Ben Yalow <
yb...@panix.com> wrote:
> "Keith F. Lynch" <k...@KeithLynch.net> writes:
>> Ben Yalow <
yb...@panix.com> wrote:
>>> Google doesn't care about Usenet --
>> Or about search, evidently, given how crappy that has become.
>> What *do* they care about? Some bright and shiny new thing
>> they invented last Tuesday and will drop next Thursday?
> But people keep using their search, and others keep dropping out of
> the market. So why should we believe you, instead of what billions
> of other people seem to think?
You might as well ask why you should believe me that the sun rises
in the east. Anyone can observe for themselves that Google's search
often finds pages that don't contain the requested search term, fails
to find pages that do contain it, often finds *more* pages when a
search is made more restrictive, etc.
Google users are looking for a good search engine. Something like
Google used to be. When we find it, we'll abandon Google.
>>> they still keep doing it without it making them any significant
>>> money, just because it's easy.
>> Apparently they don't find it easy to do *right*.
> They do it well enough to dominate the market.
If they dominate the market, it's only because the market is so
fragmented -- which is a good thing.
> It doesn't work well for you -- but you're not someone they care
> about, since your profile doesn't match the way they make money.
Lots of people complain about it. Many, unlike me, go so far as to
killfile all posts from Google Groups. If Google Groups posts will
hencforth be filled with angle brackets, semicolons, and ampersands
like the source code to a web page, a lot more people will killfile
them.
>>> There are only a few sites still left that carry Usenet; almost
>>> everybody gets their feed from the same handful.
Most ISPs still carry it. When a major ISP drops Usenet, that's
remarkable enough that it makes headlines.
>>> And they make their money by people willing to pay to be able to
>>> download large amounts from the binaries groups, and not anything
>>> to do with the text groups, which carry an insignificant amount of
>>> usage.
Some ISPs have dropped just the binaries groups because of the
bandwidth and disk space drain. So of course people who subscribe to
third-party Usenet providers are disproportionately users of binaries
groups.
As for "insignificant," not all bits are created equal. You might as
well claim that television is a million times more popular than books,
based on how many bits are conveyed by each medium. A better metric
is how many person-hours are spent with each.
> But, for example, the cheap Easynews plan is their 20G/month plan.
> And most of their customers take one of their larger plans. You
> don't get to need more than 20G/month for text.
Do you think you're disagreeing with me? You're not. I've been a
heavy user of Usenet for over a quarter century, and I haven't yet
read or posted 20G in total. The more than 38,000 messages I've
posted to this newsgroup probably total less than 0.2G -- and that's
spread over 21 years.
> "Our customers don't care about Usenet -- why should we?"
Whose customers?
> Feel free to write something better.
Usenet doesn't need a replacement.
> Or continue to keep pretending that Usenet isn't dying -- and keep
> hoping that binaries can keep it alive for a while longer.
In no sense do the binaries groups subsidize the text groups.
If Usenet is dying, it's not because someone has created or failed to
create something better. It's because of ubiquitous gross violations
of netiquette, such as the repeated failure to trim irrelevant groups
from crossposted threads.
If I were on the grand jury investigating the attempted murder of the
net, I'd indict everyone who has crossposted in the massive thread
that has dominated this newsgroup for the past five weeks. It's way
off topic in rasfw. Worst of all is anyone who crossposts without
checking *both* newsgroups for followups, since he's implicitly
discouraging people from doing the right thing, i.e. trimming
irrelevant newsgroups. Indeed, that's not so much crossposting
into a newsgroup as it's shitting into a newsgroup.