On Saturday, 1 May 2021 at 18:38:41 UTC+10,
shannon...@gmail.com wrote:
> On Wednesday, April 28, 2021 at 8:17:38 AM UTC+9,
jimb...@gmail.com wrote:
> > On Wednesday, 28 April 2021 at 00:23:59 UTC+10, Jasper wrote:
> >
> > > Professor Bass, Breen, Cormier, TT, cindy, Jacobs, Bremner, myaw, Robson, Webster, W, Matsuda, the Onion, gary, cumminsky, Raynolds, Takabayashi And the rest of you! Are you alive? (I don't think so.)
> > I was alive, last time I looked. The good old HP (now) at
http://nihongo.monash.edu/index.html and the Japanese page at
http://nihongo.monash.edu/japanese.html still work.
> Wow, I'm not sure what to make of this coincidence, but I don't visit Google Groups very often these years. Probably several years since my last visit, but I only missed this post and the replies by a couple of days.
[...]
> I do miss the old days when usenet was so lively. I would like to be missing the annoying trolls, but there seem to be more of them than ever and pretty much everywhere you look on the Web. So in this comment I'll throw in my favorite theoretical solution approach for the troll problem, and I'll start a new and separate conversation about a language learning app I've been seeking for some years.
>
> So the reason I'm starting with the troll part is because I think they killed usenet more than any other factor. [...]
I think Usenet died with the arrival of the WWW, which provided many other platforms for interaction and discussion. Sure there was a troll problem, especially with soc.culture.japan, but you can get trolls everywhere. Usenet was a bit geeky and newcomers found it easier to go elsewhere. I remember a lot of sci.lang.japan people went to The Japanese Page, but it went and collapsed.
Another WWW victim was email lists. Some of the ones that were very busy in the 90s and early 2000s, such as Honyaku, are now only used by a handful of diehards. A Facebook page (shudder) has taken much of the action. I'm in a few Slack communities, which seem to work fairly well.
Jim