ago!
TMN has some interesting ideas, but it has yet to have any impact
on the net.

The only significant thing I can point to of late is NNTP.  On LANS, NNTP
has no effect on the net, other than letting clients save disk space.
As a transmission mechanism, it has not had a direct affect.  Instead, its
effect comes in tandem with NSF's funding of the internet, and the vastly
reduced transmission times that come with it.

So what is new?  I like to think I'm doing new things, with stuff like
an ultra-moderated newsgroup, electronic publishing, fancy feed/filtering
tools and classification tools.  But I can't deny that many of these
things are not truly new.  Hell, you could read UPI on "The Source" when
it opened up in 1978.  Better article classification has existed on
other nets for some time, too.

The only thing that really distinguishes USENET these days is the
strongly moderated group.  Most other nets don't have that, or don't
use it much.  (No surprise, on things like CIS the people pay to post,
and hardly want to write things to have a moderator toss it away.)
But this idea is just an evolution of something that existed on
the ARPANET in the 70s.  We're going into the 90s now.

Much of the "news" on USENET these days isn't about revolution in
computer networking.  It's about whether aquariums are hobby or science.
Or about what new tweak should be made to newsgroup creation rules.

Now the object of this article is not to have everybody list some minor
new thing that's happened to USENET.  I want to find out why we aren't
watching *major* changes, and why we aren't watching a lot of them.
And what we can do about it.

I do know one reason, and it comes from my own experience as (I think) one
of the few people to try to do completely new things in this network
environment.   You get pointlessly flamed whenever you try to innovate.

People have forgotten what USENET should be about.  USENET is about
*doing* things in computer networking.  Not thinking up arguments why
people shouldn't do them.
-- 
Brad Templeton, ClariNet Communications Corp. -- Waterloo, Ontario 519/884-7473