The alt.* groups were always mostly a cesspool, there were very few usable ones past roughly 1995. The comp.* hierarchy was rather good and that's where the action was.
I feel sorry that USENET is gone. The experience of using a good NNTP newsreader was way way better than the terrible phpBB forums that supplanted it. And the next generation of programmers simply copied the phpBB ideas because they've never seen anything better. So now we have to live with those "forums" where you can't find anything, and you have to wade through screenfuls of decoration just to see any content at all.
What was also really good was that you had a single interface for accessing multiple groups. That's something we lost: if I have multiple interests today, I have to register for multiple "boards/forums", each one with different software, and I have to go around and check them all for new posts. That quickly gets problematic and tedious if you are interested in more than two things.
I have a nagging feeling that we've dumbed things down terribly.
Which forums do you mean? Every community I was part of has moved to facebook groups, Reddit or Discord. PhpBB has gone the way of the dodo (regrettably, since those were the "good old days" for me, since I never used usenet).
I'm on forums like these and they're doing totally fine. And if anything with the recent Reddit SNAFU the last thing users there want is for some central authority in SV to decide what they're allowed to talk about.
Facebook often doesn't even show you interesting discussions if the discussion is interesting to you but not for the average person.
It's very true and the reason why he can't find anything textual on Usenet... Usenet is now filesharing primarily.
I missed the heyday of Usenet by several years and instead landed right in the middle of the phpBB/InvisionBB/vBulletin era, but also made heavy use of RSS/Atom and was curious about other protocols, and so at one point played around with Usenet by way of the Panic client Unison[0].
It might've just been the client (though that'd be surprising, given Panic's knack for UI design) but I didn't find it any more intuitive than web forums. The ability to search numerous groups at once was nice though.
That's not to say that web forums were or are good however. They're a step above something like Discord at least because they're open, but forum search is notoriously bad and I've never come across forum software where navigation isn't somewhat clunky.
Web-based forums are objectively worse. The only thing they have working for them is that you can upload/include images. Otherwise, everything is terrible, beginning with their inability to hide stuff that you've already read. You have to wade in a sea of content every time you visit every forum.
Add to this the terrible usability (for example, you only see several posts in a thread, and then you have to find the tiny tiny numbers at the bottom to go to the next "page" of posts), we've really taken a huge step back.
For a while, we had gopher, nntp, telnet, ftp, etc. but http/web ultimately provided a more general platform on which you could construct a wide variety of applications without needing to switch clients, removing friction and creating bridges.
And then there is GMANE.
It was very much not perfect, though. Spam, hoaxes, and general crap abounded, and moderation was all-or-nothing and iffy at best. Hopefully, the ActivityPub world can avoid some of Usenet's mistakes and get us out of the single-point-of-failure model.
For once, I'm going to hire someone to install me a local USENET set of groups for my research team, using e.g.:
local.news
local.research
local.research.conferences
local.research.papers
local.research.ideas
local.research.conferences
local.research.experiments
local.research.datasets
local.research.tools
local.systems
local.social
local.teaching
local.admin
README:
DFeed is:
an NNTP client
a mailing list archive
a forum-like web interface
an ATOM aggregator
an IRC botI should note that the BINARY usenet is still on fire, if you know what that's used for, that is.
My first experience with the Internet was via WebTV, and WebTV had a gated Usenet - only the users had access to it.
It was just full of red hot, vicious flame wars. In retrospect, it was the harbinger of things to come with social media in general. Take away the barrier of entry, let the masses in without any moderation, and it will turn into a cesspool.
> Take away the barrier of entry, let the masses in without any moderation, and it will turn into a cesspool.
So much this. So many brilliant forums began to die as they were flooded with arrogant and foul-mouthed 13 year olds who thought it great fun to flame everybody. Gradually each of the ancient users who had contributed so much eventually logged out, never to reappear.
That and the new breed of Moderators who actively encouraged the trolls based on "any engagement is good".
I ran a local NNTP relay on my home phone back in the day. I recall spending quite a bit of time filtering out a lot of the binary groups.
There was a concerned expectation that there would be a distinct drop in the quality of USENET posts. They did not disappoint.
What was Google's end game in acquiring DejaNews. Make way for "Google Groups". It's baffling. The comp.unix.* groups became less accessible for so many years, and perhaps inaccessible in some cases. Fixing accessibility problems was obviously low priority. Whatever their motives, Google indeed dumbed things down terribly.
Some boards support RSS/Atom, and it will help finding new posts. It is not as good as the old usenet readers, but at least you save some time.
Well, there was a lot of fun in the chaos too. Stuff like alt.pave.the.earth had a culture around it.
There was serious stuff too, like alt.save.the.earth. Also things like alt.os.linux (later renamed to comp.os.linux)
Around this time a lot of them fell apart but niche ones (art, music, internet culture) were still alive and generally unspammy.
I keep seeing people wanting to build distributed this and distributed that. According to Wikipedia, usenet was already distributed. Why did it die?
Edit: follow-up question, what about freenet? Are they the same thing? Are they different, compatible, implementations of the same protocol? Are they incompatible but share some properties? Etc
2. It lost control over its culture, and that culture was crucial to its functioning.
3. It was too problematic for ISPs (or others) to provide ready access to it: spam, harassment, child pornography, and copyright violations all posed massive concerns.
4. There was no viable business model for providing the service.
<https://web.archive.org/web/20230603024330/https://old.reddi...>
(I'm author of that piece. It seems to hold up pretty well with insiders' views, e.g., <https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36200045>. That last link is from an earlier discussion on Usenet's demise, of which there are several in HN history: <https://hn.algolia.com/?q=usenet>)
(To some extent, there was a natural response in that anyone could cancel anything, although those ended up adding authentication. At one point people estimated that a third of traffic was spam and another third was "spam cancels".)
1. The clients were kind of a pain for anyone but comp.sci nerds
2. It was butt ugly. Web forums killed it, because you could make them pretty
3. Not only spam, but the troll bots just destroyed everything. I can't remember why exactly this started happening, but there were a dedicated pool of assholes spamming Usenet groups they didn't like with garbage or vile crap posing as regular contributors of the groups. When you searched for posts by someone, the first 100 pages were from these troll bots
This might strongly depend on the corner of usenet you were in, but there were large and important groups where elitism was absolutely cancerous, and a culture I don't miss. I frequented German end English groups, and can say that it was much worse in the German ones. Absolutely condescending attitude towards newcomers if they "misbehaved" even in the slightest; you'd have the "n00bs" post and then a dozen replies by the regulars circle-jerking by dissecting the OP down to every little detail they did wrong and trying to one-up each other in sarcasm. A typical flex was the length of your killfile.
Web-Based bulletin-boards (phpBB, vBulletin, WBB, ...) quickly took over in the early 2000s, which had the advantage of having superior moderation tools (e.g. being able to remove spam after the fact), giving a more consistent experience to users. Bulletin boards still tended to have the elitist group of regulars compared to usenet, albeit less pronounced. Some/Much of this can probably also be attributed to the users of those boards being a new generation of Internet users, which just had a different approach and attitude, much like we see today with facebook vs. Instagram, YouTube vs. TikTok etc.
What managed to mostly kill Internet forums was probably reddit, which improved SNR a lot by having the up/downvote system, and while technically being even more centralized than bulletin boards, managed to grow so much by basically allowing their users to create subreddits, which would equal the sub-forums in bulletin boards, which only the board's administrator could create.
Precisely. Usenet's "regulars" back in those days were generally IT staffers, with perhaps a professor or three, at any given school, or were IT staffers running news servers at their companies. The regular September flood of new kids discovering Usenet at school was annoying, but manageable.
Then the gates were thrown open wide, and netiquette got crushed under the weight of the general public. Once the crooks and con artists discovered it, it was the beginning of the end.
- it was slow
- it wasn't consistent; not unusual that thread replies would be out of order
- it was text only (essentially)
- posting and downloading binary files was even slower and cumbersome)
It was insecure, there was no trust model and no encryption, so no proof of authorship, no proof of server identity.
It was too public. Not everyone wants their conversations out in the open.
A bunch of pre 90s data caches got uplifted and then silently seemed to vanish. I was a box admin in the UK in the early 80s and my honey-danber database records were online for a while in the maps Usenet group. They're not responding to search any more.
But within a few years Google stopped caring about it entirely.
Web crawlers indexed online forums too, so you could find the content right away through the same search engine instead of having to search the BBS discussions for hours or post a request on the local BBS and wait (days) for replies. Your technically illiterate aunt could browse the search results for posts containing the recipes she wanted from a number of disparate forums, and choose to read anonymously (and print out) or login and contribute. All you need is an email address.
This accessibility and semi-transparency created a major shift in where you go for content, effectively forcing the tech literate to follow suit as well. It fits in the general trend of democratizing the internet, and IMO was a good thing for tech. (I blame the monetizing and large commercial entities for the current state of fragmentation.)
I still login to a local BBS about once a year to say hello. Although I have a shell account now so I don't need to telnet over the net. It's still very alternative and hacker friendly.
Properly configured, these news readers feel just like email clients, with threading and signatures and all that. Yes, the configuration part is some work but you only have to do it once and then you’re set up for all of Usenet. With forums you have to find and create an account separately for each one.
But whenever people meet in unmoderated digital world, all sorts of other toxic people follow -- spammers, trolls, etc. People who don't care about the community or personal exchanges.
This makes the place toxic and unpalatable to the ones who started it and so the real people just leave and the place dies.
The real question would be why did those forums mostly died nowadays? I don't have a definite answer, but from the user viewpoints:
- Centralised services had the benefit of only creating one account (remember password managers were uncommon! People were advised only to create accounts of websites they would trust, to avoid leaking their passwords they often re-used)
- More modern UI and the "new factor"/hype definitely helped people moving
Let's not forget the move was also sometimes initiated by the webmasters, who did not want to pay and administrate it forever (Canonical example being a teenager spawning a forum about one of your hobby, then still maintaining it a decade later while having lost all interest)
Usenet was great while it was a niche thing and before the advent of spam. It was distributed in the sense that most ISPs would run a server and they would mirror messages between them. You'd use your mail client to talk to your ISP's server, and messages would be like emails, but threaded somewhat like a forum. Binary files were usually uuencoded and often split across multiple chunks.
Unlike solutions run by centralised entities, it really did feel like a public square, but your ISP could and often did decide which groups they would carry. On the flip-side your ISP or university could carry its own groups which weren't replicated out to the wider internet, for local discussion.
It died for a few reasons but there were a few main reasons and mainest of those (lol) was that spammers realised they could flood it with their tripe for almost no cost, all actual conversation just got drowned out pretty fast.
It had an undeath (maybe still does?) as a way to distribute pirated material, mostly because 'normies' didn't know about it and it would fly under the radar. All the movies on torrent sites would come from groups releasing them on usenet. I guess these particular users weren't affected by spam, and weren't a target for spam because no human was trying to read the groups...
Usenet readers supported plonkfiles; spam management on usenet was easier on Usenet than with email. A GUI Usenet reader let you plonk someone with a single click. Granted, in those days, spammers were less resourceful...
In particular it died because whatever moderation it had (almost none TBH) was no barrier to bad actors, so it drowned in spam and troll posts.
Then the centralized social platforms took over with their network effects and moderation paid for from ads.
Yggdrasil is one example of this although it is an 'overlay' and not a direct protocol replacement. https://yggdrasil-network.github.io
From my limited understanding, it's not "distributed" as you think
It's "distributed" among ISPs. It's like one of the yourname@isp.com free emails,
To run a usenet server, you need a server with public IP with TCP port 119 open. It's like running your own email service.
People like distributed things ideologically but practically speaking they have a ton of drawbacks. It failed because it was outcompeted by centralized solutions that could leverage their centralized power to make a better product (e.g. handle spam among other things). The decentralized aspect also means incentives can become misaligned where people who are paying for it aren't really benefiting or controlling it (i imaging alt.bibaries was not cheap to syndicate)
> follow-up question, what about freenet? Are they the same thing?
No, and generally pretty unrelated.
AOL/compuserve/prodigy/whatever offered easy to use and understand UXs which drew a large crowd, and their large crowd was in a fairly walled off portion of the internet using foreign protocols and systems -- so they drew in their friends and so on.
same kinda thing fb does, among others, now.
when the crowd/discussion moved elsewhere that was that.
I think usenet saw a bit of a resurgence in popularity due to piracy, but the discussion has never really came back.
Even if you just offer the ability to have 3rd party clients to your closed system you still have the problem of distributing new features, that's why there's only 1.2 browsers now
I think that one good thing from these services was the relatively high barrier of entry. Today, online services are all about low friction signup, which makes a lot of sense in the highly competitive Internet of 2023. But when computers were somewhat niche and you really had to figure out how to get things working, users were a lot more committed and thus the quality of discussions was a lot higher.
Interestingly, Hacker News has a fairly low barrier of entry and high quality discussions. Maybe because it's kind of ugly and scares away the average user expecting animated prompts and fancy style sheets.
Speaking of BBSs, there is nothing today that quite captures the full value proposition of BSSs. Back in the day, you could sign up to one of them and meet a lot of locals due to the high long distance phone bills. I made a lot of "real world" friends, even a girlfriend or two, back in the BBS days.
Ignoring the hellthreads, the technical content here is pretty mid these days. The last year has been rough on this site. It's like reading a combination of r/linux and r/rust, a sort of nuance free assertion of FOSS-heavy technical preferences. If that's the echo chamber that you enjoy go for it, but even on Matrix I find a lot deeper content than here, let alone some Discords and smaller forums. What I do appreciate is the breadth on some more niche technical content (J and APL threads come to mind.) But IMO the glory days here are gone.
Social forums seem to "collapse" a few ways: die (like Usenet, many old IRC channels), calcify (many older forums I'm in, Lobsters), or become an echo chamber (Subreddits, this place.) I guess Eternal September comes for us all.
Something works, culturally, in 1970s place X, and doesn't in 2020s place Y.
Wikipedia, started today, would not be Wikipedia for every reason. Different user culture, different founder culture, finance culture, IP, "truth," etc. Wikipedia started in today's world would start different, go on a different trajectory...
We have an intuitive grasp of this, and are always looking for a more objective/formal/causal understanding... but I don't think it really exists.
In any case, just like with "music these days," and whatnot... sometimes the thing that has changed is you yourself.
Ultimately the worst situation is when replies can consist of only a “joke” or meme (worst of all… a gif). Discussion is destroyed and instead replaced with a delta function; a single impulse response. “Click and move on”.
Usenet was also niche and technical in the beginning, but that changed over time. Maybe the answer is multifaceted; Hacker News is a bit ugly, has a large percentage of technical users, strong moderation and lack of "low effort" features such as inline images, GIF libraries, reactions etc.
However, there is another part of me that is glad this new Internet is so much more accessable. Don't get me wrong, I abhor the pervasive marketing, corporate fingers in everyrhing, and all the bloat that comes with it, but if I just focus on the fact that so many more people are even getting a mild, watered-down taste of why I love computers so much, that makes me a bit happy. Computers connect us, and during a crucial time in my life where I was feeling woefully disconnect from my peers (socially excluded, perhaps?) the BBS and newsgroup communities were there to welcome me.
My hope was that wireless mesh networks would fill that void since you have to be physically local to the network to gain access. We could have local/community level LANs with file sharing, gaming, chat, and forums. Instead we got things like facebook groups and Nextdoor.
I made an account around the time when I started reading HN for the first time. I was a master student in computer science. Other than the reason to be able to create things out of my imagination, another reason why I studied computer science is because I felt too dumb to grok the field. So it was me stretching myself out of my academic comfort zone since I felt I'd never be able to grok programming. I cannot describe how heavy of a pressure I put on myself. How would you feel if what you're trying to attempt is almost certainly futile? The only counter argument I had is that I knew that humans (myself included) are notoriously difficult at predicting someone's capability. In the master computer science, I was scraping by at that point.
When I found HN, it felt quite inaccessible to be honest. It felt too geeky, too technical. I was able to stay around was because of the broad curiosity in all kinds of topics. A related reason was that curiosity is the main virtue that HN stands for, which is the same virtue I've stood for since I was 7 years old. I remember reading all the non-technical submissions for a few months while once or twice per week reading an actual technical submission.
Mind you, I had enough training, I took my computer science master over the course of multiple years (while also doing a bachelor in psych and a master in game-design, simultaneously). And yet, I could only bare 1 or 2 technical articles per day.
It took a whole year of acclimation. After a year, HN felt fully accessible. I could enjoy any submission on there. In part, what really helped was that I took very very hard computer science courses and that gave me an intellectual development that has been unprecedented ever since. After that, HN felt like home.
But for that whole year, it was interesting but it also felt like a strain on my mind every day.
So to say that HN does not have a high barrier of entry, I'd respectfully disagree. I don't think I'd be able to have enjoyed this place if I wouldn't have studied computer science. I know there are non-technical people on here that are able to do that. I know that I simply wouldn't, and I think there are others like me that couldn't have either.
BBSs kind of served as a filtering device for finding other people like you. In a small town, it was easy to feel isolated and lonely for being a nerd, but then you find this community of other nerds!
It was great and I don't know the equivalent nowadays.
I played around with FidoNet back in the late 1980s/early 90s, when Usenet was not available to me, and FidoNet's Usenet-like echomail system had some very active groups. But even with FidoNet, there was very much a local-to-regional focus. Networks were organized geographically, and Net 115 (Chicago area) had some social gatherings. But FidoNet collapsed pretty quickly once the internet came to the public.
CW (Morse), RTTY (Teletype), etc, etc.
Talking of high barrier to entry, does anyone ever remember that hackers group that said you needed to hack something in your newsreader to make it not read-only so you could post?
I expect there were other groups that needed an Approved: header to post.
Which in turn will die and give way to Lemmy (generally ActivityPub).
So... don't know if that will ever replace Reddit. You really have to be a bit tech-savvy, and most users of the internet aren't.
Edit: And the instructions how to do it are buried away somewhere around two-thirds of the way through the text on this page (https://join-lemmy.org/docs/users/01-getting-started.html), with way to much text on it for normal users to read it all or to not stop caring.
Just like email, you do not need to create multiple accounts to talk to people from other servers, unless they have blocked one another. I am confused, I find it likely that HackerNews readers would know this. Perhaps you're making a point?
> So... don't know if that will ever replace Reddit. You really have to be a bit tech-savvy, and most users of the internet aren't.
I'm sure this is a familiar argument to most of us here. People usually focus on technical solutions, making it easier, one-click, fool-proof. I fear that is a game corporations and centralised services have an advantage in.
I have an alternative. It's not an easy solution, but a social solution to this would be to have "family sysadmins". Someone in the family who is at least slightly tech-savvy, helping the other members of the family set up their accounts. There is no need for the average person to understand federation or to be tech-savvy in this case. In other words, "help your family and friends with their IT stuff instead of putting them in the control of big corporations".
It already did: https://fedidb.org/software/lemmy
It will be a slow descent for reddit, but if you take the "rule" of social media that splits content creators/active participants/lurkers as 1/9/90%, and if we assume that a substantial amount of the 1% is moving away from reddit, then it stands to reason that the other 99% will end up following the creators.
Yeah, network effects are still at play, but there is already a critical mass of people on Lemmy that want it to work. I find myself posting a lot more than I ever did on reddit (or even here) because I look at it as tending a garden.
But to be fair I like my communities small, obscure, slightly unfriendly and without PR. Every good community I've liked had a phase of being nice to newcomers who were trying to fit and being hostile to those who weren't, so maybe there's something to it.
Having a blast on Tildes (Y) though.
Is there more to the thread, actually looking at all 65k groups or a fair sample of them? Where can one find it?
It continues again from here: https://mastodon.sdf.org/@cfenollosa/103470433583276145
"Spammers have decided "it's not profitable to send a few bytes to these open boards anymore" and if you think about it it's kinda sad"
As much as I hate spam, and I hate it a lot, yes, that's pretty damning evidence.
You know a new comms platform has arrived when the spammers, scammers, griefers, and propagandists do.
And you know it's dead when they don't even bother any more.
(afr-l notwithstanding)
And far more quickly this time than last.
- https://github.com/taviso/nntpit (reddit to nntp)
- https://gitlab.com/antekone/desugar (reddit/lobsters to nntp)
- https://github.com/nkizz/mop3 (mastodon to pop3)
- https://github.com/NattyNarwhal/LobstersNntp (lobste.rs to nntp)
(although reddit gateways probably stopped working after Reddit closed the doors to their API)
What if they were spies in the field, exchanging coded messages? Like posting classified ads in newspapers, it's one of those places nobody will look at.
Or, they could all be Putinistas talking to each other, justifying their job of spreading propaganda. "Hey boss, I posted 3k messages just this month! Worth a few more rubles, right?!"
Or they could be experiments, AIs talking to AIs. That's the most cyberpunk explanation, and Usenet being a '90s thing, it's hence the most likely.
I have wondered the same thing multiple times, having seen posts that either didn't resemble anything human generated, or were suspiciously crafted seemingly with steganography in mind. Spam itself could be used for that purpose; who would suspect that "6uy v1@gr@" from user XYZ read by an automated system that downloads groups regularly would actually trigger an action somewhere?
You filed an "request for discussion" and if approved, there would be a discussion for a month or so. Then you'd file a "call for votes" and people would email their votes to a mailbox and there would need to be two thirds in favour.
If not, just curious, what was the last newsgroup to be created this way?
Last one was comp.infosystems.gemini in October '21[0]
[0]: https://www.big-8.org/wiki/Nan:2021-10-22-result-comp.infosy...
I never did get into Usenet but the internet in the nineties and before was like that.
Your online niche was a bubble of private elitism and secret joy that people wondered about, but never knew. You were ensconced and free. People were amazed and curious about the images and magical pull into the future, that people who knew how to work computers, could access in front of them.
Your arcane knowledge of (what is now basic and made easy for us) connecting to the internet and plunging into this otherwordly language of buttons and code words... a different time. Contrasted to your father who wore a suit and tie to work at the bank and read the newspaper, and lived through the invention of the Television set.
You didn't need a reason to shout into what we now call an echochamber, it held all the hope and promise of working out to some unknown magical end anyway.
alt.computer.workshop:
alt.culture.usenet:
alt.fan.usenet:
alt.folklore.computers:
alt.obituaries:
alt.os.linux.slackware:
alt.privacy:
alt.tv.simpsons:
ba.broadcast:
comp.ai:
comp.arch:
comp.compilers:
comp.dcom.telecom:
comp.infosystems.gemini:
comp.infosystems.gopher:
comp.lang.c++:
comp.lang.c:
comp.lang.forth:
comp.lang.misc:
comp.lang.perl.misc:
comp.lang.postscript:
comp.lang.python.announce:
comp.lang.python:
comp.lang.raspberry-pi:
comp.lang.tcl:
comp.misc:
comp.mobile.android:
comp.mobile.misc:
comp.os.cpm:
comp.os.linux.announce:
comp.os.linux.misc:
comp.risks:
comp.sys.apple2:
comp.sys.ibm.pc.games.action:
comp.text.tex:
comp.unix.shell:
comp.windows.x:
gnu.emacs.help:
misc.legal.moderated:
misc.news.internet.discuss:
misc.taxes.moderated:
news.admin.moderation:
news.announce.important:
news.announce.newgroups:
news.groups.proposals:
news.groups:
news.software.readers:
rec.arts.drwho:
rec.arts.movies.current-films:
rec.arts.sf.tv:
rec.arts.sf.written:
rec.autos.sport.f1:
rec.aviation.soaring:
rec.bicycles.tech:
rec.food.cooking:
rec.games.backgammon:
rec.music.beatles:
rec.music.classical.recordings:
rec.music.opera:
rec.radio.amateur.antenna:
rec.radio.amateur.boatanchors:
rec.radio.amateur.equipment:
rec.radio.amateur.homebrew:
rec.radio.amateur.misc:
rec.radio.amateur.moderated:
rec.radio.amateur.policy:
rec.radio.amateur.space:
rec.radio.info:
rec.radio.shortwave:
rec.sport.rowing:
rec.woodworking:
sci.astro:
sci.electronics.design:
sci.electronics.repair:
sci.logic:
sci.physics.relativity:
sci.physics.research:
talk.origins:
uk.comp.sys.mac:
uk.radio.amateur.moderated:
uk.rec.sheds:
uk.sci.weather:Had an client that I had an ongoing search contract to fill their needs for Unix Sys Ads at the NAS facility at NASA in Mt. View. Cool client that got me into playing Flight Simulator on SGI Power Series in their lobby.
Yes, yes. That is correct. Move along.