The Changing Face of Community

January 9, 2009 · Posted in Other, SQL Server 

Alt title: NNTP is Dead. Long Live the King!

I am not old school like BBS’s and gopher but I have been online since 95. I didn’t get into SQL until about 99. Back then there were mostly just NNTP usenet groups and majordomo style mailing lists for SQL communities. I loved both of them up until a few years ago. I got bored with them. I got bored with the internet in general. I jumped back into the SQL NNTP group and MSDN forums in 2007. To be honest, it was mainly to promote my blog by having a link in my sig. I was turned off by it because there were like 10 answerers to every person asking questions. The same 10 questions get asked every other day. For answerers, they are rewarded for quantity instead of quality. Am I jaded? Maybe :)

Then I found twitter along with other social sites and it was like there was this new thing called the Internet again. It is more than just twitter. Twitter is the glue that combines blogging, RSS feeds, Facebook(and others), mobile social networking, real time search, and an open web. Not quite sure what it is called…..

Anyway, I was curious if others are thinking the same way, if it is affecting traditional communities and what the future holds. I researched and came across these interest tables.

Messages by Month for Microsoft.public.sqlserver.server since inception

Jan Feb Mar Apr May Jun Jul Aug Sep Oct Nov Dec
1996 3 12 13 96 35 26 41 350
1997 897 855 1018 1317 1356 1180 1171 1091 1614 1418 1297 1530
1998 1828 1853 2022 1983 1831 1919 2004 1822 1833 1956 2170 1920
1999 2994 2997 3487 2954 3399 3650 3437 3793 3581 3506 3829 3333
2000 4130 3611 4056 3785 3614 4006 4129 4349 3820 4287 4583 3642
2001 4840 3901 4381 4470 5229 4424 4169 4996 3905 5056 4539 4716
2002 5335 5076 5018 4843 4679 4197 4986 3877 3548 4655 3655 3864
2003 6178 5181 5003 5082 4767 4657 4809 4989 4930 4896 4575 4079
2004 4195 4158 4044 3182 3619 4618 3960 3727 4061 3870 3789 3390
2005 3542 3457 3971 3480 2881 3749 3157 3732 3186 3260 3234 2919
2006 3681 2740 3284 3218 3658 3380 3340 3633 2794 3072 3073 2440
2007 3218 2569 2623 2396 2551 2449 2189 2583 2389 2501 2619 1717
2008 2339 1724 1664 1648 1649 1784 1913 1623 1429 1560 1298 1085
2009 1576 1166 1112 1368 1262 1360 163

Messages by Month for Microsoft.public.sqlserver.programming since inception

Jan Feb Mar Apr May Jun Jul Aug Sep Oct Nov Dec
1992 2
1996 5 17 113 29 40 72 344
1997 907 746 809 895 904 831 877 964 1263 1187 975 1108
1998 1558 1661 1854 1718 1774 1911 1774 1751 1982 2110 2159 2081
1999 2414 2642 3006 3130 2950 3441 3350 3797 3890 3739 3878 3473
2000 4255 3891 4497 4064 4750 4673 4711 5604 4941 5501 5571 4625
2001 5974 5306 6048 6789 7677 7567 6946 7907 6147 8486 7652 6668
2002 8784 8228 9041 8827 8192 7410 7808 6598 6496 7264 6825 6243
2003 8438 8108 8623 8010 7723 7542 8060 7377 7216 7246 6553 6352
2004 6843 6499 7355 5304 5883 6761 6634 6567 6593 6266 6227 6161
2005 5854 5898 6697 7108 5876 5714 5957 7182 5656 5891 6146 5462
2006 6696 5768 5528 6076 6364 5660 5448 5519 5506 5340 4645 4364
2007 5265 4337 4637 3980 4060 4188 4462 4099 3551 4042 3679 3218
2008 3762 3207 3607 3783 3321 2793 3752 2941 2760 2671 1989 1830
2009 2377 1729 1893 1636 1975 1974 261

Both peaked in 2003. If I had to guess, the decline from 2004-2007 was because HTTP forums like MSDN and third parties became more popular. What is really interesting is looking at the % of drop from 2007-2008 and 2008-2009 vs. the previous same month year over year drops from 2004-2007. The decline on NNTP is hastening.

The biggest drops have occurred when the SQL Server community really embraced social networking apps like twitter and facebook along with sites like StackOverflow. That is my hypothesis. No proof. Just cold hard unforgining numbers to interpret. Watching the trend as time progresses will be interesting.

I am not happy that NTTP is declining but happy that something better is taking its place. Thoughts?

P.S. Change is good otherwise we would be living in caves bonking small animals with clubs.

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Comments

  • chrisleonard
    Good stats, and it sure makes sense.

    I agree that Twitter is overrated, though some people make better use of it than I want to go to the effort to do. The signal-to-noise ratio is terrible, and while you can get a "realtime survey" that has breadth ("which version(s) of sql server do you use? #sqlsurvey14422") the depth of insight available is trivial - you cannot get information using twitter alone about troubleshooting techniques for deadlocks, or tuning a specific kind of query, or researching a particular error message, or anything else that is context-rich. The problem is that life really is context-rich, and twitter, by design, is only helpful when there is already context.

    Finally, sadly, I have had to bonk small (well, medium-sized) animals, but only when they threatened children. It was self-defense.
  • Wait, you said something better is taking its place. What are you referring to? I haven't seen anything even remotely close. NNTP offers:

    - The ability to work effectively when offline
    - The ability to get and send messages via any number of servers--it's totally distributed and fault tolerant
    - Fully searchable, persistent archives, via Google Groups (well, before Google messed them up a bit)
    - The ability to use any number of tools to read and send messages, so that you can use an interface of your choice and you're not tied to someone else's idea of how to work

    No other technology that I've seen offers such a broad set of qualities. NNTP was designed as a highly scalable communications infrastructure. It's not a social network. It's a way to have a detailed written conversation. And no social network that I've seen can replace that. Correct me if I'm wrong.
  • statisticsio
    The ability to work offline is as relevant as postal mail. Now is the ability to work mobile.

    I can't say anything about the distributed, fault tolerant point but I speculate the same guys that wrote the DNS rfc wrote the NNTP rfc.

    Search is way better on twitter and friendfeed. It is a real time pulse of what is going on in the world. Real time is the key imo. Usenet can't do that by design.

    I have have to disagree with the tools thing too. It is way too easy to post to twitter or facebook. There even used to be a voice to text telephone number you could use.

    Don't get me wrong. I like the usenet and it works well but so did the pony express.
  • First of all, you're not the only Internet user. Perhaps you are connected 24x7, but many people--myself included--are most definitely not.

    Second, Twitter?! Sorry, but you've gone off the deep end if you think Twitter is any kind of replacement for NNTP. Twitter is a chat engine, designed for short, quick messages. It is not a forum for deep or involved conversations, and although some search capabilities exist they're a far cry from Google Groups. In addition, messages are barely threaded and it's far too easy to lose track of where a "discussion" is going. And it's certainly not any more real-time than NNTP. They both work on a very similar asynchronous request/response architecture. Please don't confuse the fact that your Twitter client asks for updates more often than your NNTP client might with whether one is more "real-time" than the other.

    Hell, this blog is a better medium for in-depth conversation than Twitter. Do you think I could have typed all of this out in 140-character increments?
  • It is not that app that makes it real time although search is way faster than a usenet search just because messages have to bounce across servers. It is the people that make it real time. Turn on CNN and wait for them to announce breaking news and then search twitter. It always hits twitter first. Sometimes hours before traditional media. You can almost "watch" your favorite team on a sunday by searching for them during the game.

    Back to SQL though, if you can't ask a question or be answered in char(140), you probably need to do some research. :)
  • I agree that Twitter is better than NNTP for things like breaking news snippets, games, and general chat. Even simple questions. That's why I'm a Twitter user.

    If you look in microsoft.sqlserver.programming you will find some threads that went on for months, with long, detailed replies back and forth. Huge example queries, and posters helping each other with extremely intricate problems. That kind of interaction was fascinating and when I have a SQL Server problem to this day, the first place I usually search is Google Groups, because I know I'll probably be able to find a detailed thread on the topic. I can't say the same for any other technology that's currently available.

    I suspect that NNTP usage actually declined not because it's an inadequate technology, but rather due to perception and ISP restrictions. NNTP has long been under scrutiny from a number of ISPs due to the various binaries newsgroups and the fact that they're pirate havens. The fact that the entire network is anonymous and supports large encoded attachments makes it a simple way to distribute pirated material (not to mention other sorts of material that is much worse). As a result of that, many ISPs started blocking NNTP traffic a few years ago, and recently it has gotten much worse. Another issue is that of perception. People are instinctively drawn to "newer" even when it's not necessarily "better," especially in our industry. Could someone have created a great Web interface for NNTP, similar to that of StackOverflow? Certainly. Did they? No. It's an old technology; why should we build on it when we can instead create something new?
  • Yah, ATT putting the kabosh on usenet is going to cripple it even though there are web interfaces and fee access to MSFT newgroups.
  • As mentioned previously, the Web interfaces suck; no one bothered building one of quality.

    Microsoft newsgroups were and are available from the MS servers, but were also distributed. So yes, this IS going to hurt those groups, because a large percentage of users probably weren't using the MS servers and may not even know that they exist.
  • I think this is an overblown crush on Twitter at the expense of the proven, in this case NNTP. Yes, ATT and other ISPs closing down their NNTP servers will hurt NNTP. But that doesn't make Twitter any kind of replacement for NNTP, let alone any kind of successor to RSS, blogs, search or other social media such as FaceBook.

    Perhaps whatever Twitter evolves into will occupy that space, but certainly not its current incarnation.
  • It is not the successor to those but the glue that enables them to be better. I don't have any real stats but I bet about 50% of RSS entries make it to twitter in one way or another and about the same % of FB updates come from twitter.
    This post wasn't meant to be about twitter. Just the decline of the NNTP traffic and speculation why. I speculated in the original post that most of what you mention has had an effect and twitter amplified it.
  • I don't see it as glue any more than putting your blog address in the footer of your NNTP posts "glued" those two media together. I also think (and similarly without stats to back it up) that RSS entries and Twitter are as connected as you say. Maybe at the bleeding edge where you are, but not for most.

    I think Twitter, RSS/blogs and newsgroups all serve different purposes and accumulate different audiences. That there's integration at all (being able to post links in Tweets, update status from phones, etc) doesn't change that.
  • oof - the second sentence should read: "I also think (and similarly without stats to back it up) that RSS entries and Twitter are *not* as connected as you say. "
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