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The geeks who saved Usenet (2002)
- chaimanmeow 6y agobring back rec.trolling and alt.flamewars
- iso1631 6y agoalt.wesley.crusher.die.die.die Always sounded hilarious (personally I loved Wes). Later found out how much the anti-wesley feeling affected Wil Wheton
- seniorThrowaway 6y agoThat does suck for Will who was a child at the time. The character is probably the most egregious Mary Sue of all time though.
- LukeShu 6y agoWas he really that bad for most if it though? If we ignore the cluster of bad Wesley episodes that only happened because of the 1988 writers' strike?
- ghaff 6y agoBoth TNG and DS9 had characters inserted to appeal to younger audiences that were mostly annoying/irrelevant to older ones. (DS9 at least had the excuse of being set on a space station.) If the producers weren't thinking about demographics, they wouldn't have been there. The original series wasn't immune either.
- LukeShu 6y agoSure, there's playing demographics, and then there's inserting "the most egregious Mary Sue of all time". I don't think anyone considers Jake Sisko or Nog to be on the level of Wesley Crusher.
- ghaff 6y agoNot really. Although I could have generally lived with a lower presence on DS9. (But it made at least more sense in the context than TNG.)
- Arrath 6y agoYeah I would have to agree. Nog especially, most Mary Sue's don't end up with prosthetics and PTSD.
- iso1631 6y agoActor who played Nog was 24 when DS9 started. Outside of a few very specific episodes mainly based around with his father or Nog, Jake was as boring as hell
- optimalsolver 6y ago>The character is probably the most egregious Mary Sue of all time though I'd give that honor to Rick Sanchez
- spudlyo 6y agoBring back Usenet Performance Art: alt.alien.vampire.flonk.flonk.flonk. See also The Meow Wars.[0] [0]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Meow_Wars https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Meow_Wars
- superkuh 6y agoBe the change you want to see. Usenet text groups are still there. You can get posting access via https://www.eternal-september.org/ https://www.eternal-september.org/ now that most ISPs have dropped usenet over the false 2004-2008 era scaremongering about it. Come back to usenet. Life is good. There's still some spam but it's honestly less than you get on any link aggregator on the web these days.
- chaimanmeow 6y agowow, that is a really great find. thanks!! awesome site
- EamonnMR 6y agoIs there a good writeup of how to do it and where to look for active groups? I set up a reader on my sdf account a while ago but I didn't end up finding much conversation.
- superkuh 6y agoThere isn't a lot. I don't know an automatic way to find active groups. The best way to find people is to post in a group you care about and see if anyone responds. edit: I tried to post in alt.flamewars but at least eternal-september doesn't carry it. I post on alt.cyberpunk and alt.startrek occasionally.
- mellosouls 6y agoIronically, Salon learned nothing from their own feature and its own discussion forum "TableTalk" was only narrowly saved by third parties (especially the Internet Archive) when they dumped it some years later. Unfortunately, too late to save the quite brilliant International Issues section, which had been arrogantly deleted without notice years before presumably because it was deemed "foreign" as well as being a cost-sink. It housed some of the most brilliant discussions I've ever read online, now mostly lost forever afaik. Strangely, Salon's own incompetence and lack of concern for guardianship is completely missing from the article. https://archive.org/details/archiveteam-tabletalk-panic https://archive.org/details/archiveteam-tabletalk-panic
- influx 6y agoThanks for killing Dejanews google. :(
- yuhong 6y agoDeja was already for sale, and there was "I Dream of Google Usenet" in the Slashdot thread: https://news.slashdot.org/story/00/10/17/0036218/deja-for-sale https://news.slashdot.org/story/00/10/17/0036218/deja-for-sa...
- buescher 6y agoI don't miss cascades.
- ghaff 6y agoI haven't examined it but there's apparently a Usenet archive independent of Google at https://www.usenetarchives.com/ https://www.usenetarchives.com/ I assume things are also on the IA in some form. Probably my earliest memory of Usenet (and really the Internet) is that after The Empire Strikes Back, there were endless posts on, I think, rec.arts.sflovers about whether [SPOILER :-)] Darth Vader was Luke's father. Someone at the AI Lab printed out the whole thread on the Lab's doubtless very expensive laser printer, bound it, and brought it into the movie committee office where I was hanging out a fair bit that summer
- WalterGR 6y agoUsenet archive independent of Google at https://www.usenetarchives.com/ https://www.usenetarchives.com/ Their stats from https://www.usenetarchives.com/stats.php https://www.usenetarchives.com/stats.php: Documents / Posts: 16,032,489 Average Document: 3.71 KB Storage Size: 56.76 GB (7.75%) Stats Collected: Mar 16, 2021, 17:34 EST The article says that Google had archived 700 million posts.
- escape_goat 6y agoThat archive appears to be in the middle of a database migration, so it's possible that this deficiency is temporary. It is (as of last report) actually a single-developer project that just launched in January, apparently with enough pull to get a shout-out from VICE's "Motherboard". The current privacy policy reserves the right do basically whatever they want with your usage data.
- WalterGR 6y agoThat archive appears to be in the middle of a database migration, so it's possible that this deficiency is temporary. Ah, I guess as of ~6 months ago the archive weighed in at 300 GB and 300 million posts, so hopefully temporary: https://www.reddit.com/r/usenet/comments/in6u06/free_usenet_text_archive_goes_online_300_million/ https://www.reddit.com/r/usenet/comments/in6u06/free_usenet_... as of last report Where does one find the reports? Here are the creator's posts to Reddit, at least: https://www.reddit.com/user/emolinare/submitted/ https://www.reddit.com/user/emolinare/submitted/
- dang 6y agoOne small past thread: The geeks who saved Usenet (2002) - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2811983 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2811983 - July 2011 (7 comments)
- mavhc 6y agoThere's no good usenet search online any more
- slacktide 6y agoSince when was there ever a good usenet search? We are talking about a technology that progressed from nn to trn to tin and then pretty much died.
- kahirsch 6y agoAfter Google acquired Deja, the search was good and improved over the next couple of years. Then around the era of Google Plus (2011), the search degraded and eventually the advanced group search page was deleted. This was certainly past the heyday of Usenet, but there was still a lot of activity and the advanced Google group search was one of the only places on the internet where you could try to trace things chronologically. For example, if you wanted to find the earliest usage of a word or the earliest appearance of a conspiracy theory, Google group search was the best place to go. And, it had (spotty) coverage back to the 1980s.
- nirav72 6y agoI'm glad nzb is still around.