Usenet – A worldwide distributed discussion system(en.wikipedia.org)
en.wikipedia.org
Usenet – A worldwide distributed discussion system
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Usenet
87 comments
The root problem has never been addressed:
How do we manage identity and reputation on the internet?
Usenet had no answer and so it withered. Facebook and Twitter are throwing large amounts of cash at the problem and enjoying moderate (but far from ideal) success. What we need is a real, decentralized solution. I'm not sure how that will be achieved, though I suspect the crypto folks have a lot of ideas. I would like to see a demonstration of one that is simple for ordinary users and that works well at scale.
How do we manage identity and reputation on the internet?
Usenet had no answer and so it withered. Facebook and Twitter are throwing large amounts of cash at the problem and enjoying moderate (but far from ideal) success. What we need is a real, decentralized solution. I'm not sure how that will be achieved, though I suspect the crypto folks have a lot of ideas. I would like to see a demonstration of one that is simple for ordinary users and that works well at scale.
I don’t think that’s what killed Usenet. What killed it was UI. It took substantial effort to get set up so you could participate. It really thrived in the era of multi-user systems where a professional could handle that for you. Once direct connections from PCs became the norm, most people couldn’t be bothered.
It could have been saved with a good web interface, but almost everybody working on web-based messaging preferred to create their own platform instead, probably because it’s a lot more fun and profitable to build your own community than it is to build a portal to one that’s already there.
As always, but even more than usual, this is just my opinion and I could be wrong.
It could have been saved with a good web interface, but almost everybody working on web-based messaging preferred to create their own platform instead, probably because it’s a lot more fun and profitable to build your own community than it is to build a portal to one that’s already there.
As always, but even more than usual, this is just my opinion and I could be wrong.
"I don’t think that’s what killed Usenet. What killed it was UI."
Nah. It wasn't the UI. It was developers and corporations chasing the new shiny, which was the web.
Any UI could have been built on top of Usenet, but instead everyone jumped ship and on to the web bandwagon.
Usenet also had a big spam problem, but one which was not insurmountable, as Gmail and other web mail providers have proven. Modern anti-spam solutions could just as easily be applied to Usenet to keep it as spam-free as most web mail is today.
Of course, now there is the lack of historical knowledge, as another poster alluded to elsewhere in the thread, but there's also a contempt for the average user, and a widespread belief that UI's have to be dumbed down for the average user. Web UIs could be just as powerful as Usenet was, but corporations such as Google, Reddit, and Facebook choose to cater to the lowest common denominator rather than to power users.
Also, unlike Usenet, with these corporate walled gardens, alternate UI's for them are rare. At least Reddit has an API, so at least there there's a potential for some powerful alternative UIs built around it, but the ones that I know of are still a pale shadow of Usenet clients from 30 years ago.
Nah. It wasn't the UI. It was developers and corporations chasing the new shiny, which was the web.
Any UI could have been built on top of Usenet, but instead everyone jumped ship and on to the web bandwagon.
Usenet also had a big spam problem, but one which was not insurmountable, as Gmail and other web mail providers have proven. Modern anti-spam solutions could just as easily be applied to Usenet to keep it as spam-free as most web mail is today.
Of course, now there is the lack of historical knowledge, as another poster alluded to elsewhere in the thread, but there's also a contempt for the average user, and a widespread belief that UI's have to be dumbed down for the average user. Web UIs could be just as powerful as Usenet was, but corporations such as Google, Reddit, and Facebook choose to cater to the lowest common denominator rather than to power users.
Also, unlike Usenet, with these corporate walled gardens, alternate UI's for them are rare. At least Reddit has an API, so at least there there's a potential for some powerful alternative UIs built around it, but the ones that I know of are still a pale shadow of Usenet clients from 30 years ago.
Usenet was already dead by the time "corporations" like Facebook and Twitter came on the scene.
What killed it was UBB/vBulletin/phpBB web forums. People who ran blogs with some traffic installed them for their community, it was easy for people to just click in and get started, and then you ended up with huge communities like gamefaqs and Something Awful (and car forums, collector's forums, etc etc). These then generated lots of content, which showed up in web search results.
Then web forums in turn got killed by social media (twitter/tumblr/facebook) and reddit and withdrew to a niche.
What killed it was UBB/vBulletin/phpBB web forums. People who ran blogs with some traffic installed them for their community, it was easy for people to just click in and get started, and then you ended up with huge communities like gamefaqs and Something Awful (and car forums, collector's forums, etc etc). These then generated lots of content, which showed up in web search results.
Then web forums in turn got killed by social media (twitter/tumblr/facebook) and reddit and withdrew to a niche.
something i've never been quite clear on: were web forums killed, or merely eclipsed? social media brought many more people online; the demographics changed, by orders of magnitude. certainly the old stalwarts you mentioned have dwindled (though are still active), but while doing searches i will still run into active webforums on speciality topics; perhaps ironically i feel these are more likely for non-tech topics
I ran the kind of mid-sized forum that catered to an active community of posters and a casual community that showed up for topic-related content (i.e. from search engines). But because most of what we were sharing was either links to news elsewhere, or shitposts, there was no reason to keep using the forum once Twitter went mainstream. I think this was probably the case for many similar communities. If you are utterly massive, your forum is probably still alive.
I agree that forums aren't "dead" - there's tones of very active forums in all kinds of niches. I meant more in the way that they're no longer where the largest growth is.
Netscape Communicator included a newsgroup interface that was just as usable as email. I don't know if that has survived into modern Thunderbird.
It has indeed. I can read all the Usenet I want in my Thunderbird.
Provided, of course, that I have a provider, and can find something still worth subscribing to.
Provided, of course, that I have a provider, and can find something still worth subscribing to.
There are a number of free providers out there. eternal-september.org is one that provides access to the text only newsgroups.
> Once direct connections from PCs became the norm, most people couldn’t be bothered.
I started participating in groups on usenet in the late '90s. There were a substantial number of posters in the groups I lurked in or participated in.
> It could have been saved with a good web interface
From the mid '90s through the late 2000s, most people that I knew didn't look for a web application for everything they wanted to do online. They used various applications like mail and news readers, IRC clients, FTP applications, etc. In other words, they looked for desktop applications. Web applications weren't really a thing at the time.
I started participating in groups on usenet in the late '90s. There were a substantial number of posters in the groups I lurked in or participated in.
> It could have been saved with a good web interface
From the mid '90s through the late 2000s, most people that I knew didn't look for a web application for everything they wanted to do online. They used various applications like mail and news readers, IRC clients, FTP applications, etc. In other words, they looked for desktop applications. Web applications weren't really a thing at the time.
MT-Newswatcher has a far more usable interface than google groups, Reddit etc. Eudora ruled Mac email for a long time.
Important at the time was that reading news occured from a local NNTP cache, and hence was fast (still 56k last mile). WAN internet was often slow, and browser UIs sucked. If you had a Unix box at home you could even cache overnight or during the day when no one was using the phone line, and your replies queued for when you went online.
NN was arguably the first 'groupware', we had patches from CVS going to news (& email gateway), build and test reports, threaded discussions, etc. Fast searching of the entire archive. Way more useful than Slack. Skype Business is barely better than ytalk + fingerd.
It seems we've barely moved in functionality since then.
Important at the time was that reading news occured from a local NNTP cache, and hence was fast (still 56k last mile). WAN internet was often slow, and browser UIs sucked. If you had a Unix box at home you could even cache overnight or during the day when no one was using the phone line, and your replies queued for when you went online.
NN was arguably the first 'groupware', we had patches from CVS going to news (& email gateway), build and test reports, threaded discussions, etc. Fast searching of the entire archive. Way more useful than Slack. Skype Business is barely better than ytalk + fingerd.
It seems we've barely moved in functionality since then.
Web forums were around and huge by the late 90s. I don’t think people really consider those to be “web applications.” In any case, being able to click a link and get started with no friction is a big advantage.
The setup effort was no more than setting up WhatsApp today. You downloaded a client and chose a few groups to participate in. Some browsers even had clients built in.
You could use Usenet from the web, Dejanews has been around just about forever.
Usenet died with Eternal September! RIP
The root problem was abusive posts, spam and bandwidth use (for binaries). These are still problems today, even with centralized identity and reputation management.
Incidentally, PGP/GPG use was surprisingly high on Usenet (nowhere near ubiquitous) back then. Many newsreaders supported it was pretty common to see signed messages and the corresponding geek code block. It did little other than help resolve arguments about spoofed messages... and as a badge of geek cred.
Incidentally, PGP/GPG use was surprisingly high on Usenet (nowhere near ubiquitous) back then. Many newsreaders supported it was pretty common to see signed messages and the corresponding geek code block. It did little other than help resolve arguments about spoofed messages... and as a badge of geek cred.
Yes, that‘s the reason - plus abusive admins enforcing their own ideological agenda in local groups wherever they could.
I don‘t really see a solution to the problem of decentralization being effectively anarchy with people having the means to do so abusing their power.
I don‘t really see a solution to the problem of decentralization being effectively anarchy with people having the means to do so abusing their power.
I don’t think we need decentralization as much as we need curated platforms. Facebook is useless because the village idiot gets more say than the scholar, and that makes the content stupid.
Addictive, sure, but stupid. Ultimately that leads for smart people to leave, making the content dumber by the day. You can argue that the same thing happened to Usenet during eternal September, and you would be correct.
HN is so valuable because it’s curated by its users, and so far, they prefer intelligent content, but just imagine what would happen if HN had its own eternal September and all of reddit decided to visit. I mean, /r/technology wasnt always the political battleground it is now, and /r/programming wasn’t always teenagers arguing about what language will replace what.
When you allow everyone to speak on equal terms, all you get is squabbled noise, and it’s often dominated by the people with the most free time, and those typically are the people with the least to contribute.
Of course the internet hasn’t had a great deal of luck with curated forums either. Especially not if it didn’t want them to be echo chambers. But I suspect the first technology or media house, or perhaps library, that manages to make a curated forum for intelligent content and debate will have a lot of followers. Because all those platforms we no longer use, like Usenet, were actually really good, until they were ruined by the noise.
Addictive, sure, but stupid. Ultimately that leads for smart people to leave, making the content dumber by the day. You can argue that the same thing happened to Usenet during eternal September, and you would be correct.
HN is so valuable because it’s curated by its users, and so far, they prefer intelligent content, but just imagine what would happen if HN had its own eternal September and all of reddit decided to visit. I mean, /r/technology wasnt always the political battleground it is now, and /r/programming wasn’t always teenagers arguing about what language will replace what.
When you allow everyone to speak on equal terms, all you get is squabbled noise, and it’s often dominated by the people with the most free time, and those typically are the people with the least to contribute.
Of course the internet hasn’t had a great deal of luck with curated forums either. Especially not if it didn’t want them to be echo chambers. But I suspect the first technology or media house, or perhaps library, that manages to make a curated forum for intelligent content and debate will have a lot of followers. Because all those platforms we no longer use, like Usenet, were actually really good, until they were ruined by the noise.
>Facebook is useless because the village idiot gets more say than the scholar, and that makes the content stupid.
This misunderstands the intended use case for Facebook as well as demeans most of the people who use it as intended.
Not every social media platform is, or needs to be, about curating "intelligent" content, any more than the web itself needs to be about sharing whitepapers between university peers, or phone calls need to be primarily about business. The problem with Facebook, specifically, is that it's curated too much rather than not enough -- people just want to be able to form networks with their friends and share content within that network.
> but just imagine what would happen if HN had its own eternal September and all of reddit decided to visit
It used to be so common to accuse HN of "becoming Reddit" that it was mentioned specifically as something to avoid in the comments. And... there is a large overlap between the HN community and Reddit. A lot of the content that gets posted here is posted from Reddit.
I hate to break it to you but a lot of the intellectual elites here are also on Twitter and Reddit and Facebook and sometimes they share pictures of their food and cats. And there's nothing wrong with that.
Also, complaining about Eternal September on the World Wide Web is a bit like cancer complaining about lymphoma.
This misunderstands the intended use case for Facebook as well as demeans most of the people who use it as intended.
Not every social media platform is, or needs to be, about curating "intelligent" content, any more than the web itself needs to be about sharing whitepapers between university peers, or phone calls need to be primarily about business. The problem with Facebook, specifically, is that it's curated too much rather than not enough -- people just want to be able to form networks with their friends and share content within that network.
> but just imagine what would happen if HN had its own eternal September and all of reddit decided to visit
It used to be so common to accuse HN of "becoming Reddit" that it was mentioned specifically as something to avoid in the comments. And... there is a large overlap between the HN community and Reddit. A lot of the content that gets posted here is posted from Reddit.
I hate to break it to you but a lot of the intellectual elites here are also on Twitter and Reddit and Facebook and sometimes they share pictures of their food and cats. And there's nothing wrong with that.
Also, complaining about Eternal September on the World Wide Web is a bit like cancer complaining about lymphoma.
> Facebook is useless because the village idiot gets more say than the scholar
This here is a problem in and of itself. Selecting whose voice is to be heard the loudest is no mean feat and simplifying this problem by simply throwing scholars at it shows a lack of respect for just how hard this problem is. Scholars have been known to hold and present pretty atrocious and even murderous ideologies. Who's to say we should trust them and not ordinary Joe who goes about his business in a small but deeply meaningful way?
This here is a problem in and of itself. Selecting whose voice is to be heard the loudest is no mean feat and simplifying this problem by simply throwing scholars at it shows a lack of respect for just how hard this problem is. Scholars have been known to hold and present pretty atrocious and even murderous ideologies. Who's to say we should trust them and not ordinary Joe who goes about his business in a small but deeply meaningful way?
Well, you should hear from “evil” scholars, because you can still learn from them. You probably shouldn’t follow them though. By contrast you can learn nothing from what joe had for dinner yesterday.
Not that scholars aren’t filling their Instagram profiles with pictures of food.
Not that scholars aren’t filling their Instagram profiles with pictures of food.
Because Joe doesn’t have decades of peer reviewed work as his context when posting his views and thus reasons from statistically limited experience.
As far as decentralization and curated platforms go, I think the former is practically a prerequisite for the latter. It all boils down to moderation. Moderation is what makes the difference between a productive debate and a room full of idiots screaming at each other.
Sure, centralized services can and do have moderation, but when they grow past a certain size, this seems to break down catastrophically. I believe this begins to happen when a service grows past serving the needs of a single community, and begins taking on various factions and tribes with conflicting needs and interests.
This is a problem which absolutely confounds the centralized social media giants of the day. No matter what approach they take, they are bound to piss off millions of users, so they do next to nothing short of removing death threats. The end result: a practically unmoderated forum, and a room full of idiots screaming at each other. I don't recall this problem being nearly as pervasive in the days where each community had it's own independent bulletin board with active moderation. There were trolls, but they were the exception, not the norm.
Different communities have different needs, and applying a one-size-fits-all moderation policy is harmful to productive discourse. There is a difference between what behavior is acceptable at the library, the coffee shop, the church, and the pub, and online communities are no different. Each community needs moderators, but they serve different roles within each one. Federated services (ideally) make this as frictionless as possible.
Sure, centralized services can and do have moderation, but when they grow past a certain size, this seems to break down catastrophically. I believe this begins to happen when a service grows past serving the needs of a single community, and begins taking on various factions and tribes with conflicting needs and interests.
This is a problem which absolutely confounds the centralized social media giants of the day. No matter what approach they take, they are bound to piss off millions of users, so they do next to nothing short of removing death threats. The end result: a practically unmoderated forum, and a room full of idiots screaming at each other. I don't recall this problem being nearly as pervasive in the days where each community had it's own independent bulletin board with active moderation. There were trolls, but they were the exception, not the norm.
Different communities have different needs, and applying a one-size-fits-all moderation policy is harmful to productive discourse. There is a difference between what behavior is acceptable at the library, the coffee shop, the church, and the pub, and online communities are no different. Each community needs moderators, but they serve different roles within each one. Federated services (ideally) make this as frictionless as possible.
How do we manage identity and reputation on the internet?
What killed Usenet? What delivered its most severe and ultimately fatal wound was the downward spiral of signal-to-noise ratio. The biggest contributor was spam, which completely overwhelmed unmoderated newsgroups. Another was the "endless September" effect of the massive influx of Outlook-using, AOL-trained new users with no respect for, ir interest in, the community civility of most existing audiences. FAQ reading before posting became dismissed as old-fashioned. "Top-posting" over relentlessly recopied content replaced thoughtful, contextual quoting. Duplicated questions that had been answered many times before (and white answers were easily found) crowded out new content and wore down longtime contributors. Finally, the difficulty in profiting from traffic sent many content providers into their own SEO-happy walled garden.
So, instead of, say, one well-curated FAQ article about how to root a given phone model/network combination, you get seventy different recipes on YouTube and proprietary forums... many with their own unique, fatal oversight that lures the novice into bricking his or her device. Yay, progress.
I started participating in 1986. Sadly, I don't even remember which year I abandoned my last newsgroup.
I'm excited to see what blockchain solutions will come about for this
It seems more fundamental than reputation. Usenet had tons of problems since I could remember it. Now there were a few shining beacons that were awesome, sci.crypto, comp.compression, some others. There was also tons and tons of noise. There is some number, X, you can’t have a conversation with X+1 people, everything struggles with it.
> What we need is a real, decentralized solution.
Mailinglists. They already were the good enough alternative when havoc running usenet-moderations were out to organize usenet to death.
Mailinglists. They already were the good enough alternative when havoc running usenet-moderations were out to organize usenet to death.
What does it mean to "manage" identities? It's not terribly difficult, technically, to enact a real name policy with online identities rooted in the real-world chain of trust --- the problem is that when you enact a real name policy, activists scream at you until you rescind it.
Without rooting identities in the real world trust chain, what do you have? Proof of work? How does that help against adversaries who are willing to do a lot of work?
Reputation systems? Sybil attacks.
We know what the right answer is here. We just need to be bold enough to enact it and keep it enacted despite the expected outcry
Without rooting identities in the real world trust chain, what do you have? Proof of work? How does that help against adversaries who are willing to do a lot of work?
Reputation systems? Sybil attacks.
We know what the right answer is here. We just need to be bold enough to enact it and keep it enacted despite the expected outcry
I use my real name on the internet, but there are lots of good reasons not to use real names. Like someone reaching out for advise on what to do about a sensitive subject that there are not ready for the rest of the world to know.
But that is not the point I'm trying to make.
You said it not technically hard to enact a real name policy, but I argue that of the options you said, a real name policy is the by far the hardest, technically speaking.
I can simply say I have a real name policy, but who is validating these names. Hire an army of people to get scans of IDs, and then have no users because no one is going to sign up if the barrier to entry is so high.
Blizzard and Facebook have a real name policies, but they do no validation.
A government could roll out such a program, but the chances of a world wide program are near zero. And such a universal system would bring identify fraud into a new era of awfulness.
It's simply not possible to have a real name system that is valid.
But that is not the point I'm trying to make.
You said it not technically hard to enact a real name policy, but I argue that of the options you said, a real name policy is the by far the hardest, technically speaking.
I can simply say I have a real name policy, but who is validating these names. Hire an army of people to get scans of IDs, and then have no users because no one is going to sign up if the barrier to entry is so high.
Blizzard and Facebook have a real name policies, but they do no validation.
A government could roll out such a program, but the chances of a world wide program are near zero. And such a universal system would bring identify fraud into a new era of awfulness.
It's simply not possible to have a real name system that is valid.
> We just need to be bold enough to enact it and keep it enacted despite the expected outcry
In other words, you know it will do real harm to real people, but you don't care about them and don't want to listen.
Real names are not sufficient. Plenty of people will publish hate speech in the newspapers under their own byline.
In other words, you know it will do real harm to real people, but you don't care about them and don't want to listen.
Real names are not sufficient. Plenty of people will publish hate speech in the newspapers under their own byline.
> In other words, you know it will do real harm to real people, but you don't care about them and don't want to listen
That's an uncharitable and emotionally-charged way of saying that you think that an edge case affecting a tiny minority should preclude a policy that makes communities better for everyone. Do you not care about the population at large?
The state of discussion on the internet seems to have deteriorated since the major platforms abandoned their real name policies a few years ago.
> Plenty of people will publish hate speech in the newspapers under their own byline
Ah, so "managing identities" is actually just a euphemism for censorship?
People should be free to publish "hate speech" (whatever that means) in newspapers and anywhere else. That's what free speech entails and it's a good thing.
That's an uncharitable and emotionally-charged way of saying that you think that an edge case affecting a tiny minority should preclude a policy that makes communities better for everyone. Do you not care about the population at large?
The state of discussion on the internet seems to have deteriorated since the major platforms abandoned their real name policies a few years ago.
> Plenty of people will publish hate speech in the newspapers under their own byline
Ah, so "managing identities" is actually just a euphemism for censorship?
People should be free to publish "hate speech" (whatever that means) in newspapers and anywhere else. That's what free speech entails and it's a good thing.
> makes communities better for everyone.
Not at all proven, and there's substantial evidence that for certain categories of abuse it makes no difference.
> edge case affecting a tiny minority
The whole point of equalities law is that you can't inflict things on people simply with the justification that they're a minority; you have to make arguments along the lines of it being necessary, proportionate, and that you've tried to mitigate the harm.
> The state of discussion on the internet seems to have deteriorated since the major platforms abandoned their real name policies a few years ago.
Usenet people like to date the deterioration of discourse back to ... 1993. Again this is kind of anecdotal and we'd have to define things like "state of discussion" and "deteriorated".
> People should be free to publish "hate speech"
OK, now you're really going to have to define "state of discussion" and "deteriorated", as well as "makes communities better for everyone", because hate speech is one of the very important things that we're trying to get rid of.
Not at all proven, and there's substantial evidence that for certain categories of abuse it makes no difference.
> edge case affecting a tiny minority
The whole point of equalities law is that you can't inflict things on people simply with the justification that they're a minority; you have to make arguments along the lines of it being necessary, proportionate, and that you've tried to mitigate the harm.
> The state of discussion on the internet seems to have deteriorated since the major platforms abandoned their real name policies a few years ago.
Usenet people like to date the deterioration of discourse back to ... 1993. Again this is kind of anecdotal and we'd have to define things like "state of discussion" and "deteriorated".
> People should be free to publish "hate speech"
OK, now you're really going to have to define "state of discussion" and "deteriorated", as well as "makes communities better for everyone", because hate speech is one of the very important things that we're trying to get rid of.
Who is the "we" that's trying to get rid of "hate speech"? I'm against censorship of ideas *period". The problem with censorship is that even if started with the best of intentions, it ends up being plain suppression of whatever ideas are inconvenient for the censors. It's been that way throughout history. Censorship is always being justified as being done in the name of someone's safey.
I take it you're the kind of person who thinks a good community is one free of ideas that make you uncomfortable.
I take it you're the kind of person who thinks a good community is one free of ideas that make you uncomfortable.
I don't think those problem strangled Usenet to death so much as:
* The emergence of the web as an application platform, which made it easy for anyone to set up a globally available discussion platform without any of the complexities of NNTP
* Binaries, which really did choke Usenet to death, forcing most independent operators to shut down.
* The emergence of the web as an application platform, which made it easy for anyone to set up a globally available discussion platform without any of the complexities of NNTP
* Binaries, which really did choke Usenet to death, forcing most independent operators to shut down.
> The emergence of the web as an application platform, which made it easy for anyone to set up a globally available discussion platform without any of the complexities of NNTP
The NNTP protocol isn't really that complex. I would say that it's simpler compared to some of the REST APIs out there.
The NNTP protocol isn't really that complex. I would say that it's simpler compared to some of the REST APIs out there.
In Germany the main Usenet providers never carried any binary groups, so that certainly wasn't a reason why Usenet died. It has always been the ISP's choice which group hierarchies they wanted to provide.
> our industry's persistent lack of institutional memory that each generation ends up struggling with these problems de novo, without reference to similar systems that came before
This sounds like what Knuth was trying to solve with Literate Programming.
His wanted to ensure that solutions were as easy to read as they were to write.
This sounds like what Knuth was trying to solve with Literate Programming.
His wanted to ensure that solutions were as easy to read as they were to write.
Today is Sunday, the 9105th of September, 1993.
Some HN readers won't recognize the reference to https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eternal_September
Kill files were great! I re-used the idea when I created my app AuctionSieve to filter out the junk on eBay.
Bit strange seeing something that used to be commonplace dug up and posted to HN like its the Rosetta Stone.
Anyway, Usenet relies on what I call "Postel Decentralization": a system is described as lacking a central authority but has a critical dependence on a few sysadmins doing something manually. In the case of Usenet that's things like spam cancellation and deciding which groups appears on their servers.
Similarly ancient technology for group discussion is Fidonet, a modem-based message forwarding system.
Anyway, Usenet relies on what I call "Postel Decentralization": a system is described as lacking a central authority but has a critical dependence on a few sysadmins doing something manually. In the case of Usenet that's things like spam cancellation and deciding which groups appears on their servers.
Similarly ancient technology for group discussion is Fidonet, a modem-based message forwarding system.
I recently started reading Usenet again using the free https://news.solani.org/ service.
Once I'd caught up on a.s.r, I couldn't really find any other groups other than alt.comp.lang.* that were worth reading.
Any HN suggestions?
Once I'd caught up on a.s.r, I couldn't really find any other groups other than alt.comp.lang.* that were worth reading.
Any HN suggestions?
alt.hackers. It's a moderated group, but with no moderator and that's intentional. You have to be somewhat clueful to post to that group.
alt.folklore.computers
alt.obituaries
alt.obituaries
Several of the comp.lang.* hierarchy have activity.
There is also comp.misc which has some activity as well.
There is also comp.misc which has some activity as well.
I've been posting to alt.cyberpunk every few months trying to get things going. I use eternal-september(.org) for my usenet access.
What is a s r? Alt.sex.robots?
An anagram of Scary Devil Monastery, the group that by tradition is not named to avoid summoning lusers.
alt.sysadmin.recovery. Its name implies that sysadmining is something that you "recover" from, and the content is typified by horror stories and contempt for "lusers". It's not everybody's cup of tea.
From the admin standpoint, Usenet was pretty good until it started being (mis)used as a binary transfer system. Once it started using a DS-3 worth of bandwidth to carry the full feed, it started being a battle between the users and the admins.
That was part of it, but there were solutions to those problems that were implementable by smaller providers. (We had a nice split host system, where we had all headers and bodies of text groups locally, and just called out to one of the big providers for bodies from the binary groups.)
Unfortunately, once the web came along, usenet became a second-class service, and slowly degraded
Unfortunately, once the web came along, usenet became a second-class service, and slowly degraded
My ISP only killed Usenet a few months ago (reselling Astraweb). I don't think it's degraded - just the purpose has changed. It's just another method of getting high bitrate video and malware from point A to point B, now.
Crazy to see this here as a novelty item. It’s one thing to accept that Usenet is gone, it’s another thing to see its Wikipedia on the HN home page
Where else would you link about Usenet?
That page is very hard to read on a mobile device.
the last major redesign was in the flipphone era
Wikipedia is as fine as any place to link.
I firmly believe that Reddit is Usenet 2.0. It has everything that Usenet wanted to do, but it’s more
accessible by an order of magnitude.
Shout out to rec.arts.sf.written.robert-jordan. I spent many hours as a teen reading their theories about the Purple Ajah and the like.
Fediverse is the closest thing to Usenet nowadays.
I think the closest thing to Usenet is Japanese 2channel (now 5channel) web forum. [1]
- text only
- lots of subboards about every interest imaginable
- barely, or completely unmoderated (therefore full of spam and troll posts)
- similar reply conventions
- the web interface is so barebones that most users are using external desktop/mobile applications to read and post on it
- ASCII/character art is widespread
[1] http://5ch.net/
- text only
- lots of subboards about every interest imaginable
- barely, or completely unmoderated (therefore full of spam and troll posts)
- similar reply conventions
- the web interface is so barebones that most users are using external desktop/mobile applications to read and post on it
- ASCII/character art is widespread
[1] http://5ch.net/
The fediverse is really awesome. I've been using my mastodon account with Tusky on my phone and social media is tolerable again.
Reddit. For me, it's reddit. And just like back in the day with Usenet, I'm addicted to reddit...
I don’t like your post, so I’m going to downvote you. That way other people won’t see your post and potentially be influenced or enlightened by it. That way I don’t have to put effort into responding either.
Furthermore your post lacks both hilarious memes and funny one liners so I’m definitely not upvoting it lol.
Furthermore your post lacks both hilarious memes and funny one liners so I’m definitely not upvoting it lol.
> I don’t like your post, so I’m going to downvote you. That way other people won’t see your post and potentially be influenced or enlightened by it.
Something about that feels familiar, but I can't quite place it.
Something about that feels familiar, but I can't quite place it.
Yes, there is a bit of an issue with downvotes being handed out just because someone disagrees. But that also happens on HN - there's an issue with voting being used as a blunt instrument across all sites that implement it.
But in defence of Reddit, the sheer breadth of content is impressive. Like /r/skincareaddiction over to /r/showerbeer (NSFW). And the content remains permanently available unless it's actively deleted by the poster or a moderator as opposed to being eventually forgotten by your chosen Usenet host.
But in defence of Reddit, the sheer breadth of content is impressive. Like /r/skincareaddiction over to /r/showerbeer (NSFW). And the content remains permanently available unless it's actively deleted by the poster or a moderator as opposed to being eventually forgotten by your chosen Usenet host.
> And the content remains permanently available unless it's actively deleted by the poster or a moderator as opposed to being eventually forgotten by your chosen Usenet host.
A lot of the commercial usenet providers have at least a decade's worth of retention at this point for binary groups. They may have even longer retention times for the text groups. The only thing that would keep a post from being archived now is having the X-No-Archive: yes header in the message.
A lot of the commercial usenet providers have at least a decade's worth of retention at this point for binary groups. They may have even longer retention times for the text groups. The only thing that would keep a post from being archived now is having the X-No-Archive: yes header in the message.
That's less of a problem if you stay off the default subs.
The hivemind exists everywhere, downvotes just make it quantifiable. It's depressing to see wrongheaded and inaccurate posts voted to the top, but at the same time it's an interesting insight into the herd mentality.
The hivemind exists everywhere, downvotes just make it quantifiable. It's depressing to see wrongheaded and inaccurate posts voted to the top, but at the same time it's an interesting insight into the herd mentality.
You're not wrong but I've found that varies by subreddit.
While I appreciate that Google went through the trouble of preserving Usenet posts - even those prior to the DejaNews archive, it’s scary that its the only source of that archive.
I found some of my first posts that date back to 1993. I was active up until around 2013.
I found some of my first posts that date back to 1993. I was active up until around 2013.
olduse.net
If you used Usenet, you should check out Mastodon: https://joinmastodon.org
"Discussion system", you say? What about alt.bin.* stuff?
What are some good providers for binaries these days?
For videos, Usenet is still going strong.
Been using newsgroup.ninja for a while Without problems.
Astraweb is good but I ditched them after they had some drama a while ago.
Astraweb is good but I ditched them after they had some drama a while ago.
Those problems ended up strangling Usenet to death, which is too bad; there were a lot of things to like about that system. Certainly there are things we had back then that I wish we had today, like killfiles (see https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kill_file).
It says a lot about our industry's persistent lack of institutional memory that each generation ends up struggling with these problems de novo, without reference to similar systems that came before. So we end up in an endless circle, fruitlessly trying the same things people tried and failed to do in the past and then scratching our heads in puzzlement when they don't work.