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slightwinder
Oh, that's a fascinating wild post.
> Google ended up acquiring and eating Usenet, becoming Google Groups.
They did not acquire usenet, they acquired Dejanews, a big usenet-archive and gateway to the usenet. Usenet itself is made of decentraliced servers. Everyone can have one, most big providers and tech-companies had one in the early days. Each with their own groups. There also were public groups, maintained by some hive-mind-org or something.
Anyway, Usenet still exists, it's not dead, technically. But there is also not much alive either. File sharing on commercial servers seems to be very popular now, and the discusion-groups are receiving more spam than actual worthy content.
> Reddit fills some of this niche, but Usenet was tech-focused,
50:50 I'd say. There were many tech-groups. But pretty fast there were also an equal amount of non-tech-groups. And in terms of hyper-focus I would say, reddit has far more focus today than usenet ever delivered. It's more about finding a sub and filling it.
> generally quite professional and frankly didn't have the same clientele as Reddit does.
I get the impression your problem is more about the people, not the platform. Yes, usenet had more nerds and expert, more technical capable people. But usenet was also significant smaller, as was the whole internet at the time. You had some kind of natural selection, as internet generally, and usenet specifically only lured very specific people in. With special interests, from a special age and culture. Today it's different, you have anyone from anywhere making a space. I'd say those time are lost forever. At best you get some overhomogenized communities, like this hackernews here. But if you look at reddit, discord, or web-forums in general, you will still find hyper-focused spaces. Just not necessarily with the kind of people your chemistry matches with.
Majromax
> I get the impression your problem is more about the people, not the platform.
There's one structural difference: Usenet had no engagement metric but replies. Modern replacements measure and implicitly optimize for view counts (the lurker experience); both Reddit and Hacker News sort and surface posts based on a karma score/like count.
I think this difference led Usenet to implicitly optimize for high-effort posts. The stereotypical Reddit "in-joke" thread has no place on Usenet because the principal reward of karma is entirely missing. Instead, posters are implicitly rewarded with attention when their posts garner replies and discussion.
On one hand, this encourages real content and discussion over superficial "updoots to the left". On the other hand, it also encourages flamebait and high-effort trolling, which a vote-scoring system can silently suppress.
antiterra
> On one hand, this encourages real content and discussion over superficial "updoots to the left".
Yeah no, if you go back to the supposed USENET glory days you’ll find a sense of humor that, to be as charitable as possible, is incredibly cringey by today’s standards.
People smugly typing stuff like ‘Bahagaha ZAP LART!! plonk Welcome to my kill file, lamer!!!.’
Today you only really run into such bafflingly unfunny stuff in the Linux kernel mailing list— you know, supposedly hilarious things like ‘Come to the dark side, Sarah. We have cookies!’
(You may find a rare exception like a shaggy dog story about how a coin flip going differently would result in HP’s UNIX, HP-UX, being called PH-UX.)
not2b
Just as in modern Reddit, the culture was very different from group to group. Some were like that, others were much more polite.
dkresge
What I wouldn't do to be done with (some of) "today's standards".
ddingus
I still like plonk.
TMWNN
>The stereotypical Reddit "in-joke" thread has no place on Usenet because the principal reward of karma is entirely missing.
Nope. `rec.arts.sf.written` and `alt.folklore.urban` immediately come to mind as having extensive in-jokes. The phenomenon of replies to a post being almost incomprehensible to the uninitiated because they use/rely on the existing ecosystem of said in-jokes is as true for such newsgroups as it is for any subreddit. The only difference is that on Reddit said comments will be at the top of the tree, but the metastructure of their replies is otherwise the same.
jaydeflix
omg, what even moderately trafficked group didn't have in-jokes? Any community will get in-jokes as it ages. This isn't a feature of reddit vs usenet vs Bob's Web Forum Software v3, it's a feature of a community.
marcus0x62
Just because there wasn’t an explicit upvote/downvote mechanism, doesn’t mean people weren’t posting — sometimes extensively — for a kind of social cachet. Witness, for instance, Kibo [1]
1 - https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/James_Parry
edit can’t spel.
thrtythreeforty
Having never experienced high-effort trolling, I suppose I don't really know whether if it's better. My gut reaction is that I'd rather have high-effort trolling over low-effort trolling though.
btilly
Then you have no idea what it's like to realize that a well-known Usenet crank is a real person, lives in the same town that you do, is pissed off at you, and is honestly crazy.
This happened to me with Archimedes Plutonium back when he was Ludwig Von Plutonium. You can find him discussed in https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Usenet_personality. (Luckily for me, his brand of crazy didn't trend towards violence. Though I still regret later having introduced him to the p-adic numbers.)
There is probably more aggregate pain over time from something like a group of 4chan users coming up with Rickrolling then successfully making it a meme. But the pain that a high effort troll can cause is rather...special.
mid-kid
Reddit has plenty of flamebait for the sake of updoots.
res0nat0r
Eh I mean Eternal September has it's own wikipedia page for a reason, and Usenet stopped being strictly nerd/geek/math/science 30 years ago. The only thing it is useful for now is piracy, and everyone else has moved on to either Reddit, or hyper specific phpbb type forums, both of which just require digging to discover what you like.
ghaff
Usenet was probably still useful for some time after the Eternal September--especially if you mostly stayed out of the alt. hierarchy. But it definitely declined as access became more widespread.
int_19h
Stuff under comp.lang was still useful way into 00s. I remember a lot of productive discussions on comp.lang.c++.moderated circa 2008.
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davidwritesbugs
As other commenters have pointed out Usenet was a serious of collaborating servers each independently owned & run so there was nothign to 'acquire'. What happened, from memory, was that a sysop made a backup of his Usenet feed and Google got that tape. My GoogleFu is to weak to find a link to the story.
I ran the Newzbin Usenet search engine so it's a topic of some nostalgia for me.
hackinthebochs
So you're the one that killed usenet for filesharing. (Binaries being unfriendly to download probably kept the DMCA folks at bay. NZBs changed that.)
davidwritesbugs
THe MPA would have come for your groups at some point, regardless of NZBs. I don't know if we made it a more immediate problem or not, and in the meantime very many people found NZBs less of a pain.
mike_d
> What happened, from memory, was that a sysop made a backup of his Usenet feed and Google got that tape
Google bought Dejanews, a service that operated a usenet2web gateway. It became Google Groups.
http://googlepress.blogspot.com/2001/02/google-acquires-usen...
davidwritesbugs
THis was what I was thinking of.. https://www.salon.com/2002/01/08/saving_usenet/
throwaway892238
Thanks for Newzbin! NZBs were a revelation. I had to build a RAID array to keep all the crap I downloaded :)
s0l1dsnak3123
Thank you for Newzbin, I've used it many times over the years!
jtode
A pleasure to finally meet you lol
adrianmonk
> maintained by some hive-mind-org or something
I believe you may be thinking of the backbone cabal[1]. But maybe not, since it's secret and doesn't exist.
---
chasd00
i bet you could fit all the BGP experts in the world in a medium sized conference hall and half of them would be on a first name basis with each other. That's what i think of when i think of "backbone cabal".
mike_d
That actually happens. The few hundred people who keep the internet humming along all get together twice a year. (At least for North America, other groups exist in other regions)
300bps
I came from the BBS era before Usenet and I think that would be an interesting experiment in social networking today.
Allow regular people to set up a BBS that other people could connect to. Once there they can read/post on public message boards, they can send direct messages to other users on the same BBS, they can exchange files between them, they can play multiplayer online games with their friends, engage in group chat, etc.
A small percentage of people like running things like this. Right now they're probably starting up a Facebook group that has draconian content restrictions and extremely limited functionality. Make it easy for them to start a BBS - either on a SaaS platform or literally hosted on their own device, they might just switch to it.
Maursault
> I came from the BBS era before Usenet
Unless you were dialing up to CBBS between 1978-1980, i.e. the only BBS in the world at the time, then USENET predates your BBS era, which I would assume like most is really somewhere between 1984-1994, even if BBS existed prior to then and after then.
matt_heimer
In practice I think access to BBS systems came before Usenet for many of us. I didn't have Usenet access until I had internet access (through a BBS). And I didn't have a good nntp server until I had a dedicated ISP many years after accessing dialup, non-internet BBS systems.
I remember reporting a PINE newsgroup thread bug at the height of my nntp usage and several of the local BBS systems had started dying off by then.
GekkePrutser
That's true but the BBSes were available to anyone with the money for a computer, modem and the phone bill. Usenet and the internet was reserved for the chosen few.
So in that sense BBSes would predate Usenet for most people.
I got Usenet access before I got full internet (even dialup) in fact but it was much later, in the mid 90s, using a really expensive UUCP account.
elzbardico
For most people outside universities, BBSes came first for all practical purposes.
cecilpl2
> Allow regular people to set up a BBS that other people could connect to. Once there they can read/post on public message boards, they can send direct messages to other users on the same BBS, they can exchange files between them, they can play multiplayer online games with their friends, engage in group chat, etc.
So, Discord?
kahnclusions
Discord is centralised, proprietary and all owned and controlled by one company.
jtode
Hey there, former sysop here, both on a C64 in the late 80s and a PC in the early 90s. I've been tossing around the idea of starting another one that you ssh to, and make it available as a docker image. Would anyone show up? Maybe if I make a web interface...
I have left all social media - this site is the only social thing I do now - and this whole thread is giving me all kinds of sad feels.
thesuitonym
> Allow regular people to set up a BBS that other people could connect to.
What do you mean "allow"? Unless you have a ridiculous ISP, you're allowed to host just about anything. I seriously doubt any ISPs are blocking NNTP, UUCP, or SSH.
shon
commandlinefan
That's not really a BBS, though... a BBS was something you dialed a phone into. I don't think that in the modern era of ubiquitous cell phones, that you really could set up an actual BBS.
not2b
The old Usenet had social groups and discussion groups for almost every interest you could think of. New groups were created multiple times per week, and when the backbone maintainers tried to rein that in, the alt hierarchy was created and vastly more groups were created. But most of the non-tech groups were not archived so that discussion is gone. Arguably fortunately: we were young and stupid and posted embarrassing stuff using our real names and affiliations.
ArtWomb
Rhizome has painstakingly documented its forensic archival of The Thing BBS
It's a testament to how de-centralized and randomly those archives were served. And the death of dial-up async long manifesto culture. Any greenfield cloud based approach can scale users, but not that culture of usenet binary harvest tools, irc #warez clubs and constrained bandwidth netiquette ;)
commandlinefan
> Everyone can have one, most big providers and tech-companies had one in the early days
In the late 90's, when the web started to dominate the internet, I was hoping for an NNTP overhaul that would allow most people to host mini-NNTP servers for true decentralization. Freenet and I2P seem to be sorts of stabs at the idea, but never really caught on, unfortunately. I'd love to see a truly worldwide Usenet.
squarefoot
> an NNTP overhaul that would allow most people to host mini-NNTP servers for true decentralization
That would be quite an idea: extended NNTP over P2P, but doesn't Mastodon do sort of a similar thing today?
sponaugle
The question is - What are you missing? I suspect you probably miss something that has more to do with the participants.
In the early days of Usenet there were very few ways to access it from the perspective of an average person. You either had to be working on one of the small number of companies that were internet connected or were at a university. That significantly restricted the available pool of people using it, and also filtered that pool.
Up through the early 90s that natural filter mechanism kept the focus of individual groups small, reduced noise, and increased signal. Over time as internet access became more widespread that signal to noise decreased, and most modern forums still have difficulty with it.
There are a few other interesting characteristics - the specific nature of the tree approach and the availability of lots of specific groups gave it some uniqueness - Today you might see a bit of that in Reddit subs, Facebook groups, and other similar platforms, albeit lacking the tree.
InefficientRed
Piggy-backing off of this post: the answer is to get off the high-trafficked parts of the public internet. Examples:
1. Meatspace user groups / interest groups.
2. University lecture series (the type of weekly seminar that all graduate students and faculty in a given research area attend). You can usually attend as a member of the public if you have an "in".
3. Mailing lists and discord servers for specific projects.
vorpalhex
"Moving Castles" was the terminology I heard someone propose[0].
Unfortunately they got too caught up in the crypto nonsense but the idea was sound - good communities have to be guarded and they occasionally "lower the drawbridge" to bring on newcomers, potentially with semi-public spaces. This could be a minecraft server, a facebook group or what have you.
Since the group is motile, they aren't affected by platforms being subpar. They can avoid stagnation by bringing in newcomers, but have a way to vet incoming people too before allowing them "internal" access.
sillyquiet
Yeah exactly. Usenet wasn't what it was because of the technology, it was because the participants were mostly there to have 'professional' conversations, and the kinds of conversations that nerdy techie-minded people have over beers after work (wesley.crusher.die.die.die, etc).
sbf501
As another Member of the Society to Reduce Wesley into a Little Styrofoam Dodecahedron, I can certainly attest that usenet wasn't as gleamingly professional as we remember. The original stereotypes of discussion group users (trolls, white knights, etc.) came from usenet.
chasd00
don't forget porn, there was a tremendous amount of porn on usenet. a friend of mine had some perl script he called "aub" that scraped alt.user.binaries or something like that. catalogs and catalogs of stuff on a quiet little server in a university lab.
xtracto
Not OP but the thing I miss the most from Usenet and IRC is the fact that they were client agnostic. I hate the discord client. I hate the reddit client and the facebook. I'd love to be able to have an open source desktop based client that I can modify and implement all sorts of plugins for it. I hate that we moved from services/protocols to closed vertical monolith.
boomboomsubban
I'm guessing they have limited functionality, but Pidgin is free software and has both discord and Facebook plugins. They've certainly made it difficult for the free software clients, but people continue trying to maintain this ideal.
jandrese
The thing I miss most was having one single newsreader interface that I could configure as I liked. With web forums everybody has their own idea of how things should work and I end up having to remember a dozen different flavors of "markdown" and ways of filtering users or threading posts. The Usenet had issues, chiefly the lack of a good way to moderate channels, but I wish we had gone with an open data model instead of the countless walled gardens that sprang up in its place.
sponaugle
Yea, that is something I too can appreciate. The simplicity of having a single place where I can read about a wide arrangement of hobbies, interests, and professions.
yjftsjthsd-h
Maybe matrix and/or mastodon?
jandrese
I thought Matrix was more of an IRC replacement than a new Usenet. Mastadon always seemed to want to be Twitter.
bartread
You mention the filter effect: I think what really killed Usenet, at least for me, was spam, much of which was automated, with no great mechanism in place to combat it.
zozbot234
These days you could fight spam simply by adding a proof-of-work requirement for posting content to the network. Isn't that exactly what this Web3/Blockchain fad is all about anyway?
v64
This was in fact one of the earliest use cases of proof-of-work from the 90s [1].
pitched
This is a really interesting use-case. I don’t think posting spam is really a zero-cost thing though. So we wouldn’t be adding a cost, we would be increasing it. So I guess the big question is, how much can we charge per post that spammers couldn’t afford but wouldn’t scare away actual community members?
simcop2387
That's been attempted for email too, not sure how far it ever went. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hashcash
saba2008
>These days
HashCash is older than Bitcoin, and Bitcoin sybil-attack protection is basically HashCash.
beezle
From late 1990 until around 1997 I had a full feed via UUNET and ran cnews locally on my pc with cnews and trn for reading. It wasn't long before I had to scale back and drop all the binary groups and eventually others. IIRC a full feed when I started was about 3MB a day (still tough to do at 12/2400 bps)
Maursault
I had a Usenet portal subscription between 2005-2008. I ran Thoth (usenet client) on Ubuntu on old Mac G4 towers. At the time, the connection speed blew away torrents.
MacsHeadroom
It still does. I download 30GB 4k movies in a minute or so, consistently, from Usenet.
IoTelectronic
I missed torrentZ, do you know how should I search torrents again?
commandlinefan
> What are you missing?
Early Usenet was like Reddit, without the corporate (and come on, blatantly left-leaning) censorship.
kahnclusions
Try posting on any of the right leaning subreddits, they are heavily censored and non-conforming people are frequently banned.
I’d encourage you to post a scientific or academic survey of Reddit’s political censorship. I think it’s common that everyone believes their own ideology gets censored when it’s probably not the case overall.
the_biot
> If I remember my computing history correctly, Google ended up acquiring and eating Usenet, becoming Google Groups.
Usenet was a distributed set of news peering relationships, exchanging posts via NNTP. There was nothing to acquire, so that's not what happened.
Google merely set up a web interface to it, which was eventually extended to the abomination that was Google Groups. This was intended to be some sort of mix of Usenet group and mailing list, all via a web interface. In reality it was awful and I suspect development on it stopped 10+ years ago.
mh-
Google acquired DejaNews, which was a popular web interface for reading Usenet. They rebranded it into Groups at some point.
But what is called Groups now is something else entirely, as you said.
easrng
Google Groups still has usenet support, I used it the other day trying to track down the source of an old story.
derefr
> The abomination that was Google Groups
FYI, Google Groups are literally the “groups” of Google Workspace — every time you create a group of users to e.g. assign that group some GCP roles, that group then also gets an email address (that being the group’s global primary key), and that email address then implicitly becomes a mailing list all group members are subscribed to.
It’s actually very useful in a corporate Google Workspace context — it’s rare to need an actual mailing list given Slack et al, but they’re effectively “group email-forwarding aliases”, allowing messages to e.g. devops-billing@example.com to arrive in the inboxes of multiple people.
arccy
the fact that it's a mailing list is so much better than a plain forwarding alias: it's a searchable/shareable archive for people who joined later. No more asking a coworker to dig through their emails for some important information
jghn
Dejanews built that frontend on top of an archive they had. Google bought Dejanews and thus the archive.
iso1631
Google really destroyed that archive, there's posts from the 80s and 90s I know used to be in deja and in early google that just can't be found any more.
quokka
Agreed. I posted a lot in the 90s, especially to groups like sci.math and rec.arts.books.tolkien, and there is almost no trace of any of it in Google groups.
When Google bought the Dejanews archives I thought it was good, because Google was good at search and I naively still believed that the company actually wanted to make all information accessible. It's a real shame that all of the old Usenet stuff is gone.
btrettel
And it seems that a lot of uuencoded content was removed at some point. You can see the text of the message, but the uuencoded part is mostly cut out. Here's an example: https://groups.google.com/g/misc.int-property/c/f2-dV5wVP9U/...
If anyone here knows how to get the uuencoded part of that message, I'd be interested.
squarefoot
The final nail in Usenet's coffin was the removal of the discussion filter from Google searches in 2014. Before that, people could use that filter to easily find others talking about something, but apparently that didn't please advertisers who wanted users to find only companies selling that something, so Google removed that filter and problem solved.
https://www.seroundtable.com/google-discussion-search-dead-1...
https://browsermedia.agency/blog/google-kills-discussion-sea...
jghn
To be honest a lot of what I posted back then I'm happy has been lost to the sands of time.
I will say one thing I've found strange is how spotty old posts are. Even within the same newsgroup. I can easily track down old posts of mine but sometimes stuff is spotty within a single thread. I've not seen any true rhyme or reason to what's gone and what remains.
fweimer
The gateway between Google Groups and certain newsgroups is still running, in both directions. For example, I received a copy of this Groups posting https://groups.google.com/g/de.soc.recht.steuern+buchfuehrun... over regular Usenet NNTP.
The technology is still up and running. Some of the people from the 90s are still there. But Usenet definitely has peaked in terms of users and postings.
Angostura
> Arguably, Reddit fills some of this niche, but Usenet was tech-focused, generally quite professional and frankly didn't have the same clientele as Reddit does
I see you didn't hang out in alt.wesley.crusher.die.die.die much
AtlasBarfed
Didn't alt.barney.die.die.die.die have more dies? I don't remember exactly
Usenet was a cost to ISPs unfortunately. But, it wasn't centrally controlled or moderated either. It also was minimally technical to use, which served as a good filter.
But I guess reddit's subreddits may be the best alternative with viewership and specific groups/areas.
You know... it should be possible with tagging to take something like twitter reddit, and generate "views" that are groups. Maybe make some spec with three letters, maybe R and an S, and heck another S for the hell of it.
Balkanization and content gardens/API walls block integration of like minded content.
deltarholamda
The cost to ISPs was mostly in the binaries groups, and some usenet servers were set up as a paid service for this purpose when ISPs started dropping the binaries groups.
I don't blame the ISPs for this. At the time, you could be an ISP with what is essentially a low-end home Internet connection now, but it cost thousands per month.
What started the downfall of Usenet was Eternal September when AOL let their hoi polloi access the Big Boy Internet. The "Me-tooer" phenomenon was particularly irritating.
jrnichols
> What started the downfall of Usenet was Eternal September
that, and the unfortunate but probably not unexpected flood of actual child abuse photos. this became a huge problem real fast. an ISP I worked for back in that day dropped NNTP like a hot potato when the company lawyers caught wind of the potential legal issues.
amysox
You're thinking of the ".word.word.word" convention for newsgroup names. The last word would be repeated three times. The prototype for this was "alt.swedish.chef.bork.bork.bork," though "alt.wesley.crusher.die.die.die" (and the related "alt.ensign.wesley.die.die.die") came soon thereafter.
The name of the group you're thinking of was probably something like "alt.dinosaurs.barney.die.die.die."
armitron
Reddit is not an alternative as it is heavily censored (same as HN really) and centralized. Usenet still exists and discussions still take place there. Being a decentralized protocol, censoring (or scoring, killfiling) someone is left up to you.
And this is the major advantage of Usenet. You can’t be silenced by a mob, which leads to freedom of expression and disparate views. Sure there is spam and flames, but one gets all the tools one needs to deal with that. There is no committee deciding what posts should be kept or deleted. We are a lot worse off today than we used to be, largely because of the centralization of discourse.
Supermancho
> Sure there is spam and flames, but one gets all the tools one needs to deal with that.
Asking the user to implement measures and keep them up-to-date is detrimental to adoption from users that are aware of curated sources. Pretending this is net-neutral is misleading.
> We are a lot worse off today than we used to be, largely because of the centralization of discourse.
Usenet was centralized in practice, so I think you mean something else. It's not clear how much the curation of content stifles discourse when creating new forums is essentially free. Either way, I would tend to disagree that curated is worse. Everyone curates to some degree, even when they are free and open discussions.
cbm-vic-20
Usenet was not driven by advertising, so it wasn't constantly pushing "click bait" and other unsolicited nefarious content onto its users. You could spew all the dumb misinformation you wanted to in your newsgroup, and it wouldn't leak into the more sane newsgroups (unless someone crossposted).
lambic
Or anything in the alt or rec hierarchies really.
revscat
alt.religion.scientology is where many of the secrets around Xenu, etc., were originally leaked.
Not all of the alt.* hierarchy was vapid.
lambic
Yep, alt.religion.scientology, alt.tv.northern-exp, and news.admin.net-abuse.email were my main hangouts.
kwoff
My first thought when seeing "tech-focused" was "let's see, I hung out in alt.atheism... wait, that's like /r/atheism?" (I see there's also an /r/nonsequitur/, kinda like alt.non.sequitur though the reddit version seems a more....attached to reality.)
beezle
rec.music.gdead was one of the most active usenet groups. IIRC rec.arts.books.sf-lovers was also a very popular group. I'm a bit nebulous on whether it originated from the mailing list or the other way around
There were also quite a few "for sale" type groups, I remember when the group for computer equipment was split into about five subgroups after it got too big.
Just editing to add - there were also a lot of regional groups, one of the earliest and probably biggest was ba.* There were also state/country level top levels and a few colleges had their own too
SeanLuke
This is a strangely rose-tinted view of Usenet. Usenet was a mess well before Eternal September. You can't talk about Usenet without talking about alt.*
After alt.* was inagurated, the very first group was (IIRC) alt.swedish.chef.bork.bork.bork. Then there were alt.destroy.the.earth and alt.pave.the.earth, which were bitter enemies despite their opposition to alt.save.the.earth, because if you destroyed the earth there'd be nothing left to pave. Alt was also the home of the Big Seven sex groups, plus piracy in the alt.binaries groups. The talk.* groups had problems as well. Oh, and then there was alt.2600, which purposely had a moderator who rejected any and all postings: you had to hack USENET and assume moderator privileges to post there.
I think easily the closest thing we have nowadays to USENET is reddit. And, to be honest, if you average over its entire audience, it's more tame than USENET was.
svachalek
Yep, having been around for Usenet I don't find Reddit all that different. The main difference is the moderators I guess. But for all the stodgy work related groups on Usenet it was the alt.* groups that caught fire. Reddit is much the same, there are subs for all kinds of serious moderated technical discussion still. Those aren't the popular parts but they weren't popular on Usenet either.
u801e
Unless you've received an award, have a gold subscription, or have moderation privileges, finding new comments in a thread is not easy. In a news reader, it's trivial.
ornornor
old.Reddit.com along with RES and only having handpicked subreddits on your front page (ie none of the default dumpster fire ones) makes Reddit halfway decent.
seti0Cha
I think the difference is, back in usenet times the weirdos were also technical professionals. There wasn't the same need to be concerned for professional reputation so you'd get things like diatribes for fringe political beliefs strewn in among deep technical discussions. I used to lurk in alt.fan.warlord and watch Bram Moolenaar make fun of people's ascii pic signatures. It was a mess, but a technically informed mess, which somehow made it more interesting.
jandrese
> Oh, and then there was alt.2600, which purposely had a moderator who rejected any and all postings: you had to hack USENET and assume moderator privileges to post there.
This is the kind of internet we lost when it went all corporate.
throwaway892238
Defacing websites with crude messages and garish colors was the internet's graffiti. Ascii and Demoscene was its street art. Zines and hacker radio were the warehouse art shows. We have all these documentaries about punk music, but so few about punk computing.
not2b
You do not recall correctly, not even close.
See https://www.livinginternet.com/u/ui_alt.htm
(and I knew Brian Reid and John Gilmore in those days).
goatcode
>[redd]it's more tame than USENET was
Of course it is, it's beholden to advertisers. Chairman Pao saw to its taming, right before getting canned.
NoGravitas
Don't forget alt.chrome.the.moon and alt.sexy.french.captain.borg.borg.borg!
kazinator
> Google ended up acquiring and eating Usenet, becoming Google Groups.
That is false and nonsensical. Usenet is a federated network of NNTP servers; Google just joined that with their own implementation having an awful web front end, which they proceeded to revise in even worse directions. That happened right in the middle of a decline that was happening, driven by ISPs shutting down their NNTP servers. So it might have looked like Usenet is somehow transitioning to Google. Google did also acquire a Usenet archive, and then make it impossible to use.
Anhyway, Usenet is alive and (sort of) well. There are new posts daily in newsgroups like comp.unix.programmer, comp.lang.c. Even comp.lang.lisp sees some action.
See you there!
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Hey look, comp.lang.awk has a new post, from the somewhat kooky, but topical, KPop 2GM
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I'm currently using the news.eternal-september.org NNTP server.
Note: there is spam, but not nearly as much as you see through the Google Groups interface, and that's the interface that offers no filtering features.
You need a newsreader with killfile processing. I use the terminal-based slrn (S-Lang Read News). It has a score feature for assigning scores to articles based on matches on arbitrary fields. If you give something a -9999 score, it disappears. The fields have a lot of information. You can kill based on what server someone is coming from, or what client they are supposedly using, if you want.
thesuitonym
Usenet is still there, I download TV shows from it all the time. The discussion forums are still there, too, but are completely overridden with spam. Most of the public unix [0][1][2] servers have a Usenet server that federates with some other tilde servers, though not the wider usenet. I stumbled across a group called ALTEXXANET [3] that claims to have one, though I've not checked to see if it's still there.
What were some of the newsgroups you were interested in? When and why did you stop checking them?
[0] http://sdf.org/ [1] https://tildeverse.org/ [2] https://tilde.club/wiki/usenet-news.html [3] http://www.altexxanet.org/usenet.html
NoGravitas
I use a feed with no binaries groups, which is how I like it. Most groups aren't exactly overrun with spam, they're just not very active. One or two spam messages a day looks like a lot when actual users are only posting one or two messages a week. But if a group is active (like comp.sys.raspberry-pi), you hardly notice the spam.
jdc0589
A friend was still using it for tv/movie download a couple years ago too
PaulHoule
I think people overlook web forums. I would point to
https://www.dpreview.com/forums
and
as good examples. There are a lot of dead forums out there, but there are also ones where the administrators make the effort to greet new users and make them feel welcome. For instance that last forum covers a fraught issue where emotions run pretty high but the administrators do a good job of "onboarding" new users.
WR7wh5Un
This is true. I have tried to maintain the same type of "great people" in my forum. It's a lot of hard work and it's been costly to maintain over the years. It is also admittedly very limited in focus.
bluedino
My favorite part of usenet was the FAQ's. I didn't have internet access at the time but I downloaded the comp.lang.c faq along with 3d graphics programming faq from a local BBS. Tons of fun reading!
http://www.faqs.org/faqs/C-faq/faq/
The worst part about Facebook groups, Reddit, and even most forums is the same questions being repeated over and over. You can do sticky threads and links on subreddits (not really sure how you would do it on Facebook) but it's not often done.
pupppet
… [166/256] GIANT FILE… [167/256] GIANT FILE… [169/256] GIANT FILE… …
Kids today will never know the pain.
jandrese
That's what parity data was for. There were even clients that would seek out all of the binaries that had enough parts for a full download and do all of the work for you.
That said, alt.binaries was a big reason that ISPs started dropping Usenet. The other being the ever decreasing signal to noise ratio as the entire system proved to be vulnerable to spam and trolls. Yet another example of why moderation is a necessary evil if you want to scale up a discussion group.
jhallenworld
"GIANT FILE" == porn...
How many of us attempted to automate this process :-)
genpfault
Isn't that what parchive[1] and/or RAR recovery volumes were for?
spc476
The solution to that was a perl script called (I think) aub (Assemble USENET binaries). I remember back in the 90s, some friends and I in college would run that as a cron job to accumulate files over time. This was long enough ago that the version we ran was Perl 4.
chasd00
This is interesting, i know that same script. I thought a buddy of mine out of Arlington TX wrote it around '96 or '97. I didn't know it existed outside of our autonomous vehicle systems lab. We used it to accumulate and categorize certain pictures.
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tzs
I'm disappointed that NNTP servers and clients didn't get wider use outside of Usenet.
Most public forums back in the day would have been vastly improved if they had been done as an NNTP server with each sub-forum as a newsgroup rather than doing them with something like phpBBB on an HTTP server.
Heck, most forums today would have better threading and post organization with NNTP than they do with the popular web forum systems.
Same goes for non-chat communication within companies. Newsgroups on an internal NNTP server would be better in most ways than mailing lists for topics in which people actually need to discuss things as a group.
Sohcahtoa82
> Heck, most forums today would have better threading and post organization with NNTP than they do with the popular web forum systems.
I beg to differ.
NNTP's lack of moderation is a bug, not a feature. Between the spam and abuse, NNTP would be an utter cesspool in today's world.
commandlinefan
> NNTP would be an utter cesspool
I've seen Usenet, and I've seen Reddit. I'll take Usenet.
Sohcahtoa82
Whatever platform gets popular is bound to become a cesspit.
If Usenet was as popular as Reddit, you would hate Usenet just as much.
Aeolun
You can only take Usenet because Reddit exists. If it didn’t Usenet would be more of a cesspool than it already is.
tzs
NNTP can be moderated.
agiacalone
Gibson Research (GRC) still runs an active news server, I believe.
nntp://news.grc.com
I also worked for a place in the early 2000s which used an NNTP server internally (large corp) for company communication and discussion.
jbn
using NNTP internally was something I always thought would be a great idea: all public discussion (i.e. public to all inside the company, as opposed to siloed conversations in emails or Slack/Teams) and a repository for knowledge transfer (whereas wikis and such are always out of date and usually do not record the arguments that led to a decision)... unfortunately I never saw it used that way at any place I worked at (lucky you).
iso1631
Back in the late 90s I had some forum software which would sync with NNTP, either posting from the forum into NNTP and vice versa.
I ran it, and linked it to a new group. Nobody ever posted in usenet, and I suspect nobody read in there.
billyjobob
https://getaether.net/ is an attempt at a modern usenet, i.e. decentralised discussion. However it doesn’t have many users or third party clients.
https://xn--gckvb8fzb.com/superhighway84/ is a more directly nostalgia inspired clone of usenet.
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Much as the title says, I really miss the Usenet days where I could contribute to a bulletin board-style forum on hyper-specific subjects.
If I remember my computing history correctly, Google ended up acquiring and eating Usenet, becoming Google Groups. I'm not sure if this is dead yet.
Arguably, Reddit fills some of this niche, but Usenet was tech-focused, generally quite professional and frankly didn't have the same clientele as Reddit does.
HN is topic-focused, rather than subject-focused.
Would be very interested to see if there's any Usenet-style project that's still alive.