Usenet

I seem to be finding some previously engaging and interesting newsgroups rather dull at the moment. In some cases I can see real differences in them, not just in me, but they don't account for it all and in other cases I can't detect any practical difference, just a loss of interest on my part. It means that I've gone from feeling often overwhelmed by the volume of news to having one of my preferred low-energy leisure activities falling in size quite dramatically.

Why do I care? Many of my friends I met as a result of one social newsgroup or another, mostly AFP and ucam.chat, so it does feel like a formerly productive part of my life has gone away.

I suppose it's possible that reading livejournal, which generally concerns people closer to me than those found on Usenet, is occupying the part of my attention that used to concentrate on large social newsgroups, but I'm not really convinced, and despite the propaganda, it doesn't generate communities in the same way; to me it seems more that it amplifies existing ones.

The things that seem to be occupying my time instead of Usenet are reading books and hobby programming. Obviously there are worse things to occupy one's time with but I'm not sure they're really quite the same niche.