I agree with most of what you're saying. However...
Perry E Metzger <perry(_at_)piermont(_dot_)com> writes:
What happened to Usenet will indeed happen to SMTP if we do not stop
pretending that the problem is insignificant.
...Usenet mostly controlled its spam problem. It's not increasing any
more, and it's much less noticable to the average user than e-mail spam.
So this statement is going to hurt your presentation with anyone who
actually knows what's going on on Usenet.
What's really happening to Usenet is that Usenet does not offer anyone
sufficient control over the presentation, readership, or postings in a
forum, and most people want control rather than anarchy and want their
presentation to be pretty. So they are instead using mailing lists
(somewhat more control) or web-based discussion software (lots and lots of
control).
Furthermore, the money in Internet communication these days is in
one-to-many broadcast communication without the possibility of response,
which web pages and to a lesser extent mailing lists thrive at, and which
is nearly impossible on Usenet and is strongly attacked by Usenet users.
So that money isn't going into Usenet.
The long-term direction of Usenet seems to more and more be heading
towards a quiet backwater populated mostly by technical people who
understand the technology and think it's cool, as more and more sites drop
all of the binary groups and carry only text-based discussion, with a
strong sideline of bidirectional gateways to mailing lists so that people
can pick the interface they prefer. I can't say that I'd be particularly
unhappy with that; it would be rather like rolling the clock back to 1995,
and in another five or ten years it wouldn't surprise me if that's what
happened.
It means that Usenet ceases to be a hotbed for experimentation in new
communication techniques, which is a bit of a shame, but frankly Usenet
hasn't been that since the web was invented. That's where all of the
effort is going these days.
--
Russ Allbery (rra(_at_)stanford(_dot_)edu)
<http://www.eyrie.org/~eagle/>