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RemarQ.com Shutting Down
Posted by
emmett
on Fri Aug 11, 2000 11:40 PM
from the another-one-bites-the-dust dept.
from the another-one-bites-the-dust dept.
ZeroLogic writes: "RemarQ.com, is shutting down! According to the message on the home page, it looks like they want you to use their pay service instead. It's a shame since RemarQ was the only good Web based usenet reader I could find." ...and the free stuff will keep going away as IPO money runs out all over the Web industry. Expect a feature on this soon.
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Re:what happened to generosity? (Score:2)
Rusty didn't charge for the site, he put ads up. And not to pay his salary, to keep the site going. Sometimes something is done for fun, or for good. But there are many immature people who like the power of destruction, but don't know the passive joy restraint can bring. (I like fire, I like explosions, I like guns. But I live in a forest, and I will kick your butt if you leave a fire unattended. I'm an engineer, so I know the joy of building, and the pain of loss an explosion can bring. And I'm human, so I aim my guns at paper targets up against really heavy backdrops.)
Louis Wu
"Where do you want to go ...
Re:what happened to generosity? (Score:1)
Re:Eternal Unsolved Question:Does Advertising Work (Score:1)
ever see a napster profit margin? Again, that was my point-- they give away a service and take nothing in. Sooner or later-- something has to give.
As far as packaging and coke goes-- i think you are essencially right--- for things that are packaged. Again, think about movies-- or pizza. If pizza hut didn't tell you about their new deal- how woudl you find out other than calling them. but, we've all, at least once, called them becasue of an ad we saw. Maybe that is the secrest. Instead of banner ads for useless crap we need ones like --"tired of surfing? hungry? want a pizza?"
oh humm ust my $.02
TANSTAAFL (Score:2)
Simply put, because there ain't no such thing as a free lunch. It'd be nice to have plentiful free services on the web, but remember, the guy behind neato-free-crap.com has to pay the bills too.
--
Re:There is always Deja (Score:2)
Deja's ENTIRE archive of Usenet prior to May 1999 has been removed for the past few months, while Deja 'moves its servers'. Taking long enough, isn't it?
With RemarQ gone, does this leave anyone else as a Usenet webportal or search capability? And if Deja now decides not to bring its archive back... well, I guess there's no proof that there was a vibrant civilization on the 'internet' prior to the Web after all.
Re:Now what? (Score:3)
I for one am glad to see Deja's pre-99 stuff broken down. I wish they'd switch their entire site over to consumer advocacy, or whatever their business model is this week, and get rid of the Usenet archives entirely.
I wouldn't mind seeing C|Net's help.com, which posts messages to Usenet without the poster having a clue as to what Usenet is, die off as well.
Shaun
Re:Quite a lag between stories (Score:1)
And the only pocket protector I have in this county is leather, with my initials embossed on it. I may be a geek, but I'm a geek with class. :)
Louis Wu
"Where do you want to go ...
Onlynews.com is another great provider - no BW cap (Score:1)
Onlynews [onlynews.com] kicks BUTT if you're on a high speed connection; They don't throttle connections; over thirty thousand groups; And they're reliable and anonymous. I don't work for them, so no benefit here, but they're a great provider. I've tried a few but the download speeds all sucked. Napster, shmapster. Try Usenet :).
For the record, dejanews is handy but it's overrated. Anyone who has a couple gigs of free space and a decent spam filter can run an archive of the good stuff for their own personal use, or HELL, even share it with a few friends. Check out some of the usenet software available.
Screw the web, Usenet got me hooked when Gopher was hot, and screw all the people who think it's dead. Get your filters on and there's still lots of intelligent converstation :). A wise man once said that the Internet's greatest resource is the people on it and Usenet is a great example! It's too bad there aren't more web interfaces being made that use NNTP (*cough* Malda, there's a awesome project to spend some VC buxxx on if you haven't already! I'd love to get the comments to the stories in a slashdot.todays.date.here format, trolls and all!)
Re:IPO Money? (Score:3)
More precisely, its a winner-take-all market. The leading ad-driven site stands to make piles of cash.
Its entirely possible that within a few years, a well-placed ad on a the leading ad-driven site will command superbowl-like fees.
Re:suprised? (Score:1)
Re:Now what? (Score:3)
Now C|Net's help.com is another story. That just pisses me off. They're making money (banners) off of people's niceness. If they want to make money by answering tech questions then hire some people to answer them! Don't leech off the newsgroups.
Why don't you guys use Newsguy? (Score:1)
Re:suprised? (Score:1)
Oh my. Surely you aren't suggesting that a web browser isn't the best way to do everything on the internet? The idea of people using the proper tool for the job must wake Mozilla developers in the middle of the night, screaming.
Re:suprised? (Score:2)
Of course, one coudl always revert to a standard news reader, get onto usenet, and forgo the middleman altogether, couldn't they???
The thing I use dejanews most for is its ability to do a search of all their carried newsgroups for terms I want and give me only the results I want. I dont' want to have to have the bandwidth required to do that on my own machine.
Are there any services (or newsreader software) which allow me to ask a server to search and give me the newsgroups and articles which contain the terms I asked for?
They couldn't get it right anyway.... (Score:1)
I didn't know they existed. I imagine not many others did either.
Strike 2:
Now that they have decided not to exist, they screw up the announcement:
"Dear Users,
On August 15th, Critical
Path will shutting down
the RemarQ.com web
site."
Read carefully, we see that while the announcement was short, it was also bad grammer.
=========
"If our products failed as often as Windows 95, we would have been out of business long ago," says Howard Selland, president of Aeroquip Corp., a Maumee, Ohio, automotive supplier.
Re:Watching ads is paying (Score:2)
Yeah, I know what you mean, I fall for TV advertising all the time but I've never bought anything because of internet banners. But that's because of the kinds of stuff being advertised. For starters, it's almost always online stuff or computer hardware etc. When was the last time you say a coke banner? Or a banner for pizza hut telling you their latest price? Or any advertising for the same sort of products that get advertised on TV? When big non-online companies get into internet advertising in a big way, there will be heaps more advertising money around.
Lots of people use usenet you goof... (Score:1)
Vermifax
Ahh, so you acted like a child and... (Score:1)
Vermifax
Open Source Usnet archive (Score:1)
Several months ago I saw that Deja.com [deja.com] was not providing an open access to Usenet and programmed a solution for it. My project is hosted at sourceforge. [sourceforge.net].
My girlfriend has started a company for it and we now try to keep this free service in operation. Our operational costs are $90/month and we need a few daily visitor to break even. The advertisement income would cover our hosting cost. The advertisements are not yet on-line, but will need to be soon.
In the spirit of Open Source the full Usenet archives can also be downloaded [usenet4free.com].
Check out the open source usenet archive. [usenet4free.com] If you would like to contribute source code to this Open SOurce project, or want to run your own deja.com-like server, please send me and e-mail.
Re:Death of Usenet-Film at 11:00 (Score:1)
UBB contributed to Remarq's fall? (Score:2)
Many major web sites with discussion boards use UBB for their discussion board inteface. UBB is pretty good because it does allow pretty tight moderation control over posters, and UBB allows for quotebacks and graphical smiley emoticons, which are more easily understandable than the ASCII-based "smileys."
Re:Watching ads is paying (Score:2)
Oh, don't worry about that.
First, large chains (Domino's, Pizza Hut, Papa John's) don't need to do much targeting.
Second, Doubleclick can target you geographically -- I recently noticed a banner ad advertising "AAA Michigan". Given that I live in Michigan...
Steven E. Ehrbar
Watching ads is paying (Score:2)
Re:Eternal Unsolved Question:Does Advertising Work (Score:3)
Then Coke took to sticking a text area directly on their cans, on every can. I've seen it used for special promotions (like 'win a trip to Disneyland') but 99.99% of the time it was the same advertising blurb- and a horrible one! Hopefully I will soon entirely forget this, but it went, "By now you've probably opened it already. The taste. The fizz. It's all there (bits of ad blurb already forgotten, thankfully deleted- culminating in) Coca-cola enjoy.
I could not get away from this freaking, drooling idiocy. It spoke to me every time I tried to drink Coca-cola- I'd lift the can and boom, there was the blurb, "By now you've probably opened it already. The taste! The fizz! It's ALL THERE..." I took to reciting it to friends with GREAT SERIOUSNESS, verbatim, to illustrate just how horrible the blurb was. And then, finally, fed up, I taught myself to like Mountain Dew, knowing it was another caffiene-rich soda beverage much smiled on by geek types- and ever since, I get both, the Mountain Dew in 24-packs.
They have ceased running the blurbs, but the damage was already done. I never wrote to Coca-cola and explained, "You guys are making me _embarrassed_ to hold a can of your product in public, and you are un-selling me from it". Seemingly someone did- how many other people went and started drinking Dew or Pepsi or jynnan tonix, however?
Advertising can be damned dangerous. If you annoy people badly enough you UN-SELL them from your product. And it really, really doesn't matter if people remember the name- if they remember it in order to never buy it again!
Re:what happened to generosity? (Score:2)
What if Remarq had a form where you could enter a credit card number and give a donation in whatever amount you deemed appropriate? Or how about Slashdot? Would you donate? Do you think an appreciable number of people would donate?
No?
Well, that's what happened to generosity.
Is Remarq really closing? (Score:3)
It's About Time! (Score:2)
Re:what happened to generosity? (Score:2)
At this time, if there is little point in throwing money into setting up an on-line presence because you aren't going to make profit for 10 years+ then you may as well establish a presence but make it all free. The setup costs are lower (no merchant accounts, secure servers etc.) and because you're not going to make money anyway.
There was also the greatest scam ever pulled over the public and website operators at this time - security companies were shouting about how unsecure the Internet was. It was just as secure to send your credit card details then with SSL as it is now with SSL. The only difference is that a few hundred million has been spent with the security companies.
If we now move forward to today, website operators are thinking that they should be seeing revenue covering their costs if not making profit within 2-3 years from startup. Customers are happier to send their credit card details over the Internet. The market has become more competitive and there is far more content people are prepared to pay to see these days. In short, the world has found the Internet an acceptable but new and original way of being able to satisfy their greed.
With regards to those amongst us who are winging about bandwidth charges and costs of servers, etc. all I have to say is that co-location is now so ridiculously cheap that if you're shifting more than your allocated bandwidth, the revenue you could generate from banner ads will actually cover your costs. Honestly. Yes, even on a 0.3% click-through rate.
Re:Watching ads is paying (Score:2)
Remember, TV is for free as well (apart from pay TV), I can watch the X-Files, movies and loads of other shit without paying. That's because advertisements pay for these things. Now TV advertisement is far more annoying than a banner since it takes away time i Could have spent watching a nice program.
Right now this Lutris ad is flashing at me at the top of this page, thanks to this article, I bothered reading it, it features the words Free, Wireless and Java. I'm sure they get more network traffic than if they hadn't run the ad. Surely they are not interested in every slashdot visitor (can you say slashdot effect!), but one out of a 1000 would already be pretty good.
Re:HOWTO: Prevent This From Happening (Score:2)
Actually, before I installed Ad Filter on my machine, some pages I regularly visit would take nearly five minutes to load, because the stupid ad server had to force the banner on me. And this was all on a T1 too. Waiting three seconds is no problem, waiting five minutes is.
"It gives them 1/10 of a cent, and might let them survive."
That's only if someone clicks on the banner ad in the first place.
"Is doubleclick really so horrible that you have to go out of your way to kill websites with your ad-filtering proxies and your mutated hosts files?"
Yes it is. When an advertiser subverts to trying to track me without me knowing, I get suspicious. Where I go online is none of Doubleclick's, or anyone's, concern. If one rotten apple in the class fucks it up, everyone has to suffer.
--
Er... (Score:2)
-legolas
i've looked at love from both sides now. from win and lose, and still somehow...
The Onion knows all (Score:3)
what happened to generosity? (Score:4)
IPO Money? (Score:4)
Really, all it means is that the web as matured to the point where you just can't throw something up, try to attract a bunch of eyeballs, and then try to figure out how to build a business model later.
Ad revenue based sites are always going to have trouble making it... look at Salon's problems recently (not that I can't think of anyone who doesn't deserve it more..) Look at the magazine industry.. Very high failure rate, pretty low profit margins.
suprised? (Score:5)
let me get this straight.
I'm going to give you a product or service. And, in return you dont have to give me anything. And later, everyone's gonna act all shocked when I don't make a profit and have to stop giving everything away?
You're wrong- "Free" is here to stay on the web (Score:4)
Sites that are ad-driven will always be free - to not be free would be instant suicide for an ad-driven site.
If sites are not using an ad model, then its wide open. Admittedly, these models have tended not be very fruitful, and it simply reinforces the strengths of those few sites who can be profitable on ad-based revenue.
I would have thought it was obvious that the market for ad-driven websites is obviously winner-take-all (AOL is not in this category - they are a subscription service). The portals are a clear indication - within five years, Yahoo outlasted its competition, who have all signed on with partners through acquisitions.
While over time the amount of choice on the web will drop, the leaders in ad-driven sites will always be free services.
what happened to generosity clicking? (Score:2)
Whenever I'm at a free site I believe is done well, I always turn off WebFree for a second and click the banners to do my bit of support. I even might buy something from some of their banner ads and give the sites I visited from them moderate attention, instead of just clicking-and-closing. If people knew how much the webmasters do just to keep the server running and free, they'd probably be more open to clicking and whatnot. But unfortunately they don't, and so the free stuff on the web doesn't survive. *sigh* now we can just buy all these services from corporate ameri-co =\
Re:HOWTO: Prevent This From Happening (Score:2)
I guess it follows JWZ's line of thinking, "Linux is only free if your time is worth nothing."
Me, personally, I just ignore the banner ads and let the companies earn their pittance. Why are some people so afraid of that?
- A.P.
--
"One World, one Web, one Program" - Microsoft promotional ad
Re:what happened to generosity? (Score:2)
I never went into it to make money, and despite the massive amount of ads on the site, I really don't. Hosting is very expensive, right, unless you're working with a stream of venture capital.
Death of Usenet-Film at 11:00 (Score:3)
I've been running usenet (or netnews) servers since 1987 and I'm thinking that usenet as it was is slowly going away. I remember back in the days were spam didn't have a name. before it was invaded by C&S and sciencultology. when sept was when all the newbies showed up. Them where the days
So if anyone needs a news peer that only will carry about 600 groups email me [mailto]
Harlan Ellison sues Remarq (Score:2)
The Boston Globe reports [boston.com] that fiction writer Harlan Ellison is suing Critical Path, owner of Remarq.com, for copyright infringement. Trial set to go to court next month.
Surely this has nothing to do with Remarq going off the air. But it does indicate the depths to which Usenet has fallen. I remember when Usenet used to be civil and productive, and it is a shame that it has become like CB radio.
According to the report, "in June, he [Ellison] won a judgment against Stephen Robertson of California, who admitted posting Ellison's stories online and agreed to pay Ellison's legal fees." Ellison, it says, uses a manual typewriter. Evidently he also has some strong ideas about art and technology.
Re:what happened to generosity? (Score:2)
-russ
Re:IPOs? (Score:2)
-russ
Not to be Ungrateful, but... (Score:5)
It's hard for me to make that last statement, since I'm very much in favor of Free Software, but there's a major difference between the big software companies and the big USENET services. Even the "big" USENET services are relatively small, and many have trouble staying afloat; RemarQ cut into an already lean profit margin for some providers, and the cost to the public of the important USENET news services shutting down is, dare I say, more grave than the cost of losing this free and limited RemarQ service.
Also, as I said, services like Remarq allowed people to get onto USENET without learning any of the basics involved, many such people never even realizing that they're not on the Web any more. While I'm a champion of ease-of-use, there comes a point when the ease-of-use of RemarQ does more harm than good. You end up with most of the free RemarQ users--not all, but most--not contributing to the newsgroups they're accessing, never bothering to read the FAQ because RemarQ does all the work for them, and littering them with "me, too"s the likes of which haven't been seen since the horrid AOL invasion of yore. Most of the senseless wastes of bandwidth I've seen on USENET recently, all the "me, too"s and clueless newbies who won't read the FAQ even after you tell them twice, have come from RemarQ.
The loss of RemarQ isn't even that bad, since great premium USENET access can be gotten for between $5.95 and $14.95 a month. Personally, even though the NNTP connection is limited to 33Kbps, I prefer Altopia's service: $12 a month, they have every single newsgroup, and a minimum of a four day retention for binaries (up to 8 days, depending) and longer for text (usually about 7). If you have a cable connection, and down/upload binaries, you can pretty much leave your connection on all the time to make up for the slow connection cap. They also offer 128kbps access, but at a hefty $48/month. One reason I support them so much is that Chris at Altopia seems to be big on freedom and very against censorship--Altopia has never dropped a group, for any reason, that I know of. As long as you're not uploading anything illegal (yeah, *you*, wArEZ d00dz and pedos!) Altopia doesn't care what you do, and is very conscious about not keeping records longer than necessary to prevent abuse. I like their privacy policy, it's absolutely the best. To be fair, I also hear good things about uncensored-news and usenetserver.
But that's just my 2 cents; support a free (as in -dom) USENET by subscribing to a good provider. Please, they need as much help as they can get to keep the news free and uncensored, unlike the Web.
Eternal Unsolved Question:Does Advertising Work? (Score:2)
Note that not all succesful companies heavily advertise - you'd be surprised. Ever see a Napster ad? Even coke from time to time will essentially stop or drastically reduce advertising and instead focus on packaging and product placement to increase sales (the former coke marketing guru was recently quoted as saying he essentially thought advertising was a huge waste of money and packaging was a far more impactful way to increase sales).
no wonder... (Score:2)
(from netcraft.co.uk)
www.remarq.com is running Microsoft-IIS/4.0 on NT4 or Windows 98
-http://MSD.dyndns.org
Remarq (Score:2)
At least dejanews still provides the service that they started out providing, it is easy to navigate or type in your fav newsgroup there.. and there are bunches.. like ones for your fav pda or newsgroups for your fav game, etc
-since when did 'MTV' stand for Real World Television instead of MUSIC television?
Not true. (Score:2)
- A.P.
--
"One World, one Web, one Program" - Microsoft promotional ad
Ahhh...memories! (Score:2)
Last time I read USENET was maybe a year ago. SPAM everywhere, little actual news in any of the newsgroups, flamefests, bunches of questions with no answers.
*sigh* sad to see it go that way...
Not too surprising... (Score:2)
Remarq is a good example -- nobody really uses USENET anymore, and the site's readership was probably decreasing rapidly. It's funny; we usually think of Internet companies as only growing, but some of the older ones are actually going to find their market share shrinking (Yahoo vs. Google, for example). Simply put, not every Internet service is one that's going to be successful with consumers. For every eBay or Amazon.com, there's a WebGrocer or Boo.com.
As the Internet continues to become more and more a part of mainstream culture, we'll -- surprise! -- see mainstream opinions dictate what appears on the Internet more and more. Look at the rise of corporate homepages and useless Shockwave animations as an example. Joe Sixpack may like to buy stuff on eBay and browse pr0n, but he could probably care less about a text-based discussion feature like Remarq -- which is used mostly by the so-called Internet "elite."
What's to do be done about this situation? Not much, really -- it's more of an inevitably than anything else. You can't have both "mainstream" status and economic freedom. In this case, the Internet is drifting towards the former, and that's not necessarily bad -- it's just a situation we'll have to get used to.