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Usenet – Let's Return to Public Spaces

• Arathorn 7y ago
  random observation: Usenet was a direct inspiration for creating Matrix.org, in terms of providing replicated conversation history with open (well, semi-open, in usenet’s case) federation. Usenet’s collapse under spam, alt.binaries, google groups and eventually reddit/fb/stack overflow left a massive hole on the open internet for open communications. The problem that remains is still one of solving the abuse/spam/reputation problem, but there’s enough progress that hopefully this time things won’t collapse again :)
• bmgxyz 7y ago
  I'm too young to have been a part of Usenet, but it seems to me that there's no good way to recreate the space described in the article without keeping most people out. My understanding is that the "Golden Age" of Usenet was possible mainly because only the people with the proper resources, knowledge, interest, and opportunity could even get to it in the first place. When you select a group of people from the general population with those traits and assets, of course you'll end up with a group that's more or less self-policing; the population will be small and largely homogeneous. It's hard to have conflict when your neighbors are almost identical to you, at least on a large scale. In my estimation, the larger and broader a group is, the more it'll approximate human culture and interaction as a whole. It shouldn't be a surprise when the negative parts of those things (e.g. war, strife, hatred) emerge, just as much as the positive things (peace, fellowship, love).
  • giancarlostoro 7y ago
    It's funny because I think this is true of most online communities I've joined. People will say on here things like "HN has changed now that its big" or "HN is not how it used to be", and I'm sure some would say the same of 4chan as well, and reddit, and probably even Facebook.
    • prepend 7y ago
      4chan was once pretty funny. I remember when they did fun things like hack Time polls [0] before they got too big and went off the rails. [0] https://techcrunch.com/2009/04/27/time-magazine-throws-up-its-hands-as-it-gets-pwned-by-4chan/ https://techcrunch.com/2009/04/27/time-magazine-throws-up-it...
      • giancarlostoro 7y ago
        This was around the time I left 4chan, when the gore stuff got out of control. The snuff films were being posted and other nasty things.
    • iso1631 7y ago
      Usenet never survived Eternal September https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eternal_September https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eternal_September
      • crankylinuxuser 7y ago
        No, it never survived the late 90's campaigns against the RIAA trying to stop piracy at the ISP level. Thats when all the big ISPs yanked support, especially after alt.binaries was sharing damn near everything. And they were big bandwidth sinks due to the distributed model usenet has, so it was easy for ISPs to yank the carpet and look at the immediate gains.
        • ape4 7y ago
          Yeah, no binaries would be a start for a new Usenet
          • crankylinuxuser 7y ago
            The problem is that binaries are transferred in a non-binary manner. Base64 was the preferred way. Except it was also used to push images back and forth as well for pertinent conversations. For any method of communication, you can transfer content that someone else tries to prevent.
  • kingste 7y ago
    I am old enough to remember Usenet. All you needed was an Internet connection, a usenet client, and access to a usenet server. Most ISPs provided usenet access just like they provided an e-mail address at the time. So it was no more difficult to be involved in usenet than it was to have e-mail. In modern terms, usenet would be reddit if it was distributed (so anyone willing to set-up their own server could run a node and let people connect to it). But for end-users it was as simple as having an e-mail account and a client application on your computer.
    • WesleyLivesay 7y ago
      During the "Golden Age" of Usenet, which I believe many people to consider to be pre-Eternal September, the number of Americans with any form of internet access was just a fraction of the population. I am finding varying figures online, but they seem to hover at <15% of the population of the United States. Given the costs of that access and the costs of the computers. It was both a very small and a very specific type of person that was accessing Usenet at the time.
      • dredmorbius 7y ago
        I've been digging up numbers over the past few years. In 1980 there were 2 million computers in the US, doubling every 2 years. By 2000, there were 168 million computers, only 6 doublings rather than the 10 the 1980 estimate would have provided. That suggests about 16 million users as of 1990, possibly 24-32 million by 1992. As of 1995, total worldwide Internet usage (then largely in the US, though also Europe) was 16 millions. As of 2019 it's 4.5 billions. https://www.internetworldstats.com/emarketing.htm https://www.internetworldstats.com/emarketing.htm (From an earlier HN comment: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21783812 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21783812) Brian Reid's Usenet Usenet usage reports as of 1988 reported about 140k active Usenet users, from a population-with-access of about 880,000. Usenet was small. (Some of these stats also cited in in one of the links (which I wrote) from TFA.)
        • 300bps 7y ago
          Yeah I got my first modem in 1985 (hence the username). Anyone outside of academia was all BBS, not Internet back then. I’m shocked to hear Usenet even had 140k active users in 1988.
  • jwing 7y ago
    "Eternal September" is slang that originated on Usenet to describe just this phenomenon. You can read more here if you like: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eternal_September https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eternal_September
    • ghaff 7y ago
      That was probably the beginning of the end even if it held on for quite a while after that. (And a lot of other changes were happening at the same time.) Especially outside the alt. hierarchy, which was always more of a free for all, real names usually associated with university, company, or government email addresses and a culture built around a certain exclusivity tended to keep flame wars and and other disruption to a manageable level.
    • tunesmith 7y ago
      That was the original "Me Too" movement. I remember all those Me Too posts popping up everywhere. (AOL users were notorious for block quoting long parts of text they agreed with, and reposting with Me Too! above. It's like "This." but less hip, if that's possible.)
  • somesortofsystm 7y ago
    USENET became irrelevant the day the OS vendors decided to include a web browser in their OS distributions. If they'd included an NNTP reader, we'd be still using USENET to this day.
    • ZiiS 7y ago
      IE3 came bundled with "Microsoft Internet Mail and News" later "Outlook Express" with full NNTP support.
      • somesortofsystm 7y ago
        >IE3 Yeah, exactly. By that time, the web hype knob was already at max level.
        • jaywalk 7y ago
          Disagree. The Internet was still mostly a curiosity when IE3 was around, but people were becoming aware of it. I'd say things really took off in the IE5 timeframe.
      • smhenderson 7y ago
        Not sure what version they're talking about on this page[0] but it's dated 1994.Netscape had NNTP support as far back as then apparently... [0] http://home.mcom.com/home/guided_tour/news.html http://home.mcom.com/home/guided_tour/news.html
        • somesortofsystm 7y ago
          '94 is mid-web ignition, imho. The point is, the web ate all the other info-sharing protocols, except for mail (which does look worse than ever, but still works) .. and as a result its near-impossible for a new user to easily share their content from their own computer to the rest of the world ..
          • 7y ago
  • mfer 7y ago
    Technology both represents and influences our culture. For example, usenet and other forms of Internet posting in the past were more long form. They types of thinking and discussion were different. These days it's much shorter leading to shallower comments. Thinking in longer form vs short form influences us. Usenet itself may be a thing of the past but some of the useful elements can be reincorporated going forward.
  • endorphone 7y ago
    Usenet always had a dramatically diverse group of participants. However each peer -- how you connected, likely through your university -- had an authoritative position over participants, and was the singular authenticating partner[1]. So if you were a shitbag, so to speak, your university could do something about it, which can be as simple as removing usenet access which left one with no alternatives. And given that you only had one usenet account, any newsgroup could ban you without one being able to just pop up again. It started to fall apart when the nodes on the network included every ISP, etc. When people who have no authority over the participants, and no real punitive avenue if they broke conventions, it started to fall apart. Even if you got banned from that node, there were thousands of other nodes to jump to and continue your abuse. [1] When you went to some university, the account they provided you was your authentication on Usenet. You had that single account and it was your sole key to the network.
    • Majromax 7y ago
      > When people who have no authority over the participants, I don't think it's exactly a matter of authority. A university wouldn't care about someone merely being a troll in Usenet; they'd have to be breaking a law or otherwise acting egregiously to attract disciplinary action. Instead, I think it's a matter of reputation. A smaller community is one where everyone is likely to be familiar with everyone else on an individual basis, and a community with a technical barrier to access imposes a transition cost on someone wanting to take their ball and go elsewhere. In my opinion, both of these things act together to change one's target audience and engagement style. In such small Usenet-style communities, a user is speaking to that community at large. In larger forums with less individual reputation and lower barriers to access, the forum instead becomes more of a performance place: people are speaking to a subset of like-minded supporters. Twitter is a great example of a very large forum with a near zero-barrier, where I can shout at an adversary while speaking to like-minded people.
    • luckylion 7y ago
      > Usenet always had a dramatically diverse group of participants. How so? It was universities, tech people in corporations and a few folks that just had PCs as a hobby. In short: upper middle class (because those things are expensive), educated (because it really wasn't as simple as it is today) and with time on their hands. There may been some diversity in political leanings, but on the fundamentals, education, social class etc?
  • krilly 7y ago
    4chan partially solved this problem by using inside knowledge to identify 'newf*gs' and push them out. Triforce, fingerboxes, etc. The weirdly complex boardculture was self sustaining because new people couldn't even keep up with the conversation without lurking for a year or so. And then of course, the newcomers started taking the abrasive and politically incorrect culture at face value.
    • jandrese 7y ago
      My impression is that 4chan did a Mother Night on itself. They started with ironic Hitler memes and edgy teenage shit, but eventually people took that seriously and all that were left were edgelords and nazis.
      • krapp 7y ago
        I know it's comforting to believe that there were never any real racists on 4chan until relatively recently, and that it was all naive shitposters and kids making edgy memes, but it's far more likely that actual racists have always hidden behind the pretense of 4chan's ironic culture and anonymity, and have always been active there.
        • 83hajfjeijg 7y ago
          racists, racists everywhere! go to a /pol/ meetup and get back to me - it's still edgelords and trolls. they just got a lot better at trolling and exploiting mainstream media for lulz
        • jandrese 7y ago
          In the olden days you could read between the lines to see people mocking the very culture their post was supposedly glorifying. Later this nuance disappeared as the board was overrun with actual Neo-Nazis.
      • kick 7y ago
        4chan still has a lot of good boards. People have an impression that 4chan is exclusively /pol/ and /b/, but a lot of it's fantastic.
  • wil421 7y ago
    Everyone thinks there was a golden age in a lot of platforms where a small group enjoyed a short amount of time together. When I started lurking around HN in 2010 they were saying the same thing, Reddit was identical, AOL, Internet forums, Usenet, BBS etc...
    • modo_mario 7y ago
      I think they're not wrong either. I was rather invested in what used to be a small subreddit that is now huge. It's a shitshow now sometimes but back then most of the posters were regulars and could recognized each-other. Moderating was a lot easier and context and what have you could be taken into account. I know i could trust one person's expertise, that another often would take a specific stance, another that was always an asshole but very careful to stay on the edge of getting banned and what was technically allowed generally got downvoted. There was space for public meta discussions about sources (not)accepted by the community that actually had an impact, etc Experiencing the transition has made me value small communities much much more.
      • RubberMullet 7y ago
        The Evaporative Cooling Effect[0]. [0] https://blogs.cornell.edu/info2040/2015/10/14/the-evaporative-cooling-effect-in-social-network/ https://blogs.cornell.edu/info2040/2015/10/14/the-evaporativ...
        • tapland 7y ago
          Thank you for that! It's what I've been trying to word regarding some subreddits back in 2011-2012
      • rdiddly 7y ago
        Small communities - you might as well say community communities. Not picking on you, just agreeing, to the point of asserting that "community" can't exist past a certain scale. Dunbar's number and all that.
      • jcims 7y ago
  • fallous 7y ago
    It was less the barrier to entry than a combination of limitations in the rate of new members in a subgroup (you may get burst of new members in September but the total number added over the course of a year was manageable) and a process of cultural (with regards to expectations of behavior and discourse) assimilation, made easier by the fact that there was no prior cultural expectations on the part of new members. Remember that usenet newsgroups numbers in the tens of thousands, usually focused on a very specific interest. New members joined either to gain knowledge, be among those who share an interest, or occasionally to troll. Trolls were easy enough to add to .ignore files, and the others had a desire for the benefits the newsgroup offered and thus were inclined to respect whatever rules were in place in order to receive that benefit. The general model of a usenet group is echoed on the web with message boards, absent the unified means of distribution and discovery.
  • DanBC 7y ago
    > of course you'll end up with a group that's more or less self-policing ...don't forget that the supposed golden age of Usenet included a bunch of assholes, and that you could usually call or email their sysadmin at their university / work and get that person to have a quiet word.
  • ArtWomb 7y ago
    For pure institutional memory from primary source. I went to the archives and read a lot of the posts on comp.infosystems.www.announce circa 1990-1994. Origins of Mosaic. Glory days at CERN. And that day had its share of cranks. Perhaps 25% of the populations ;) But even the cranks had a certain elan. The made up private research centers in the email sigs were optimistic: Paragon Institute of Cyber Consciousness, and such Whats interesting about IRC, with xdcc peer to peer file transfers, it already acted as a distributed peer brokerage back in the mid 1990s. Trying to bootstrap a laer like that today requires enormous overhead
  • Giornito 7y ago
    Golden age often comes from a nostalgia driven perspective of what life seemed to be at some point. In many cases it involves individuals who had similar views and beliefs which made them feel more comfortable around each other. In other cases, it is just the brain looking for things that made someone feel good, even if it only accounted for a short picture of what the good/service/experience really was.
  • shadowgovt 7y ago
    I think you are correct, and inconveniently, the principle doesn't apply to only USENET. The public square serves a vital purpose in public discourse and society at large, but it isn't actually where great ideas are born; it's where they're tested. Traditionally, salons and small groups are where great ideas are born and polished before being presented to a public. Otherwise, you're fighting a low signal-to-noise ratio that hampers motion.
    • dredmorbius 7y ago
      Warrens and Plazas. Both are necessary. Neither is superior. They are complements. I'd hived the idea from elsewhere, and this piece discusses it in the context of trying to form a new community (largely failed), but the ideas may interest: https://old.reddit.com/r/MKaTH/comments/4ntf5p/public_private_warrens_plazas/ https://old.reddit.com/r/MKaTH/comments/4ntf5p/public_privat...
      • dredmorbius 7y ago
        Almost certainly from Ribbonfarm: https://www.ribbonfarm.com/2010/10/27/warrens-plazas-and-the-edge-of-legibility/ https://www.ribbonfarm.com/2010/10/27/warrens-plazas-and-the... The Evaporative Cooling Effect is also a useful notion. http://blog.bumblebeelabs.com/social-software-sundays-2-the-evaporative-cooling-effect http://blog.bumblebeelabs.com/social-software-sundays-2-the-... Archive as site seems down: https://web.archive.org/web/20101012105003/http://blog.bumblebeelabs.com/social-software-sundays-2-the-evaporative-cooling-effect/ https://web.archive.org/web/20101012105003/http://blog.bumbl...
    • javajosh 7y ago
      What is the modern equivalent of a salon? Coffee shop?
      • hairofadog 7y ago
        I think this forum right here is pretty close to the modern equivalent of a salon.
  • kazinator 7y ago
    > I'm too young to have been a part of Usenet. Usenet exists. I read daily and post regularly. Just came here after a little Usenet session.
    • u801e 7y ago
      I would, except the groups I used to post in are essentially dead.
      • taborj 7y ago
        I've run into this as well. On the flip side, they were only "alive" because people -- like me, like you -- posted to them. So they're dead, but like Lazarus they can be resurrected by commanding them to be alive, through the simple mechanic of using them, and encouraging others to come participate.
        • floren 7y ago
          I'm up for it! Where do you like to post?
          • taborj 7y ago
            I frequent alt.ham.radio, comp.sys.cbm and comp.os.vms (which is quite active). I lurk on some others that are generally used for notifications, such as alt.bbs (and alt.bbs.ads). I'm always up for more newgroups to hold my interest. Another poster mentioned comp.misc is active, so I'll probably start checking that one out as well.
            • floren 7y ago
              Thanks, I've subscribed to the ham radio groups (don't really do anything with commodore or VMS [anymore]). Do check out comp.misc, it's got some regulars and things can be a bit curmudgeonly but it's quite active and not spammy.
        • pferde 7y ago
  • technofiend 7y ago
    Post-golden age Usenet: see Eternal September [1] on Wikipedia. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eternal_September https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eternal_September The zeitgeist definitely changed as the general public gained access. Prior to wide availability conversations were close to Hacker News posts in that people were mindful to be constructive and meaningfully contribute to conversations. But that was only in the macro - there were still pockets of poor behavior and even groups dedicated to different standards, notably the alt tree was meant to be looser and groups like alt.flame were no-holds-barred. Similar to modern-day memes, one of the alt.flame threads inspired a tshirt (which I still have, somewhere) sporting the quote "Go jump in a goddamn volcano, you f.... cave newt." And like memes of today you need some cultural literacy to get the reference, much less for it to be funny.
    • amyjess 7y ago
      And keep in mind that HN is only able to be the way it is because of constant, vigilant moderation. The Internet has simply grown too large over the past couple of decades for any unmoderated public space to not be taken over by people who don't care about community norms, individual bad actors, organized invasions, and psyops. Usenet could handle the first two in small doses: people who don't care about community norms will eventually learn or leave, bad actors will get bored of trolling, and persistent individuals can be killfiled. But both of those two flooding in in large groups can kill a community. If bad actors harass and attack every new person every time they post something, the community can't grow. and enough people in a community who disregard the existing norms will simply cause the Overton Window to shift, establishing a new normal. And a killfile isn't a large-scale solution: when you have to have a triple-digit killfile just to get past the noise and actually see the useful discussion, the community is dead. Usenet on the other hand has never been resilient against coordinated activity. The Meow Wars were one of the most deleterious things to ever happen to Usenet back in the day, and I'm sure it contributed a lot to people abandoning Usenet for moderated web forums. Now that the Internet has had 20 more years to further develop invasion techniques, and the invading forces are even larger and more malignant than ever, unmoderated communities can't survive unless they're invisible. Even heavily-moderated communities have trouble handling incoming raids from 4chan and 8chan. And then you have the subtle psyops, groups stealthily infiltrating others in order to promote an agenda. Imagine a coordinated effort to have new people join a newsgroup for a TV show and slowly push the Overton Window towards normalizing antisemitism. This is hard to detect and root out even in a place with moderators (see: Stormfront's psyop in /r/videos), and unmoderated spaces are completely helpless against this kind of assault.
  • anyonecancode 7y ago
    "In my estimation, the larger and broader a group is, the more it'll approximate human culture and interaction as a whole. It shouldn't be a surprise when the negative parts of those things (e.g. war, strife, hatred) emerge, just as much as the positive things (peace, fellowship, love)." Yes and no, I think. Physical space has some constraints that counter this in a way online spaces don't. Take a place like NYC, for instance, where there are so many people, from so many parts of the world, that it arguably begins to "approximate human culture and interaction as a whole." What you see here is that people start to subdivide the space and agree on expected behavior -- in public spaces, like the subway, people by and large try to reduce interactions. Then there are public spaces that are pseudo-private, like bars or cafes or restaurants, but each have their own understood rules -- at a bar you can start to talk up a stranger, at a restaurant you don't just walk to a random table and join in a conversation. There are also many private spaces -- apartments, or your own room in an apartment shared with roommates. Contrast that with the typical online space, where it's not just that there are lots of people, but also no constraints. It's the equivalent of going on to a subway and yelling at someone about politics... I don't think the problem with the modern internet is scale so much as a failure to build some constraints into its design. Everything is public at a very loud volume.
    • Psyladine 7y ago
      >Take a place like NYC, for instance, where there are so many people, from so many parts of the world, that it arguably begins to "approximate human culture and interaction as a whole." Except people are a product of context, so putting them into a new context creates a new breed, the new yorker, of which no human being aspires to.
      • anyonecancode 7y ago
        Substitute any decently large physical collection of people for NYC. Same overall point I was trying to make applies.
    • jasode 7y ago
      >I don't think the problem with the modern internet is scale so much as a failure to build some constraints into its design. Can you speak more concretely what you mean here? Are you talking about technical "constraints" into protocols such as "http" or "TCPIP"? Or constraints into DNS? Or constraints on HTML markup language? What would an "internet technical architecture designed to prevent negativity" actually look like? Is there an example repo on github or a computer science research paper showing the algorithms that would satisfy this ideal?
  • rdiddly 7y ago
    Throw in "commerce" (on both lists)!
  • alexgmcm 7y ago
    I learned Usenet in 2009 as a Uni freshman because the University blocked p2p software and monitored http traffic to stop people downloading loads but for some reason my Usenet usage wasn't detected. I mean that's over a decade ago now, but it seemed like it was still pretty big back then - albeit just for piracy.
  • flyinghamster 7y ago
    Spot-on. I was on Usenet for a bit in the 1980s, and loved it. After I was out of school, though, it was effectively unavailable to me until internet access opened up in the 1990s. In the meantime, though, there was a similar but smaller network that operated in a similar fashion: FidoNet's Echomail system. For younger readers, FidoNet was a network of dialup BBS systems (usually single-user) with a central list of nodes distributed weekly. Echomail was an add-on that worked in much the same manner as Usenet; a message posted in a forum would be propagated to other systems sharing that forum. Strictly speaking, both still exist today, but like Usenet, FidoNet is a shadow of itself, and most FidoNet nodes are using the internet instead of dialup modems these days. I recall FidoNet having a lot fewer problems with spam and bad actors than Usenet, though, mostly because troublesome nodes could and did get de-listed.
  • drpgq 7y ago
    There's probably something to the average user IQ declining towards the overall population mean as a site becomes more popular.
    • bmgxyz 7y ago
      You may be right, but for what it's worth I caution you against equating being early and being smart.
      • yoz-y 7y ago
        Also intelligent people can be toxic, unwelcoming and plain rude too.
  • DrScientist 7y ago
    I remember back in the early 1990's as the web took off people bemoaning the fact that the oiks from AOL were bringing the tone down. Back then studying for a PhD was almost the defacto minimum requirement to have access. Few undergrads outside computer science had access. As an illustration, back then, once I got into a usenet discussion with some called Martin Rees ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Martin_Rees https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Martin_Rees ) on the nature of science.
  • rubsh99 7y ago
    IMO humans keep developing ornate epistemologies that have nothing to do with utilitarian needs of the public, and keep ramming them down the masses throats. An open literal trade network of materials is one thing. Deference to the godheadeds romantic notions that a minority rule of that trade network is proper order is nonsense. It’s WWE as a political platform. Yet at scale we keep deferring to the romantic until the utilitarian aspect is kept from the growing masses, we refuse to accept the literal growing population, so a new romance comes along to expand access to utilitarian life and then it’s gamed over a generation until... well you get the point. Chimp tribes have been observed killing their alphas. Utilitarian life became more normalized for the tribe at large. Humans might consider figuratively doing the same. Emotionally disempowering such nonsense. It does nothing to limit our capacity for great ideas. Einstein was not an Alexander the Great literally. We need to be modeling neurons, which is exactly what rule of law/religion/monarch does so let’s not get all “oh that’s scary mind control”, we’ve long accepted it’s required without having the science to see how literal that truth is, to disempower unaccountable empire building. Personal property is one thing. Unaccountable manipulation of social agency at scale is inequality, and despite many of us here making bank in tech, the daily cadence should be in our control as individuals. And it’s pretty clear to me the messaging has effectively made it so it’s not. Talking heads on MSNBC going on about socialist death squads, keeping the ship on course. Then Fox News of course. Don’t look behind the curtain! I saw this in the 80s/90s too. Who is all in office still? What a shock the narrative isn’t feeling much different 30 years later.
  • LaGrange 7y ago
    > I'm too young to have been a part of Usenet, but it seems to me that there's no good way to recreate the space described in the article without keeping most people out. Hahahah no. So the biggest problem of usenet wasn't really the throngs of the "Eternal September" people (I hate the expression, btw). It was that nearly every Usenet group had its resident troll with too much time on their hands and an extreme obsession. So you'd post about, say, plans to build a 2nd railway track between Chachówek and Radom, and you'd get some dude go at you about how useless that would be and how improving transport between Warsaw and Radom would destroy the public infrastructure of the entire country. This is not theoretical, I've stumbled on usenet archives from _a few years ago_ recently and have seen the dude still going. And it was everywhere. Operating systems? Some journalist going off about how Mac's better than Linux in Every. Single. Thread. General "whine about the world" group? Some random libertarian to tell you that actually it's you who sucks. It wasn't many people, but they were active enough to ruin everyone's day. You could mute them, but unless you muted every thread that included them (and nearly every did) you'd still be exposed to them. And, because I happened to meet a few of them personally: if you further restrict the space by means, credentials and "interest", all you're going to get is a higher concentration of these people.
    • pmoriarty 7y ago
      "So the biggest problem of usenet ... was that nearly every Usenet group had its resident troll with too much time on their hands and an extreme obsession." This is what kill files were for, which every half-decent news reader of the time had (something that's still lacking in most contemporary web forums). So trolling wasn't really a problem, because you could easily filter out the trolls. Same with spam, especially once Bayesian spam filtering was invented. No, the real challenge that Usenet faced was the World-Wide Web. People were enamoured with the new shiny, with hypertext, and with embedded pictures and styling, which Usenet did not have. Web forums were also a lot easier to use. You didn't need to download or learn to use a news client. All you needed was a web browser, which everyone already had and knew how to use. Also, web search results on your topic of interest usually pointed you to forums, not to Usenet newsgroups. If Usenet was better integrated in to the web, it might have stood a chance.
  • zouhair 7y ago
    > I'm too young to have been a part of Usenet Indeed you are[0] [0]: https://timeline.com/flame-wars-early-cyberbullying-1c509aa5ffad?gi=13e0b5bb82f7 https://timeline.com/flame-wars-early-cyberbullying-1c509aa5...
    • zozbot234 7y ago
      These conflicts didn't really matter because nobody used real names anyway. Online identities were very much expected to be disposable, if necessary. Real names and real-world reputation wpuld only enter the picture in more "serious" spaces where moderation actions and social expectations were correspondingly a lot higher. Modern social media merged the "real names only" expectation of the most academic Usenet groups with the conflict-orientation of alt.flame.flame.flame and www.4chan.org. Disaster is the predictable outcome of this, often with non-trivial real-world consequences.
      • zouhair 7y ago
        There were still a lot of flame wars between known people.
  • dejawu 7y ago
    I've been toying with the idea of running some "chatroom experiments" - chatrooms each with different functional gimmicks, one of which would be capping the user count allowed in each channel. I think reddit's robin [0] was onto something really cool and I wish they'd explored it more in-depth. [0] https://www.reddit.com/r/joinrobin/comments/6398yp/what_was_robin/ https://www.reddit.com/r/joinrobin/comments/6398yp/what_was_...
  • Animats 7y ago
    There's no good way to recreate the space described in the article without keeping most people out. Right. Anonymity plus the ability to create an unlimited number of accounts guarantees spam. Originally, to have a USENET address you had to have an account on a time-sharing computer of moderate size, or run your own node. Both were hard to create in bulk, which kept the noise level down. What can we use now? Facebook real names? RealID? Proof of work?
  • toohotatopic 7y ago
    >there's no good way to recreate the space described in the article without keeping most people out. I have to disagree. You don't have to keep them out, you just have to provide an option to mark and filter them. Then, it's possible to see the full spectrum of comments and interact with everybody. However, if discussions become too big, the filters can be used to remove the noise. Creating such a system will be brutally eye-opening for some people but it will inevitably come. The minimum viable product will be the Chinese social graph. If China plays its cards right, they have the tool to overcome Eternal September.
  • vkou 7y ago
    > In my estimation, the larger and broader a group is, the more it'll approximate human culture and interaction as a whole. It shouldn't be a surprise when the negative parts of those things (e.g. war, strife, hatred) emerge, just as much as the positive things (peace, fellowship, love). Given how vicious and downright nasty politics can get in incredibly homogeneous small towns/organizations/communities, I don't think the size of a community has all that much to do with this. As soon as everyone is not friends with everyone, people start behaving in incredibly shitty ways. If the community does not police that behaviour, the resulting interactions become quite visibly toxic. If the community does police that behaviour, then they are still toxic, but in a less-visible manner.
  • dredmorbius 7y ago
    In large part agreed. People see Usenet and the wide-open access to all. What they fail to see, especially for its crucial first formative decade (1980-1990) was the very formidable gates that did exist: institutional access through selective research universities, and a handful of tech firms and government agencies. It was a bit like Disneyland's legendary E-Ticket -- once inside the gates you could wander freely and sample at will. But there was a price to be paid to enter: technical ability, inclination, and most of all access to the institutions. Those institutions also provided a brake on some of the worse forms of abusive behaviour -- individuals could be identified, sanctioned, and removed from the system. The small number of site administrators (initially literally a handful, later still capable of fitting within a single conference room or lecture hall) also reflected a balance of centralisation and decentralisation which seemed to mostly work. Much of what was good and bad about Usenet derived from these gatekeepers, and that is a point very often missed in subsequent treatments or discussions.
    • jfalcon 7y ago
      Don't forget that Usenet itself has its own safeguards as in the news.admins and the newsgroup moderators should that particular newsgroup have it enabled. Otherwise, it was and still is the wild west in terms of content and quality.
• MrGilbert 7y ago
  > [...] how to build better online communities by studying internet history. I love that part already, even without reading the full article. Yesterday, I had an interesting experience (yes, storytime): I started using a fountain pen again a while ago, and wanted to research why I've some pain in my wrist after using it[1]. So I stumbled upon an old thread, which basically asked how to develop a "well-refined handwriting"[2]. This thread was from 2004, so just short after when I started to use "the internet". The conversation was all in all very polite, respectful, with some tips from other members, and often some kind of "well, you could try it like this and that" or "I found something here, where xyz showed you could do it like this", "I prefer to do it like this, but ymmv.", and etc. The thread spans 19 pages, and, interestingly, is still active almost 15 years later. What stroke me the most was the change of tone towards the end. There was a lot more "you HAVE to do it like that", "THIS is how it WORKS!" and there like. Also, they started discussing what "well-refined" means at all. 15 years later. There was a lot of, let's say, "whining" towards the end of this thread (that school nowadays needs a lot of parental involvment, nothing works, and everything is bad). I am left confused. Something has changed in the last 15 years, and I'm not sure what the reason is. [1]: You guessed it: It has to do with the way I'm holding it. Now, back to topic! [2]: //edited upon request, german page though: https://www.penexchange.de/forum_neu/viewtopic.php?f=17&t=378 https://www.penexchange.de/forum_neu/viewtopic.php?f=17&t=37...
  • yummypaint 7y ago
    Could it be more school-aged children online?
  • yori 7y ago
    > Despite the english name of the website, it's a german page, so no use in linking it here I suppose. No, please do link it here. First, there are many Germans here who would appreciate it. Second, people like me who cannot read German can still auto-translate the page to English and read it.
    • MrGilbert 7y ago
      Understood - I added the link. :)
• cjslep 7y ago
  Federating applications allows one to balance the competing factors of building a local community with its own identity and having that community participate in a wider whole. The hard part is convincing users to use the federated applications.
• sneak 7y ago
  "dealing with bad actors", as the author puts it, is censorship by another name. Anything truly a public space is going to be filled with things you don't like seeing. That's the messy part of real freedom for a whole crowd of people. I recently wrote about 2k words on this exact topic: From https://sneak.berlin/20200211/instagram/ https://sneak.berlin/20200211/instagram/ : > For a moment, put aside the fact that you may or may not want to read any of that, or spend time thinking about any of that. Any time that doesn’t happen, considering how many people are on the internet and the theoretical ideal of any-to-any communication, then some communications are being censored (or you’re posting about the weather/your kids). The why and the how of that censorship should interest you, even if you like or benefit from it most of the time, such as not seeing constant spam in your DMs. > Who is permitted to create accounts to speak? What money, rights, privacy, or information must they give up to do so? Who doesn’t have access to the prerequisites for an account and is excluded from the public square? How many different accounts are people permitted? Can people create new accounts anonymously? How much or how often are they permitted to post? On which topics? How many people are they permitted to message? You can’t follow every single account on Twitter, for example. You can’t DM a million people in one day.
  • netsharc 7y ago
    To anyone who read through those 2k words: Is it worth reading (after clicking away a "subscribe to my newsletter!" dialog), or is it just some guy's mental masturbation? (Hah, on the topic of things one doesn't like seeing...). I scrolled to the end and I think sneak concluded with "delete social media, send emails to each other". Then again, people who think they're highly philosophical enough to be offering newsletter subscriptions are probably not worth reading.
  • bovermyer 7y ago
    Sounds like you're OK with trolls and death threats. Should I assume you originate that kind of content?
    • Mediterraneo10 7y ago
      > Should I assume you originate that kind of content? No, you shouldn’t. Slashdot (in its golden age, which was also a golden age of inventive trolling) and 4Chan has shown that there are a subset of internet users who, while not creators of that kind of content themselves, actually enjoy the trolling, it brings them merriment.
• _red 7y ago
  It really annoys me that increasingly its required to join slack / discord / telegram channel in order to connect with developers of projects I'm interested in. I understand spam is a problem, but its such step backwards from just subscribing to alt.whatever. The glory days when NNTP was built-in to most email clients, so mornings were spent with a cup of coffee answering emails and keeping up with project conversations. The future of our world looks to be hyper-siloed with incessant privacy leaking and no one actually seems to mind.
  • Topgamer7 7y ago
    I am more disturbed that these groups are not search index-able. If you want to find an issue that someone encountered in a game for example. You won't be able to search to find it.
    • u801e 7y ago
      You can to some extent by searching Google groups (which would include posts to usenet). It doesn't work very well in some cases though.
      • Topgamer7 7y ago
        Oh I was referring to the new communication channels such as Slack and Discord. They are not publicly searchable whatsoever.
  • catalogia 7y ago
    > I understand spam is a problem From what I've seen in numerous channels for software projects on freenode, spam is not a problem on IRC. A project choosing to use discord/slack/etc instead of IRC is a real disappointment.
    • crb3 7y ago
      IRC lacks backscroll. Even if you park a bot in your channel to act as recording secretary, there's no low-friction means of getting at that history without going out of band. This means that spam doesn't persist... but neither does consideration and consensus.
• h2odragon 7y ago
  Keeping a decent Usenet spool running was no joke. I'd say the primary reason Usenet died is ISPs and schools stopped hosting their own news feeds. You had to go commercial, by around '96; and by '98 that'd pretty well killed it off. It was harder to put stuff up on Usenet than the web, and once you had it was gone in day or weeks. I don't know what "store and forward" publication would look like today; the "common carrier" concerns about being responsible for something someone else posted to your spool seem to be larger and murkier today then they were back then.
  • u801e 7y ago
    > You had to go commercial, by around '96; and by '98 that'd pretty well killed it off. My ISP had a Usenet feed up till 2010 and I was a regular poster in several groups from 1999 through 2014.
  • joshspankit 7y ago
    You touch on the very difficult legal conversation that was just bubbling up when the commercial providers stepped in: Companies that had their own Usenet servers had to not only keep a massive storage pool with serious bandwidth, but they were without question hosting illegal material. At a certain point before that it was flying under the radar: most people seemed to assume that it was just text since that’s all the technology supported, but of course 7-bit encoding, multi-part archives, and parity files all had changed that. Once the rights groups got wind, the clock was ticking Some “scene groups” chose to encrypt uploads and change post names, but that only served to splinter the usefulness of it since most of those became group specific. For everyone else, it was ISPs committing more and more resources to fighting to keep illegal files off their network, and end-users scrambling to either grab stuff fast before it was taken down, or move to a grey market “full archive“ provider for a fee. Somehow, as bittorrent took off, the newsgroup technology never ended up having to “pay the piper”. But that is definitely something that could happen very easily in current day.
• jasode 7y ago
  >Decentralized / Shared Ownership - a genuinely public space no one “owned” >IMO, this last aspect is what made Usenet truly special. >The idea that no one was bigger than any given (news)group was baked directly into the software. Everyone held the keys to the castle. [...] Sadly, it seems we’ve given up on the idea of online communities as shared spaces — but studying Usenet is a great way to be reminded of what’s possible. I took the opposite lesson from USENET history: shared spaces where _everyone_ has equal say and power is _impossible_. (Much of my thinking in the following paragraphs is influenced by Clay Shirky but his essay seems to be deleted from the internet.[1]) Any digital shared space that needs to function for the long term will always create a formal (or informal) power structure where a subset have disproportionate influence. Therefore, any idealism of a shared space where everyone has equal say or power will devolve into unequal power. This has happened with all "digital shared spaces" of any significance outside of USENET such as Bitcoin (democratic home computers --> China ASIC miners), or Ethereum (a few influential developers choose to reverse the DAO hack), or Wikipedia (super editors with special powers to reverse edits). The repetition of that human history across many digital domains shows that only a subset will hold the keys to the castle. I was an avid user of USENET in the 1980s. I learned C Language by asking questions in USENET (comp.lang.c). I also had my first long discussions on economics on USENET. I have a fondness for nostalgia but that doesn't change the fact that reddit/Stackoverflow/HN are far more useful to me than USENET ever was. I think that private ownership of those entities improves baseline quality of discussion. Sure, Mastodon is decentralized but the discussions there are not as interesting to me as the front page of HN. We techies don't like to admit that decentralization makes shared spaces worse on many dimensions which is why I abandoned USENET because it wasted too much of my reading time. [1]https://www.google.com/search?q=clay+shirky+group+worst+enemy https://www.google.com/search?q=clay+shirky+group+worst+enem...
  • prepend 7y ago
    There aren’t too many truly successful forums I know of, but I think the key is some form of benevolent dictatorship and transparency so the community can fork or more quickly depart. HN might be the last forum working forum where I participate and it’s pretty topic specific. There are still some dev projects that use irc (maybe pandas), but email is expensive to support because it’s 1:1 in that my answer only helps the recipient and it gets mixed in with all the other stuff. I recently had a problem with the Altair python viz package and submitted a question on GitHub but found their google group [0] from searching and had someone help me in the middle of the night EST. That was neat. I think my take away is that there doesn’t need to be a single protocol like nntp as long as there is effective search. Although I do miss my morning coffee and Usenet. Phenomenal porn too. [0] https://groups.google.com/forum/m/#!forum/altair-viz https://groups.google.com/forum/m/#!forum/altair-viz
• prepend 7y ago
  I think the secret to reviving Usenet is to make it harder to use. The hassle of using irc is like a proof of work that doesn’t keep out all idiots, but helps. I haven’t used Usenet in years and the only people I know who still use it, use it for movies and music and stuff. I spent a lot of time on alt.food.tacobell and alt.destroytheearth and alt.music and places like that. They worked for the same reason bbs boards on fidonet worked. I think because there wasn’t anything better and they were hard to set up and use. So only people with enough time or passion or smarts to overcome the setup and management were involved. I expect that once people stop trying to pyramid scheme crypto, we will eventually get some sort of “pay a penny per message with tips and escalating costs for violations” that is protocol based so can be run by volunteers rather than “core developers.” It needs to be just confusing enough to keep out people, but useful enough to keep in enough people.
  • chrissnell 7y ago
    Sorry, but the ship has sailed. I ran a BBS and FidoNET node (and even a hub) and it was the golden era of computers for me. Sadly, there's just no way that we could ever drum up the sustained interest to (re)build a semi-private network with a high technical bar again. People simply don't have the time. It was the era before smartphones and social media and Netflix and most people came home from work and watched cable TV or read books and most average people never conversed with other people outside their immediate sphere. It was new and novel but that feeing is long gone. Now people get into arguments online and don't even appreciate the long chain of technology that makes it so instantaneous. Believe me, I would ditch all of this tech and go back to 1992 in an instant if it was a viable option but let's be real: we've been discussing this in the semi-annul Fido and Usenet HN posts for years and yet, here we are. The only way this could happen is if some techno-elites with name recognition decided to recreate it. Even then, it would probably die quickly. Remember Ello?
• yori 7y ago
  Has Usenet really died? I still see many active newsgroups with posts appearing daily.
  • rjsw 7y ago
    I still use it every day too.
    • kreddor 7y ago
      I was a usenet user back in the day, but I don't actually know how I would access it now. Is there any other way than using a commercial provider? My ISP certainly doesn't provide access and haven't for I don't know how long.
      • rjsw 7y ago
        I use the free server at Eternal September [1] It only carries the text groups, no binaries (so no pOrn). [1] https://www.eternal-september.org/ https://www.eternal-september.org/
    • lunias 7y ago
      Me too! Well, maybe not every day, but most days. Usenet rules.
  • smhenderson 7y ago
    Forgive my ignorance but how/where do you get to it? It's been so long since I even tried I'm not sure where to begin anymore. Thanks!
    • pwg 7y ago
      Here is a long list of clients: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Usenet_newsreaders https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Usenet_newsreaders And you can get free access to the text groups (no alt.binaries.*) from, at least, either of: Eternal September: https://www.eternal-september.org/ https://www.eternal-september.org/ or AIOE https://www.aioe.org/ https://www.aioe.org/
• derekp7 7y ago
  For dealing with "bad actors", the problem is anonymity. Systems such as moderation, adding people to an ignore list, etc are all defeated because bad actors can get unlimited anonymous identities. Ways of combating that (such as a signup form checking IP address, or other patterns) remove some anonymity which isn't really that great either. What I'd like to see is the ability to get a personal identity SSL cert with tooling (browser plugins, for example) to make it easy to use on signup pages. This personal cert could have several fields, depending on how much information the user revealed to the certificate authority. The primary field would be how much they paid for the certificate. That way people can be as anonymous as they want, and can get new IDs if they need, but they have to pay for each one. Then forums could require new users to have a certificate that cost at least a minimum amount, whatever is required to keep trolls away (that is, trolls who constantly sign up with new IDs). I'm thinking that $5.00 should be enough for most purposes. (There would be a minimal cost to cover the CA's expenses, however anything above that can be specified by the user depending on if they want a bronze level or platinum level certificate) There could be additional fields that the CA verified, such as name, address, etc. These could also be marked as "Supplied to / verified by CA", but not included in the cert (so only the CA knows that info, and can have a policy of destroying their records shortly after verification). Or if needed (such as for financial transactions), name and address could be part of the cert. The whole idea here is that forums could better control when troll users register multiple accounts -- yes, with the "completely anonymous" version of the cert the troll could keep buying new ones, but that is still a higher bar they have to cross than they do now.
  • inviromentalist 7y ago
    I'm a fan of this idea. Reddit is a corporate cesspool where marketing teams do "reputation management". Today, You might think someone is sharing a deal on groceries, but in reality Aldi has carefully planned a post, buying accounts and upvotes. When caught, marketing teams learn what people use to identify fake accounts, and make future accounts more legitimate. Heck we still see this on Twitter with Trump. Identification should be optional but preferred.
  • dexen 7y ago
    >For dealing with "bad actors", the problem is anonymity I wish it was this simple :^) Consider Facebook, where people post mostly under their own name and photo. Even a casual visit to Facebook quickly reveals your hypothesis is wrong; it's nearly the exact opposite of reality. Contrast that with HN, where users range from pseudonymous to fully anonymous, and where discussion is kept to a much higher standard. It bears repeating - the discourse on HN is kept to a much higher standard. Active moderation and community guiding, performed by intelligent agents, is the real answer to the woes. Anything automatic, anything with a guaranteed outcomes will be 'gamed' and put to bad ends. --edit-- There's also the separate but equally important matter of privacy. As internet spaces became both the town square and also gentlemens' clubs and also private homes to multitude of discourses, we need privacy from various actors' prying eyes.
• olah_1 7y ago
  Obligatory link to Aether as the modern, decentralized Usenet. I highly suggest everyone looking at this post download the app and join some tech rooms. Just repost links and help build the community up, quite literally "for science". https://getaether.net/ https://getaether.net/
  • iwalton3 7y ago
    For anyone on Linux that would rather not install Snap, Aether is a standard electron app. You can unpack the snap and run it as a regular application using unsquashfs. It also looks like there is a blacklist for Aether (https://static.getaether.net/Badlist/Latest/badlist.json https://static.getaether.net/Badlist/Latest/badlist.json). If you're concerned about using this application because someone might post illegal content, this could be used to prevent that from being a problem. (I'm not a lawyer though. There may still be legal risk in running software like this.)
• skrowl 7y ago
  I'm old enough to remember when every dial up and early ADSL ISP included access to their own first-party usenet server. Now I'm paying 3x the cost for 100x the bandwidth, but no usenet server.
• somesortofsystm 7y ago
  (Disclaimer: 30 years ago, I got on the Internet as a junior operator. My first task, after setting up email for myself, was to build the company's new USENET feed. This was the start of a very fast, loud, bumpy rocket ride... and now here I am, a grumpy old man, wishing we still had USENET... /disclaimer) All we need, is for the OS distribution vendors to include a way to mount a global, public filesystem - without involving any third party beyond a DNS request. Imagine if Linux and MacOS users could point their machines, immediately upon install, to a global filesystem - and start publishing to it themselves, directly from their own machine - without involving third parties, or servers, or whatever. Alas, the OS guys won't do this, because they've decided to make money from ads and tracking peoples habits, so have stopped being decent OS vendors, these days. But I keep thinking to myself, surely some kid is out there gluing IPFS and Debian together in a way that just makes sense. It really does make sense. I guess, it'll happen soon enough. And when it does, so many big fish are going to find themselves hungry. (Perhaps thats also why it hasn't been done yet.)
  • dredmorbius 7y ago
    What could possibly go worng?
  • dboreham 7y ago
    Here you are: https://github.com/ipfs/go-ipfs/blob/master/docs/fuse.md https://github.com/ipfs/go-ipfs/blob/master/docs/fuse.md
• vascocosta 7y ago
  Getting a home Internet connection in 1997 I was still lucky enough to enjoy Usenet. Back then I spent the bulk of my time answering emails and Usenet posts, rather than surfing the web or gopher space. The almost identical interface shared by email and Usenet was what truly captivated me. Usenet was also great due to it's subscription model with a pull paradigm. Instead of getting all emails in a mailing list pushed to you, you could pull only a selection of newsgroups and messages to read, depending on your mood. I loved this way of interacting with people in the nineties. Like already mentioned, Usenet promoted thoughtful answers, as opposed to quick superficial answers like on IRC. I spent a lot of time on the latter, nevertheless Usenet was where I learnt critical thinking and massively improved my English. Thank you for that, rec.autos.sport.f1, a newsgroup which is still active by the way. Having gone through a reasonable amount of Internet eras, IMHO the main roadblock to a perfect community, no matter which protocol is used, will always be an elevated number of users. Thus, a possible solution is to have more communities with less users.
  • mmcgaha 7y ago
    I couldn't agree more; In the 90s, my main internet usage was lurking various news groups. Everything that I wanted was on usenet. I could get answers to programming questions, tech support, source code, software, quality images, and plenty of reading material. I am not sure when my net habits changed, but I was still setting up leafnode as late as 2003.
    • vascocosta 7y ago
      Indeed. I forgot to mention what you just did. Usenet, despite its distributed/federated technical nature, which made the network extremely resilient, centralised the way we searched for information on all sort of different topics. There was no need to use dozens of different protocols or visit different websites. I remember I had my newsgroups grouped by topic like programming, operating systems, science, sports and so on.
  • beezle 7y ago
    Back in the day...guess around 91 or 92... I was taking a full feed from UUNET using a Trailblazer modem. Clearly had to drop the binaries not long after but kept the rest until around 97 when a local ISP emerged that also had access to a feed. Memory lane!
• ageofwant 7y ago
  Ah yea, "Eternal September". I'm just old enough to have gotten on usenet when ES was in full swing, but you could still get a glimpse through the dust of stampeding trolls and the campfires of the marauding neverdowells of the lost great edifices that stood in that land before. I have to confess that I was one of those trolls: Edgy McEdgeLord saying things and acting in ways that I'll never dare with real people in a real room. I would like to see AI moderated feeds of some sort, tuned to the preferences of the seed group. It would be a interesting social experiment at least.
• himinlomax 7y ago
  I remember that in the late 90s, there was some effort at implementing distributed voting on Usenet with an out of band protocol. The newsreader I used implemented it iirc. This could be implemented in a decentralized way cryptographically. Subscribe to people whose vote you trust by accepting their cert, you can also have a web of trust.
• fortran77 7y ago
  I wonder if the flamewar I started back in 1988, when I suggested that "Lost in Space" was better than "Star Trek", is still going on. I should check out rec.arts.tv.startrek and see.
• nige123 7y ago
  I had fun writing my Master's thesis on 'Flaming' back in 1995. There was a 6 month long flame war between the denizens of alt.tasteless and those quiet, kind, kitty lovers in rec.pets.cats. And what about Kibology - where is Kibo now??! ;-)
• indymike 7y ago
  I have a lot of positive feelings for Usenet, but it wasn't because of the lack of central control. Most of the positive was that the internet was smaller, and the people on Usenet were often very influential. I got to talk to movie producers, scientists, business executives, rock stars and lots of very engaged, interested regular people. The problem with Usenet was that it was that it slowly was infested with pirates (of the copyright kind), troll, netcops and spammers.
  • Mediterraneo10 7y ago
    > pirates (of the copyright kind), troll, netcops and spammers. Don't forget the mentally ill, who ruined a lot of science newsgroups. It became hard to find solid discussion among university-employed experts once the newsgroup attracted cranks who wanted to propound their ideas, e.g. "Perpetual motion machines are possible!" or "I have deciphered Linear A!" Even if you killfiled the mentally ill, a lot of the experts got bogged down in pointlessly trying to refute the cranks, so you would see their replies and it totally destroyed the group's culture. That said, I am not sure why you find pirates a problem. Sharing binaries actually goes back to the golden age of Usenet, before Eternal September.
    • indymike 7y ago
      There were quite a few enthusiastic believers in the impossible, but that happens in real life, too. The reason pirates were a problem was they were the excuse for removing Usenet as a service for ISPs. Binaries were most of the bandwidth, legal and storage cost.
• btbuildem 7y ago
  > Unfortunately Twitter hashtags suffer from the same structural deficiency as Usenet newsgroups: unfettered anarchy collapses at scale. Perhaps that is a feature and a life-saver after all. Nobody should have a megaphone that can reach five billion people.
• rbanffy 7y ago
  > Missing a business model In the late 90's my main access to it was via my ISP. It was one more reason to sign up. > Surpassed in ease-of-use by browser-based forums (didn’t need to be installed) At that time browsers came with NNTP clients. Both Netscape and Internet Explorer (in the form of Microsoft News and Mail, later Outlook Express, later Windows Mail). While the experience was better with a dedicated NNTP client, using the system didn't require installing anything the user wouldn't already have. As a side note, I twice set up NNTP servers to replace e-mail discussions in two companies with reasonable success. Public discussions were so much neater in that format.
• smileypete 7y ago
  Would be nice to have an NNTP interface to read HN Free agent still seems to work on Win8 :-)
• trasz 7y ago
  All I want is NNTP access to HN, tbh.
  • mothsonasloth 7y ago
    Have a look at ActivityPub
• rafaelvasco 7y ago
  USENET was before my time (was born in 1987 but only started using computers seriously in 1999) so I really don't know how it was. But, out of curiosity , I've payed a USENET provider for some months to try it. Downloads pretty fast most of the time, and you can find some pretty obscure shit, or things that aren't released yet in torrent. But ultimately it's not worth it.
  • ulkesh 7y ago
    The author of the article isn't really referring to binaries. NNTP was wonderful for text-based discussion. It still could be, but not having moderation to alleviate spam/etc is a real concern.
  • sequoia 7y ago
    To add upon or when Ulkesh said: whereas today "USENET = pirated stuff" in the olden days "USENET = Discussion."
    • rafaelvasco 7y ago
      I'm aware of that. Never said USENET is and always was about pirated stuff. Was just giving my impressions on modern USENET.
      • sequoia 7y ago
        Ah OK. Your comments about download speeds on a post about recreating communities like old-time USENET used to have created the impression that perhaps you were missing the point. I can see you were not! Cheers.
        • rafaelvasco 7y ago
          All good :)
• dredmorbius 7y ago
  Community and conversation are exceedingly difficult to scale. Mostly they simply don't, and scaling will kill what little that actually does form. The article cites a couple of pieces addressing why Usenet died. I'm fairly familiar with one of those as I wrote it about four years ago: https://old.reddit.com/r/dredmorbius/comments/3c3xyu/why_usenet_died/ https://old.reddit.com/r/dredmorbius/comments/3c3xyu/why_use... My thinking's evolved somewhat. First, as noted, Usenet was small by today's standards, with Brian Reid and others' reports putting total active users at 140k (posting) from 880k with access, as of 1988, and just shy a million in 1995. Total worldwide Internet usage in 1996 was about 16 millions (through growing rapidly). Those would be failed-social-media-site numbers today. Usenet, like Facebook, formed on and around academic communities, and specifically highly selective institutions. This created several barriers to entry / points of control, which were both highly discriminatory and highly effective at helping dissuade some of the worst forms of misbehaviour. For a while. The type of organisation of a discussion ... matters a lot. Usenet's fixed groups kind of worked and kind of didn't, and we've seen a few additional models come up since. Ad hoc structures (which Usenet didn't support at all), personal "salons" (think a typical blog -- Charlie Stross's comes to mind, also some social media hosts, Yonatan Zunger at G+ for those who were there). Location, time-centred, event/project based, and others. Clay Shirkey's concept of fluid organisations (something that can be dated back at least to Alvin Toffler's Future Shock, 1970, and "ad-hocracies") captures some of this. The liability and business-model problems (both upside and risk) are really huge, and cannot be overstated. I suspect a number of social media / user-generated-content site/service closures, including quite probably Google+ and Yahoo Groups, have much to do with this. Factors-promoting-growth and factors-promoting-continued-survival differ hugely. The elements which create a viable and attractive social network are almost entirely nontechnical. The elements which are required for a social network to continue once it's attained (or exceeded) critical mass are highly technical (though also call on a complex mix of other factors, business, social, legal, and more). Critically: the lessons and methods that get you successful won't keep you successful. Founding cohort is a huge factor for initial success and growth. Starting a new social network with the express goal of becoming the next Usenet, or Facebook-killer, or whatever, is almost certainly doomed to failure. Even more than starting any social network is. Probably better is to address the needs of a specific, paying, interested, and motivated community, from which there may be a future growth path. Tim Ferris's downsides of fame article posted a few days back makes some really good points about bad actors and scale -- you only need a few dimwits at a million to a billion followers / fans before negative encounters start becoming really common. Human brains simply aren't built for mass social network interactions, whether as one of the many or one of the few. Any concept in which nominal success criteria are principally predicated on scale means winner-take-all dynamics, and that there can be at most only one winner. Maybe a winner and an also-ran or two. Given numerous factors including several mentioned above, the winner will likely be determined based on starting conditions and a lot of raw luck. Possibly exchangable for ruthlessness. We've existed in a technically-mediated world in which the winners have tended to be US or Wester-based private corporations. The next decade or several may see changes to that. US hegemony of the Internet has been strongly criticised. Several of the possible alternative hegemons don't strike me as notable improvements. Given inherent monopolisation of technical communications, questions of closed vs. open protocols, and of private vs. public ownership and control, should be asked. Changing open standards is extraordinarily difficult. I'm inclined to say impossible. More typically, they're supersceded. Sometimes by other open standards, increasingly of late, not. The reasons for all of this would make for some extraoridinarily interesting academic research across numerous fields. Agreeing on how to do things is the most underrated technological innovation of the past 200 years. Usenet's client-independence is often stated as a benefit. I've argued that myself. Given variations in message formats and posting behaviours encouraged by highly different client mechanics, I'm not so sure of that. The Web is the worst possible applications development environment, but it does impose, not infrequently by force of law, a consistent UI/UX and format. Supporting both a useful level of behavioural consistency and a diversity of access tools would be a good but challenging goal. In my earlier Usenet piece I talked about the obvious advantages of decentralisation. I've been using several decentralised networks of late (Mastodon and Diaspora principally). I'm not so certain the advantages are entirely obvious any more. I think the questions "what problems is decentralisation supposed to solve, and what new problems is it creating?" need to be asked. I'd like to believe decentralisation is a positive. I'm not sure I can. And I was wrong about Ellen Pao and Reddit. She was doing well under an extraordinarily challenging environment, in which communicating basic facts was all but impossible. My apologies for my earlier comments.
• shadowgovt 7y ago
  I wonder what the technical hurdles would be to building a USENET client in a browser these days. If not directly implementable, a USENET-to-HTTP proxy running in the cloud (to address the issue the author identifies of "didn't need to be installed") could obviously be done (and has been done, or near to it, a couple times).
  • sequoia 7y ago
    My understanding is that the client isn't the technical challenge, it's the (federated) servers, and it's more of a business challenge. In particular, "who pays for them." Usenet servers used to be something ISPs maintained & your ISP subscription would include (usually) a certain number of hours of internet access per month, an email account, access to USENET and perhaps a couple other things. As it fell out of favor in the mainstream ISPs stopped supporting it/paying for it & it became a niche service to pay for separately, if I understand correctly, and the only people willing to pay (by and large) are people sharing pirated software, media, etc.
    • Symbiote 7y ago
      For a while, I used a commercial NNTP service which was free for text-only newsgroup access. I think I stopped once I started university, as there were better distractions. With a quick look on a partial NNTP server (requires registration), the only groups I used to look at that are still active is the old/retro computer one. Most of the posts are people still using these computers day-to-day, and finding problems with Javascript-heavy websites or outdated encryption. https://dotsrc.org/usenet https://dotsrc.org/usenet
  • Dirlewanger 7y ago
    I think the biggest problem is who is building it, and why. Open source is certainly a boon, but when insidiously magnanimous corporations start contributing and start spreading their influence, that's when rot creeps into the project.
• tom-thistime 7y ago
  Key part: Usenet was effectively a public space. Nobody had their hand on the OFF switch. Much less important part: Usenet was full of horrible behavior for many years before people started complaining about "Endless September." If there was a golden age it was before my time (1985).
  • webmaven 7y ago
    Prior to "Eternal September", maintaining a personal killfile[0]/scorefile was only a minor chore (indeed, adding someone to your killfile could be accompanied by a sense of glee), but in the next few years the addition of spam to the mix made it overwhelming, giving an edge to moderated mailing lists and discussion boards. YMMV, of course, depending on which groups you frequented and their community norms. pg's "A Plan for Spam"[1] provided a lower-effort solution eventually, but by then it was too late as the onboarding experience for new users had become hopelessly polluted and toxic (new email users at least had a grace period before their address was discovered). [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kill_file https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kill_file [1] http://www.paulgraham.com/spam.html http://www.paulgraham.com/spam.html
  • PaulDavisThe1st 7y ago
    Bitnet! the hot tub channel! 1985! the golden age!
• tptacek 7y ago
  As usual I am obliged to point out that what killed Usenet was software piracy. The amount of work it took to run a competitive news server with reliable binaries was unbelievable, easily the most expensive and fussy hardware we had at the ISP, and if your service fell behind or dropped any binaries, users would absolutely lose their shit: Usenet was an all-or-none proposition, so if you weren't going to buy a rack full of NetApp filers to run binaries you might as well not run Usenet at all. The protocol centralized before web interfaces made centralization palatable to users, and then died.
  • Isamu 7y ago
    Do you mean newsgroups like alt.binaries.* ? I completely forgot about that. They ate up all the bandwidth? I'll take your word for it. Source code sharing was pretty important I remember. That was how I first got Perl source code to compile, although it was probably not in the alt newsgroup tree, it must have been in some other that escapes my memory.
    • tptacek 7y ago
      They ate up disk and CPU. It was the nature of NNTP, at least at the serious provider levels, that you had to be able to keep up in real time with a certain high level of responsiveness, or you'd miss your window for posts and there'd be holes in your binaries (because Usenet is perhaps the dumbest imaginable way to transmit a large binary, a Usenet binary was a chain of separate posts, all of which were needed to reassemble the binary). You could run a Usenet server without binaries, just to host the discussions and source code sharing and whatnot. But customers would have none of it: if you didn't have binaries, you weren't serving real Usenet, and they'd go to ISPs that did, and when ISPs generally stopped serving Usenet because it had become the world's lamest warez and porn distribution network, they moved to centralized NNTP services.
      • webmaven 7y ago
        > (because Usenet is perhaps the dumbest imaginable way to transmit a large binary, a Usenet binary was a chain of separate posts, all of which were needed to reassemble the binary) I just realized that this is superficially similar to how bittorrent works...
• johnminter 7y ago
  I remember Usenet and the science newsgroups. The author of the parent article mentioned the problem with trolls. There was one who was especially infuriating and unforgettable. He was from Dartmouth and used the screen name "Archimedes Plutonium". People would be discussing some topic on the science newsgroups and he would post off topic rants proclaiming the plutonium atom was god. Of course people took the bait. Dartmouth decided that was part of free speech. I think this was the origin of the advice "Don't feed the trolls".
  • beezle 7y ago
    That guy was in my kill file...along with a few others that made sci.physics and similar otherwise unreadable! I do miss those groups and do check in from time to time but they are still heavily weighted to crackpot theories rather than general questions, reasonable discussion and new results. Sad.
    • downerending 7y ago
      I miss USENET, but I really really miss kill files. In principle one can locate substitutes for various sites like HN, but in practice it often seems ineffective and unreliable. I'd love to see a general solution to this.
• sequoia 7y ago
  I am sorry to say this (not really, I was young) but I was a USENET troll back in middle school. I remember coming home from school and running up to my computer, turning it on and connecting to the internet, downloading new messages to see what mayhem our (my friend and I shared a handle) latest provocations had caused. We eventually had an entire forum revolving around our posts, about 50% of messages were from or related to us. It became tiresome in time & we stopped. One anachronism that sounds almost unbelievable to younger internet users was this: another user threatened to (and did) take down my ISP and report me to my ISP "for abuse." It sounds so incredibly quaint in the 21st century, but time was you were expected to behave yourself online, potentially on penalty of your provider cutting you off. How times have changed.
• dspillett 7y ago
  > Interface - UI made it easy to scan many posts quickly This is the thing I really miss. The NNTP client I used in the late 90 / early 00s had a far better UX for dealing with large groups and complex nested threads (such as those seen in groups I used to frequent like comp.language.* and alt.fan.pratchett) than anything I've seen implemented via HTTP+HTML since. Part of that is due to bandwidth constraints no doubt: the client was working from a local database of content that the UI was pulling data from for display so achieving everything it did on "old web" tech could impose a massive bandwidth cost on the provider and UI latency cost on the user, but with modern UAs this could be largely replicated with the various client-side storage options. There would still be an issue for users who moved between different browser instances regularly, a bunch of "read/purged/etc" data would need to be synced between clients via the service which increases the design complexity, but something noticeably better than most (all) web based forums offer should be eminently possible.
  • talkingtab 7y ago
    does anyone have a screenshot of the usenet UI or an easy way to see it? A couple of people have mentioned this.
    • pwg 7y ago
      You can find several screen shots in the different client web pages linked from this wikipedia article: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Usenet_newsreaders https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Usenet_newsreaders
• fao_ 7y ago
  BBS systems are still alive (SDF has one, and it's reasonably good and well-read). So is IRC and mailing lists, the latter of which encourages the behaviour that Usenet had.
• arbitrage 7y ago
  good lord how old are we. just let USENET die and stay dead, the world moved on. we should too.
• rpiguy 7y ago
  People miss the quality of discussions on Usenet, but don't ever think about why the discussions were better. Biggest factor I think that made the discussions better is that folks were not connected all the time so discussions would span days or weeks. You had time think between posts. Folks would log on once or twice a day. Obviously there were exceptions. Today a reddit thread has about a 24 hour shelf life because of its global nature, and then it dies. Furthermore the most intense discussions will happen in bursts and then flame out. People aren't engaging in discussion they are shouting their opinion into the ether and moving on. Second factor obviously is the tremendously larger and more diverse population on the internet. More people mean more new topics posted and less time to discuss topics. The actors are less technical overall than those who had internet in the 90s and early 00s.
  • brobdingnagians 7y ago
    True, kind of why love letters (and letters in general) were better back in the day. People took more time to think about things, and magnus opus was a thing.
  • mumblemumble 7y ago
    I think you're very right about the slower pace fostering better discussions. It plays out in other places, too. I've noticed that, since moving to Slack, the quality of electronic communication at my company has taken a serious nose dive. I think precisely because Slack makes it nearly impossible to have a deep conversation over a long period of time. I've also noticed that the quality of discussion in face-to-face meetings tends to be inversely proportional to the number of people present. The more people, the quicker you need to be to speak if you want to get anything out there before the flow of conversation moves on and whatever you have to say becomes a non sequitur. The less time you can take to compose your thoughts before presenting them. The people who place the highest value on measured speech generally don't open their mouths at all, unless someone puts them on the spot. The worst incarnation of this phenomenon that I can think of seems to be Twitter. Twitter doesn't host conversations. It hosts a conversation-themed massively multiplayer live action game in which participants compete for scorekeeping tokens known as "likes" and "retweets".
• Paul_S 7y ago
  If you make a usenet anyone can use you'll just have another twitter or reddit. The reason usenet was different wasn't the technology but people. If it had been centralised it would've been the same.
• thosakwe 7y ago
  What I got from this article is that the main reason to return to Usenet is the lack of requiring moderators. Wouldn't you still need moderators on a big enough Usenet instance? There's also the issue of what happens in an unmoderated community of any size (4chan). EDIT: Also, I don't see "having more thoughtful discussions" as a good reason for needing to return to Usenet. Not every discussion has to be thoughtful, and really, most aren't.
  • amiantos 7y ago
    What I got from this article was sheer nostalgia, mixed with early-internet optimism. The fact is, on the internet these days, you can't allow everyone to have an equal voice without threat of moderation, because more often than not people will use that voice to spew hatred and vitriol just for fun. In the early days it was somewhat easy for good people to shout down or ignore the bad actors, but these days there are more bad actors than there are good people--if this isn't the case, it's surely the case that the bad actors simply have more time, and the good people ultimately flee and do something else with their time.
    • thosakwe 7y ago
      Agreed, especially since it's often that the bad actors aren't even human, and simply explosive in number. Moderation is hard, but ignoring it is a recipe for disaster.
  • filoleg 7y ago
    As a sidenote, 4chan has moderators, they are just called "cleaners". And 4chan is far from the wild west people imagine it to be, with the exception of some general cesspool boards like /b/, /v/, /pol/, etc. that cater to the lowest common denominator and are super general in terms of topics discussed (which naturally attracts a ton of people). More niche boards (most of which happen to be categorized as SFW) have some pretty good material, tend to stay on-topic, and are indeed suited well for a civil discussion. My personal favorites would be /o/ (anything car/vehicle related), /toy/ (for stuff like assembling/painting/working on models), /lit/ (for literature), /diy/ (self-explanatory), and /sci/ (science&math). Yes, it isn't super concentrated serious material with no fun allowed, e.g., there are occasional threads where people do things like build a motorized bathtub and then proceed arguing about feasibility of making it street legal. But the quality of discussion there isn't that bad at all, and the moderators are pretty strict about banning people and deleting threads for either being unrelated to the theme of the board or for NSFW stuff on SFW boards.
• kchoudhu 7y ago
  Posted on Substack. Perfect.
• metalgearsolid 7y ago
  I think brining usenet back is problem solving in reverse. Usenet will not bring back the joys of early internet, but attempting to revive an old technology through the collaboration of other curious and passionate people certainly will.
• rednerrus 7y ago
  Twitter used to be great before everyone and their opinion is great. People make communities. It's the people that are great and it's the people that suck. The key is how do you filter people who suck out.
• hota_mazi 7y ago
  I think reddit is a superior product to Usenet. I used to use Usenet in the early 90s, I was even a sysadmin at the time and helped my university install it. NNTP, huge hard drives, constant network stream, it was a big deal but so excited to manage and read it. But I quickly felt the need to have some kind of upvoting system in order to wade through the noise. At the time, I used jwz' genius "BBDB" emacs extension, which allowed you to weigh posts based on authors and subjects. The potentially most interesting articles would magically bubble at the top of the discussion group and this would tremendously speed up my consumption of all the groups. But obviously, this is not as effective as the crowdsource voting system that reddit uses. The combination of reddit's voting system (for the voting) and RES (for the customized author tagging) makes the reading a lot more efficient than Usenet ever was. I personally don't have a problem with the fact that reddit is proprietary. The amount of knowledge and entertainment that I gain from reddit way outweighs my slight philosophical discomfort from the proprietary aspect. And if one day, reddit fails to meet that criterion, another site will replace it. Digg has shown us that these sites are a lot less permanent than they seem.
• peterwwillis 7y ago
  > For more on how I plan to incorporate shared ownership into the community app I’m building, Soooo the whole idea of returning to Usenet is part of your product pitch. Can we get a giant asterisk on posts that are basically just advertisements?
• deleted 7y ago
  [deleted]
• buboard 7y ago
  what was the total population of users on usenet before 2000? any community turns to a mob above a certain level and rapidly becomes useless. If you wish to revive usenet style community, build something that is only technically capable people get to use and aim to gather approximately the same number of users. some of the new decentralized media are probably heading for this point .
• exterrestrial 7y ago
  Reddit is easily the best model for social media, if only the software was better. The key is prioritizing community over individuals. Subreddit admins have a ton of freedom, so long as a very small bit of their energy goes toward a few basic universal rules. This gives them a real sense of ownership. Healthy social media must support and defend pseudonymity, because it’s the only way to juggle the fact that everything on the internet can be recorded by at least one other party. And the only way to defend pseudonymity is to treat every user the same. Twitter’s “approved” users violates this and Facebook violates it in many different ways, but Reddit just prioritizes communities over individuals. This is the root of the solution. When people treat Reddit like it has some broad character or quality, I have to disagree. Those people just haven’t found a subreddit that they love, probably because they haven’t tried to. And I don’t think that needs to he changed or automated. If a Reddit-like site was the only social media, all these people would be motivated to create or build their own communities.
• daotoad 7y ago
  The concept of evaporative cooling (from other comments, not the OP) is really interesting. If you buy the principle, then a way to encourage quality posts and discourage poor posts would be to: 1. Limit the number of posts a person can make. 2. Reward posts that get responses with the ability to make more posts. Obviously you'd want to add some filigree to these principles to allow members of a conversational thread to post with abandon once they've already joined.
• ping_pong 7y ago
  The only issue that killed Usenet was the illegal content, namely MP3s and child pornography. Back in the early 90s, I knew people that were using Usenet for regular porn (not kiddie porn). But it was the MP3s once music piracy got big that became huge. The weight of all those binary posts, plus the risk of housing child pornography is why most ISPs shut off access to Usenet. Reddit is an excellent upgrade on Usenet. If you have a specific interest, it's usually well-maintained by a moderator or the subreddit dies. And unlike Usenet, the best comments usually bubble to the top, so you don't have to read every single comment, the voting mechanism works on well-run subreddits.
• nickdothutton 7y ago
  Discrimination is the key, discrimination, hierarchy, an elite, but an elite drawn from the mass. I wrote a little on this within the context of LinkedIn a while ago myself: https://blog.eutopian.io/building-a-better-linkedin https://blog.eutopian.io/building-a-better-linkedin
• aSplash0fDerp 7y ago
  I agree with the notion that early on, participants were pre-qualified by having to clear a small hurdle of hardware reqs and technical chops to connect. The mobile phone changed the barrier to entry forever on Internet 1.0, but if the satco's decided to launch petabytes of storage into space and require a specific basestation/modem to access the signal, that small hurdle would limit participation to those that made an effort and effectively leave 99% of Inet1 behind. Perhaps not the best example, but all it takes is a small technical hurdle to limit participation.
• a3n 7y ago
  Usenet died because it cost infrastructure owners to make space and bandwidth available for it, over and above the cost of the infrastructure itself.
• bookAlot 7y ago
  Boom uncontrollably
• anonymousiam 7y ago
  Usenet did not die for the reasons stated in the article. It died because all of the major ISPs succumbed to pressure from the media companies and stopped providing news feeds.
• tonfreed 7y ago
  I'm convinced the way we'll return to the golden age is if we all jump off broadcast social media if it's not anonymous. The amount of people I see demanding special treatment because of their follower count or whatever, or insisting they're to be free from all criticism is insane. I remember my parents telling me to never upload photos of ourselves onto the internet, now 20 years later we seem to have forgotten that little bit of common sense
• zzo38computer 7y ago
  I still use Usenet (although I would like to find more newsgroups that I may be interested in), and actually only started using it in late 2019 (and read another article posted to Usenet by someone who also did). Usenet is still in use (although maybe not so much compared to before). (Note: I don't use binary newsgroups, and the service I use doesn't include them anyways. That is OK, because it is the text newsgroups that I am interested in.) The flaws they list I think are often not as bad as the alternatives. Additionally, there are mitigations for them, such as kill files, alternative interfaces, etc. I also think that you should continue to use NNTP, both Usenet and otherwise (when making your own newsgroups which are not part of Usenet, I suggest Unusenet to avoid namespace collision; it uses reverse domain names as name spaces, like Java and some other stuff does; and like Usenet it can be federated, but usually isn't). This is a better alternative to mailing lists and web forums, although it is possible to have multiple interfaces to the same messages (you could have web forum, mailing list, and NNTP, all interoperable with each other). I would like to find more Usenet (and/or Unusenet and/or others; I think there is also something called "Rock solid network", apparently?) newsgroups for some stuff I am interested to have, and would like to promote use of NNTP. (I also think that those who make available Usenet archives should implement proper From-munging. The only one I downloaded so far, does not do this.)