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The question is - What are you missing? I suspect you probably miss something that has more to do with the participants. In the early days of Usenet there wer

The question is - What are you missing? I suspect you probably miss something that has more to do with the participants. In the early days of Usenet there were very few ways to access it from the perspective of an average person. You either had to be working on one of the small number of companies that were internet connected or were at a university. That significantly restricted the available pool of people using it, and also filtered that pool. Up through the early 90s that natural filter mechanism kept the focus of individual groups small, reduced noise, and increased signal. Over time as internet access became more widespread that signal to noise decreased, and most modern forums still have difficulty with it. There are a few other interesting characteristics - the specific nature of the tree approach and the availability of lots of specific groups gave it some uniqueness - Today you might see a bit of that in Reddit subs, Facebook groups, and other similar platforms, albeit lacking the tree.

InefficientRed 4y ago
Piggy-backing off of this post: the answer is to get off the high-trafficked parts of the public internet. Examples: 1. Meatspace user groups / interest groups. 2. University lecture series (the type of weekly seminar that all graduate students and faculty in a given research area attend). You can usually attend as a member of the public if you have an "in". 3. Mailing lists and discord servers for specific projects.
- vorpalhex 4y ago
  "Moving Castles" was the terminology I heard someone propose[0]. Unfortunately they got too caught up in the crypto nonsense but the idea was sound - good communities have to be guarded and they occasionally "lower the drawbridge" to bring on newcomers, potentially with semi-public spaces. This could be a minecraft server, a facebook group or what have you. Since the group is motile, they aren't affected by platforms being subpar. They can avoid stagnation by bringing in newcomers, but have a way to vet incoming people too before allowing them "internal" access. [0]: https://trust.support/feed/moving-castles https://trust.support/feed/moving-castles
sillyquiet 4y ago
Yeah exactly. Usenet wasn't what it was because of the technology, it was because the participants were mostly there to have 'professional' conversations, and the kinds of conversations that nerdy techie-minded people have over beers after work (wesley.crusher.die.die.die, etc).
- sbf501 4y ago
  As another Member of the Society to Reduce Wesley into a Little Styrofoam Dodecahedron, I can certainly attest that usenet wasn't as gleamingly professional as we remember. The original stereotypes of discussion group users (trolls, white knights, etc.) came from usenet.
  - chasd00 4y ago
    don't forget porn, there was a tremendous amount of porn on usenet. a friend of mine had some perl script he called "aub" that scraped alt.user.binaries or something like that. catalogs and catalogs of stuff on a quiet little server in a university lab.
    - sbf501 4y ago
      alt.binaries.pictures.erotica FTW (There was also a computer at MIT called "zurich.ai.mit.edu" that you could FTP to in 1990 and download really raunchy NSFL porn. I still have scars.)
bartread 4y ago
You mention the filter effect: I think what really killed Usenet, at least for me, was spam, much of which was automated, with no great mechanism in place to combat it.
- zozbot234 4y ago
  These days you could fight spam simply by adding a proof-of-work requirement for posting content to the network. Isn't that exactly what this Web3/Blockchain fad is all about anyway?
  - pitched 4y ago
    This is a really interesting use-case. I don’t think posting spam is really a zero-cost thing though. So we wouldn’t be adding a cost, we would be increasing it. So I guess the big question is, how much can we charge per post that spammers couldn’t afford but wouldn’t scare away actual community members?
    - bartread 4y ago
      I think making a non-free Usenet is pretty much anathema to the whole concept of Usenet.
      - gknoy 4y ago
        I wouldn't want to pay Real Money for it, but somehow it doesn't seem the same to say "I'll spend some finite amount of computation time/energy to make this comment". That seems like a much lower hurdle. At the same time, paying ten cents to make a comment on Reddit or HN is very unappealing.
        pitched 4y ago
        10c of crypto mining is about 30 minutes on an RTX 3090. It would have to be a much, much lower cost!
    - 4y ago
beezle 4y ago
From late 1990 until around 1997 I had a full feed via UUNET and ran cnews locally on my pc with cnews and trn for reading. It wasn't long before I had to scale back and drop all the binary groups and eventually others. IIRC a full feed when I started was about 3MB a day (still tough to do at 12/2400 bps)
- Maursault 4y ago
  I had a Usenet portal subscription between 2005-2008. I ran Thoth (usenet client) on Ubuntu on old Mac G4 towers. At the time, the connection speed blew away torrents.
  - MacsHeadroom 4y ago
    It still does. I download 30GB 4k movies in a minute or so, consistently, from Usenet.
  - IoTelectronic 4y ago
    I missed torrentZ, do you know how should I search torrents again?
jandrese 4y ago
The thing I miss most was having one single newsreader interface that I could configure as I liked. With web forums everybody has their own idea of how things should work and I end up having to remember a dozen different flavors of "markdown" and ways of filtering users or threading posts. The Usenet had issues, chiefly the lack of a good way to moderate channels, but I wish we had gone with an open data model instead of the countless walled gardens that sprang up in its place.
- yjftsjthsd-h 4y ago
  Maybe matrix and/or mastodon?
  - jandrese 4y ago
    I thought Matrix was more of an IRC replacement than a new Usenet. Mastadon always seemed to want to be Twitter.
    - GekkePrutser 4y ago
      Not quite IMO. Matrix gets very cluttery very quickly once you join more than a handful of rooms with lots of activity. At least with the mainstream clients. It seems more targeted at replacing telegram and its public groups than IRC. The channel list in particular is way too low density.
- sponaugle 4y ago
  Yea, that is something I too can appreciate. The simplicity of having a single place where I can read about a wide arrangement of hobbies, interests, and professions.
xtracto 4y ago
Not OP but the thing I miss the most from Usenet and IRC is the fact that they were client agnostic. I hate the discord client. I hate the reddit client and the facebook. I'd love to be able to have an open source desktop based client that I can modify and implement all sorts of plugins for it. I hate that we moved from services/protocols to closed vertical monolith.
- boomboomsubban 4y ago
  I'm guessing they have limited functionality, but Pidgin is free software and has both discord and Facebook plugins. They've certainly made it difficult for the free software clients, but people continue trying to maintain this ideal.
commandlinefan 4y ago
> What are you missing? Early Usenet was like Reddit, without the corporate (and come on, blatantly left-leaning) censorship.
- kahnclusions 4y ago
  Try posting on any of the right leaning subreddits, they are heavily censored and non-conforming people are frequently banned. I’d encourage you to post a scientific or academic survey of Reddit’s political censorship. I think it’s common that everyone believes their own ideology gets censored when it’s probably not the case overall.

InefficientRed 4y ago

Piggy-backing off of this post: the answer is to get off the high-trafficked parts of the public internet. Examples: 1. Meatspace user groups / interest groups. 2. University lecture series (the type of weekly seminar that all graduate students and faculty in a given research area attend). You can usually attend as a member of the public if you have an "in". 3. Mailing lists and discord servers for specific projects.

vorpalhex 4y ago
"Moving Castles" was the terminology I heard someone propose[0]. Unfortunately they got too caught up in the crypto nonsense but the idea was sound - good communities have to be guarded and they occasionally "lower the drawbridge" to bring on newcomers, potentially with semi-public spaces. This could be a minecraft server, a facebook group or what have you. Since the group is motile, they aren't affected by platforms being subpar. They can avoid stagnation by bringing in newcomers, but have a way to vet incoming people too before allowing them "internal" access. [0]: https://trust.support/feed/moving-castles https://trust.support/feed/moving-castles

sillyquiet 4y ago

Yeah exactly. Usenet wasn't what it was because of the technology, it was because the participants were mostly there to have 'professional' conversations, and the kinds of conversations that nerdy techie-minded people have over beers after work (wesley.crusher.die.die.die, etc).

sbf501 4y ago
As another Member of the Society to Reduce Wesley into a Little Styrofoam Dodecahedron, I can certainly attest that usenet wasn't as gleamingly professional as we remember. The original stereotypes of discussion group users (trolls, white knights, etc.) came from usenet.
- chasd00 4y ago
  don't forget porn, there was a tremendous amount of porn on usenet. a friend of mine had some perl script he called "aub" that scraped alt.user.binaries or something like that. catalogs and catalogs of stuff on a quiet little server in a university lab.
  - sbf501 4y ago
    alt.binaries.pictures.erotica FTW (There was also a computer at MIT called "zurich.ai.mit.edu" that you could FTP to in 1990 and download really raunchy NSFL porn. I still have scars.)

bartread 4y ago

You mention the filter effect: I think what really killed Usenet, at least for me, was spam, much of which was automated, with no great mechanism in place to combat it.

zozbot234 4y ago
These days you could fight spam simply by adding a proof-of-work requirement for posting content to the network. Isn't that exactly what this Web3/Blockchain fad is all about anyway?
- pitched 4y ago
  This is a really interesting use-case. I don’t think posting spam is really a zero-cost thing though. So we wouldn’t be adding a cost, we would be increasing it. So I guess the big question is, how much can we charge per post that spammers couldn’t afford but wouldn’t scare away actual community members?
  - bartread 4y ago
    I think making a non-free Usenet is pretty much anathema to the whole concept of Usenet.
    - gknoy 4y ago
      I wouldn't want to pay Real Money for it, but somehow it doesn't seem the same to say "I'll spend some finite amount of computation time/energy to make this comment". That seems like a much lower hurdle. At the same time, paying ten cents to make a comment on Reddit or HN is very unappealing.
      - pitched 4y ago
        10c of crypto mining is about 30 minutes on an RTX 3090. It would have to be a much, much lower cost!
  - 4y ago

beezle 4y ago

From late 1990 until around 1997 I had a full feed via UUNET and ran cnews locally on my pc with cnews and trn for reading. It wasn't long before I had to scale back and drop all the binary groups and eventually others. IIRC a full feed when I started was about 3MB a day (still tough to do at 12/2400 bps)

Maursault 4y ago
I had a Usenet portal subscription between 2005-2008. I ran Thoth (usenet client) on Ubuntu on old Mac G4 towers. At the time, the connection speed blew away torrents.
- MacsHeadroom 4y ago
  It still does. I download 30GB 4k movies in a minute or so, consistently, from Usenet.
- IoTelectronic 4y ago
  I missed torrentZ, do you know how should I search torrents again?

jandrese 4y ago

The thing I miss most was having one single newsreader interface that I could configure as I liked. With web forums everybody has their own idea of how things should work and I end up having to remember a dozen different flavors of "markdown" and ways of filtering users or threading posts. The Usenet had issues, chiefly the lack of a good way to moderate channels, but I wish we had gone with an open data model instead of the countless walled gardens that sprang up in its place.

yjftsjthsd-h 4y ago
Maybe matrix and/or mastodon?
- jandrese 4y ago
  I thought Matrix was more of an IRC replacement than a new Usenet. Mastadon always seemed to want to be Twitter.
  - GekkePrutser 4y ago
    Not quite IMO. Matrix gets very cluttery very quickly once you join more than a handful of rooms with lots of activity. At least with the mainstream clients. It seems more targeted at replacing telegram and its public groups than IRC. The channel list in particular is way too low density.
sponaugle 4y ago
Yea, that is something I too can appreciate. The simplicity of having a single place where I can read about a wide arrangement of hobbies, interests, and professions.

xtracto 4y ago

Not OP but the thing I miss the most from Usenet and IRC is the fact that they were client agnostic. I hate the discord client. I hate the reddit client and the facebook. I'd love to be able to have an open source desktop based client that I can modify and implement all sorts of plugins for it. I hate that we moved from services/protocols to closed vertical monolith.

boomboomsubban 4y ago
I'm guessing they have limited functionality, but Pidgin is free software and has both discord and Facebook plugins. They've certainly made it difficult for the free software clients, but people continue trying to maintain this ideal.

commandlinefan 4y ago

> What are you missing? Early Usenet was like Reddit, without the corporate (and come on, blatantly left-leaning) censorship.

kahnclusions 4y ago
Try posting on any of the right leaning subreddits, they are heavily censored and non-conforming people are frequently banned. I’d encourage you to post a scientific or academic survey of Reddit’s political censorship. I think it’s common that everyone believes their own ideology gets censored when it’s probably not the case overall.