I'm not sure how the fact that Dennis Ritchie (the R in K&R, inventors of C) made a one-line response makes this the "Best Usenet post ever". I don't mean to be negative or anything, but let's not go overboard here.

This post is of mild interest and possibly a tiny little bit amusing to a small cross-section of geeks. It's hardly the "Best X ever".

Here's the entire original thread in case anyone might find the quote funnier in context, without the horrid highlighting:

http://groups.google.com.au/group/comp.std.c/browse_thread/t...

-> reddit.com/r/funny

why did the Usenet die?

Forums did a a large enough chunk of what usenet did, but with nicer interfaces and easier moderation. The value-add of usenet wasn't high enough, once message passing wasn't actually necessary for data transmission.

For certain values of 'nicer' anyway.

Well, usenet isn't really dead per se, though it's admittedly not what it once was. Some of us still use it, and some newsgroups still have nice communities to them and are still good sources of information. True, many groups are overrun with spam, and in my experience it seems to attract a disproportionate number of lunatics, but it's still got its good parts, and I think it's a shame that so many ISPs are dropping it as of late.

It's not dead. I asked a question about a freezer cartridge on a Commodore 64 newsgroup, and another question about a Star Trek episode, in the past 6 months.

Both replies were exactly what I wanted, and both questions were successfully answered with no spam.

Spam, & people too stupid and/or lazy to download dedicated clients.

Signal to noise ratio mostly.