This morning, I took a look at the newgroups. I thought there weren't very many posts in comp.lang.perl.misc, so I did a little test: I marked everything younger than 72 hours as unread. I found that there were only about 90 posts in those 3 whole days, roughly 30 per day...
That is very little. Only a few years ago, I seem to recall that there were, on average, 300 posts per day. That's 10 times as much as this past weekend.
What's going on? Is my news server missing that many posts? I don't think so, it's behaving pretty well lately.
Some people suggested that this might have been a "special weekend". Perhaps. Since this morning, roughly 50 new posts have arrived, over about 12 hours. That's clearly a higher rate than in the last few days, but still a lot less than in the olden days.
It's not spam that killed it, there's barely any spam in comp.lang.perl.misc. A traditional complaint is that the regulars are too harsh on newbies. Perhaps they are — heck, I've complained about it myself, in the past — while being a regular myself, so it wasn't harshness against me :). But in any case, that's nothing new. It didn't stop the newsgroup from thriving before. Still other people feel that newsgroup trolls are responsible for its decline. But I can't see much troll activity, lately.
I don't know. I feel it's still some other cause, something I've overlooked here.
I have absolutely no evidence to back this up. It's just a gut feeling.
