AOL is no longer offering usenet access.

This feels to me like they’re tearing down an old diner in a neighborhood I used to live in. I never go there anymore, but I spent 5 years of my life on usenet, and 2 of those years in a fever I can’t characterise as anything other than addiction. I learned to write there, and it’s one of only two places where I had people I’d call real friends who I never met IRL. (The other was Old Man Murray, RIP.)

The moment AOL started offering newsgroup access, it created the ‘long September’, where the flood of clueless newbies became more or less permanent, in contrast with previous years where every September saw an influx of freshman at colleges with usenet access, who were then flamed to high heaven acculturated, and the whole thing settled back down by October.

It was also the first sign that the logic of value through interconnection was higher than value through exclusivity. (AOL’s genius, unrivalled, I believe, in the modern era, was to say one thing to investors and another to users, telling Wall Street it was a media company, but selling communications tools and the attendant access to community to its users, functions that always dwarfed use of its media properties.)

There’s not much to eulogize here — the era when you had to explain to the press that the internet was more than just usenet are long over, and AOL’s vital place in the ecosystem wanes each day with the fortunes of dial-up access generally. Over at MeFi, they’re trying to revel in the idea that the long September is ending, but that’s not whats happening here — AOL’s decision to disconnect its NNTP servers cedes usenet to spam and usenet access to Google, which things were each a done deal some time ago.

Still, it feels kind of funny. Usenet was such a spectacular experiment in the annals of human communication, the idea that it’s value isn’t worth the cost of keeping the servers running comes as a marker of things I already knew, but which still feel different when they become facts in the world.