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Oh, that's a fascinating wild post. > Google ended up acquiring and eating Usenet, becoming Google Groups. They did not acquire usenet, they acquired Dejanews

Oh, that's a fascinating wild post. > Google ended up acquiring and eating Usenet, becoming Google Groups. They did not acquire usenet, they acquired Dejanews, a big usenet-archive and gateway to the usenet. Usenet itself is made of decentraliced servers. Everyone can have one, most big providers and tech-companies had one in the early days. Each with their own groups. There also were public groups, maintained by some hive-mind-org or something. Anyway, Usenet still exists, it's not dead, technically. But there is also not much alive either. File sharing on commercial servers seems to be very popular now, and the discusion-groups are receiving more spam than actual worthy content. > Reddit fills some of this niche, but Usenet was tech-focused, 50:50 I'd say. There were many tech-groups. But pretty fast there were also an equal amount of non-tech-groups. And in terms of hyper-focus I would say, reddit has far more focus today than usenet ever delivered. It's more about finding a sub and filling it. > generally quite professional and frankly didn't have the same clientele as Reddit does. I get the impression your problem is more about the people, not the platform. Yes, usenet had more nerds and expert, more technical capable people. But usenet was also significant smaller, as was the whole internet at the time. You had some kind of natural selection, as internet generally, and usenet specifically only lured very specific people in. With special interests, from a special age and culture. Today it's different, you have anyone from anywhere making a space. I'd say those time are lost forever. At best you get some overhomogenized communities, like this hackernews here. But if you look at reddit, discord, or web-forums in general, you will still find hyper-focused spaces. Just not necessarily with the kind of people your chemistry matches with.

Freebytes 4y ago
Does alt.sex.robots fit into tech or non-tech?
- no-dr-onboard 4y ago
  Depends on the use case :)
adrianmonk 4y ago
> maintained by some hive-mind-org or something I believe you may be thinking of the backbone cabal[1]. But maybe not, since it's secret and doesn't exist. --- [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Backbone_cabal https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Backbone_cabal
- chasd00 4y ago
  i bet you could fit all the BGP experts in the world in a medium sized conference hall and half of them would be on a first name basis with each other. That's what i think of when i think of "backbone cabal".
  - mike_d 4y ago
    That actually happens. The few hundred people who keep the internet humming along all get together twice a year. (At least for North America, other groups exist in other regions)
    - fragmede 4y ago
      Coincidentally, NANOG 85 just wrapped up!
300bps 4y ago
I came from the BBS era before Usenet and I think that would be an interesting experiment in social networking today. Allow regular people to set up a BBS that other people could connect to. Once there they can read/post on public message boards, they can send direct messages to other users on the same BBS, they can exchange files between them, they can play multiplayer online games with their friends, engage in group chat, etc. A small percentage of people like running things like this. Right now they're probably starting up a Facebook group that has draconian content restrictions and extremely limited functionality. Make it easy for them to start a BBS - either on a SaaS platform or literally hosted on their own device, they might just switch to it.
- Maursault 4y ago
  > I came from the BBS era before Usenet Unless you were dialing up to CBBS between 1978-1980, i.e. the only BBS in the world at the time, then USENET predates your BBS era, which I would assume like most is really somewhere between 1984-1994, even if BBS existed prior to then and after then.
  - matt_heimer 4y ago
    In practice I think access to BBS systems came before Usenet for many of us. I didn't have Usenet access until I had internet access (through a BBS). And I didn't have a good nntp server until I had a dedicated ISP many years after accessing dialup, non-internet BBS systems. I remember reporting a PINE newsgroup thread bug at the height of my nntp usage and several of the local BBS systems had started dying off by then.
    - smcameron 4y ago
      The opposite is also true for many, namely, lots of university students who were on usenet in the computer labs, and maybe had a TRS-80 in the dorm connected to nothing.
    - rnxrx 4y ago
      There were also a number of Usenet <-> FidoNet/echomail gateways. This was especially useful for local BBS users that weren’t affiliated with any university computing facilities.
res0nat0r 4y ago
Eh I mean Eternal September has it's own wikipedia page for a reason, and Usenet stopped being strictly nerd/geek/math/science 30 years ago. The only thing it is useful for now is piracy, and everyone else has moved on to either Reddit, or hyper specific phpbb type forums, both of which just require digging to discover what you like. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eternal_September https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eternal_September
- ghaff 4y ago
  Usenet was probably still useful for some time after the Eternal September--especially if you mostly stayed out of the alt. hierarchy. But it definitely declined as access became more widespread.
  - int_19h 4y ago
    Stuff under comp.lang was still useful way into 00s. I remember a lot of productive discussions on comp.lang.c++.moderated circa 2008.
- deleted 4y ago
  [deleted]
davidwritesbugs 4y ago
As other commenters have pointed out Usenet was a serious of collaborating servers each independently owned & run so there was nothign to 'acquire'. What happened, from memory, was that a sysop made a backup of his Usenet feed and Google got that tape. My GoogleFu is to weak to find a link to the story. I ran the Newzbin Usenet search engine so it's a topic of some nostalgia for me.
- throwaway892238 4y ago
  Thanks for Newzbin! NZBs were a revelation. I had to build a RAID array to keep all the crap I downloaded :)
- s0l1dsnak3123 4y ago
  Thank you for Newzbin, I've used it many times over the years!
- hackinthebochs 4y ago
  So you're the one that killed usenet for filesharing. (Binaries being unfriendly to download probably kept the DMCA folks at bay. NZBs changed that.)
  - davidwritesbugs 4y ago
    THe MPA would have come for your groups at some point, regardless of NZBs. I don't know if we made it a more immediate problem or not, and in the meantime very many people found NZBs less of a pain.
- jtode 4y ago
  A pleasure to finally meet you lol
- mike_d 4y ago
  > What happened, from memory, was that a sysop made a backup of his Usenet feed and Google got that tape Google bought Dejanews, a service that operated a usenet2web gateway. It became Google Groups. http://googlepress.blogspot.com/2001/02/google-acquires-usenet-discussion.html http://googlepress.blogspot.com/2001/02/google-acquires-usen...
Majromax 4y ago
> I get the impression your problem is more about the people, not the platform. There's one structural difference: Usenet had no engagement metric but replies. Modern replacements measure and implicitly optimize for view counts (the lurker experience); both Reddit and Hacker News sort and surface posts based on a karma score/like count. I think this difference led Usenet to implicitly optimize for high-effort posts. The stereotypical Reddit "in-joke" thread has no place on Usenet because the principal reward of karma is entirely missing. Instead, posters are implicitly rewarded with attention when their posts garner replies and discussion. On one hand, this encourages real content and discussion over superficial "updoots to the left". On the other hand, it also encourages flamebait and high-effort trolling, which a vote-scoring system can silently suppress.
- thrtythreeforty 4y ago
  Having never experienced high-effort trolling, I suppose I don't really know whether if it's better. My gut reaction is that I'd rather have high-effort trolling over low-effort trolling though.
  - btilly 4y ago
    Then you have no idea what it's like to realize that a well-known Usenet crank is a real person, lives in the same town that you do, is pissed off at you, and is honestly crazy. This happened to me with Archimedes Plutonium back when he was Ludwig Von Plutonium. You can find him discussed in https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Usenet_personality https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Usenet_personality. (Luckily for me, his brand of crazy didn't trend towards violence. Though I still regret later having introduced him to the p-adic numbers.) There is probably more aggregate pain over time from something like a group of 4chan users coming up with Rickrolling then successfully making it a meme. But the pain that a high effort troll can cause is rather...special.
- TMWNN 4y ago
  >The stereotypical Reddit "in-joke" thread has no place on Usenet because the principal reward of karma is entirely missing. Nope. `rec.arts.sf.written` and `alt.folklore.urban` immediately come to mind as having extensive in-jokes. The phenomenon of replies to a post being almost incomprehensible to the uninitiated because they use/rely on the existing ecosystem of said in-jokes is as true for such newsgroups as it is for any subreddit. The only difference is that on Reddit said comments will be at the top of the tree, but the metastructure of their replies is otherwise the same.
commandlinefan 4y ago
> Everyone can have one, most big providers and tech-companies had one in the early days In the late 90's, when the web started to dominate the internet, I was hoping for an NNTP overhaul that would allow most people to host mini-NNTP servers for true decentralization. Freenet and I2P seem to be sorts of stabs at the idea, but never really caught on, unfortunately. I'd love to see a truly worldwide Usenet.
- squarefoot 4y ago
  > an NNTP overhaul that would allow most people to host mini-NNTP servers for true decentralization That would be quite an idea: extended NNTP over P2P, but doesn't Mastodon do sort of a similar thing today?
ArtWomb 4y ago
Rhizome has painstakingly documented its forensic archival of The Thing BBS https://thingbbs.rhizome.org/ https://thingbbs.rhizome.org/ It's a testament to how de-centralized and randomly those archives were served. And the death of dial-up async long manifesto culture. Any greenfield cloud based approach can scale users, but not that culture of usenet binary harvest tools, irc #warez clubs and constrained bandwidth netiquette ;)
B1FF_PSUVM 4y ago
> receiving more spam than actual worthy content. Let me take a minute to commemorate "Canter & Siegel, green-card lawyers", for being the first sharp-eyed critters to spot they could make a buck shitting in the common's spring.
not2b 4y ago
The old Usenet had social groups and discussion groups for almost every interest you could think of. New groups were created multiple times per week, and when the backbone maintainers tried to rein that in, the alt hierarchy was created and vastly more groups were created. But most of the non-tech groups were not archived so that discussion is gone. Arguably fortunately: we were young and stupid and posted embarrassing stuff using our real names and affiliations.

Freebytes 4y ago

Does alt.sex.robots fit into tech or non-tech?

no-dr-onboard 4y ago
Depends on the use case :)

adrianmonk 4y ago

> maintained by some hive-mind-org or something I believe you may be thinking of the backbone cabal[1]. But maybe not, since it's secret and doesn't exist. --- [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Backbone_cabal https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Backbone_cabal

chasd00 4y ago
i bet you could fit all the BGP experts in the world in a medium sized conference hall and half of them would be on a first name basis with each other. That's what i think of when i think of "backbone cabal".
- mike_d 4y ago
  That actually happens. The few hundred people who keep the internet humming along all get together twice a year. (At least for North America, other groups exist in other regions)
  - fragmede 4y ago
    Coincidentally, NANOG 85 just wrapped up!

300bps 4y ago

I came from the BBS era before Usenet and I think that would be an interesting experiment in social networking today. Allow regular people to set up a BBS that other people could connect to. Once there they can read/post on public message boards, they can send direct messages to other users on the same BBS, they can exchange files between them, they can play multiplayer online games with their friends, engage in group chat, etc. A small percentage of people like running things like this. Right now they're probably starting up a Facebook group that has draconian content restrictions and extremely limited functionality. Make it easy for them to start a BBS - either on a SaaS platform or literally hosted on their own device, they might just switch to it.

Maursault 4y ago
> I came from the BBS era before Usenet Unless you were dialing up to CBBS between 1978-1980, i.e. the only BBS in the world at the time, then USENET predates your BBS era, which I would assume like most is really somewhere between 1984-1994, even if BBS existed prior to then and after then.
- matt_heimer 4y ago
  In practice I think access to BBS systems came before Usenet for many of us. I didn't have Usenet access until I had internet access (through a BBS). And I didn't have a good nntp server until I had a dedicated ISP many years after accessing dialup, non-internet BBS systems. I remember reporting a PINE newsgroup thread bug at the height of my nntp usage and several of the local BBS systems had started dying off by then.
  - smcameron 4y ago
    The opposite is also true for many, namely, lots of university students who were on usenet in the computer labs, and maybe had a TRS-80 in the dorm connected to nothing.
  - rnxrx 4y ago
    There were also a number of Usenet <-> FidoNet/echomail gateways. This was especially useful for local BBS users that weren’t affiliated with any university computing facilities.

res0nat0r 4y ago

Eh I mean Eternal September has it's own wikipedia page for a reason, and Usenet stopped being strictly nerd/geek/math/science 30 years ago. The only thing it is useful for now is piracy, and everyone else has moved on to either Reddit, or hyper specific phpbb type forums, both of which just require digging to discover what you like. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eternal_September https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eternal_September

ghaff 4y ago
Usenet was probably still useful for some time after the Eternal September--especially if you mostly stayed out of the alt. hierarchy. But it definitely declined as access became more widespread.
- int_19h 4y ago
  Stuff under comp.lang was still useful way into 00s. I remember a lot of productive discussions on comp.lang.c++.moderated circa 2008.
deleted 4y ago
[deleted]

davidwritesbugs 4y ago

As other commenters have pointed out Usenet was a serious of collaborating servers each independently owned & run so there was nothign to 'acquire'. What happened, from memory, was that a sysop made a backup of his Usenet feed and Google got that tape. My GoogleFu is to weak to find a link to the story. I ran the Newzbin Usenet search engine so it's a topic of some nostalgia for me.

throwaway892238 4y ago
Thanks for Newzbin! NZBs were a revelation. I had to build a RAID array to keep all the crap I downloaded :)
s0l1dsnak3123 4y ago
Thank you for Newzbin, I've used it many times over the years!
hackinthebochs 4y ago
So you're the one that killed usenet for filesharing. (Binaries being unfriendly to download probably kept the DMCA folks at bay. NZBs changed that.)
- davidwritesbugs 4y ago
  THe MPA would have come for your groups at some point, regardless of NZBs. I don't know if we made it a more immediate problem or not, and in the meantime very many people found NZBs less of a pain.
jtode 4y ago
A pleasure to finally meet you lol
mike_d 4y ago
> What happened, from memory, was that a sysop made a backup of his Usenet feed and Google got that tape Google bought Dejanews, a service that operated a usenet2web gateway. It became Google Groups. http://googlepress.blogspot.com/2001/02/google-acquires-usenet-discussion.html http://googlepress.blogspot.com/2001/02/google-acquires-usen...

Majromax 4y ago

> I get the impression your problem is more about the people, not the platform. There's one structural difference: Usenet had no engagement metric but replies. Modern replacements measure and implicitly optimize for view counts (the lurker experience); both Reddit and Hacker News sort and surface posts based on a karma score/like count. I think this difference led Usenet to implicitly optimize for high-effort posts. The stereotypical Reddit "in-joke" thread has no place on Usenet because the principal reward of karma is entirely missing. Instead, posters are implicitly rewarded with attention when their posts garner replies and discussion. On one hand, this encourages real content and discussion over superficial "updoots to the left". On the other hand, it also encourages flamebait and high-effort trolling, which a vote-scoring system can silently suppress.

thrtythreeforty 4y ago
Having never experienced high-effort trolling, I suppose I don't really know whether if it's better. My gut reaction is that I'd rather have high-effort trolling over low-effort trolling though.
- btilly 4y ago
  Then you have no idea what it's like to realize that a well-known Usenet crank is a real person, lives in the same town that you do, is pissed off at you, and is honestly crazy. This happened to me with Archimedes Plutonium back when he was Ludwig Von Plutonium. You can find him discussed in https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Usenet_personality https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Usenet_personality. (Luckily for me, his brand of crazy didn't trend towards violence. Though I still regret later having introduced him to the p-adic numbers.) There is probably more aggregate pain over time from something like a group of 4chan users coming up with Rickrolling then successfully making it a meme. But the pain that a high effort troll can cause is rather...special.
TMWNN 4y ago
>The stereotypical Reddit "in-joke" thread has no place on Usenet because the principal reward of karma is entirely missing. Nope. `rec.arts.sf.written` and `alt.folklore.urban` immediately come to mind as having extensive in-jokes. The phenomenon of replies to a post being almost incomprehensible to the uninitiated because they use/rely on the existing ecosystem of said in-jokes is as true for such newsgroups as it is for any subreddit. The only difference is that on Reddit said comments will be at the top of the tree, but the metastructure of their replies is otherwise the same.

commandlinefan 4y ago

> Everyone can have one, most big providers and tech-companies had one in the early days In the late 90's, when the web started to dominate the internet, I was hoping for an NNTP overhaul that would allow most people to host mini-NNTP servers for true decentralization. Freenet and I2P seem to be sorts of stabs at the idea, but never really caught on, unfortunately. I'd love to see a truly worldwide Usenet.

squarefoot 4y ago
> an NNTP overhaul that would allow most people to host mini-NNTP servers for true decentralization That would be quite an idea: extended NNTP over P2P, but doesn't Mastodon do sort of a similar thing today?

ArtWomb 4y ago

Rhizome has painstakingly documented its forensic archival of The Thing BBS https://thingbbs.rhizome.org/ https://thingbbs.rhizome.org/ It's a testament to how de-centralized and randomly those archives were served. And the death of dial-up async long manifesto culture. Any greenfield cloud based approach can scale users, but not that culture of usenet binary harvest tools, irc #warez clubs and constrained bandwidth netiquette ;)

B1FF_PSUVM 4y ago

> receiving more spam than actual worthy content. Let me take a minute to commemorate "Canter & Siegel, green-card lawyers", for being the first sharp-eyed critters to spot they could make a buck shitting in the common's spring.

not2b 4y ago

The old Usenet had social groups and discussion groups for almost every interest you could think of. New groups were created multiple times per week, and when the backbone maintainers tried to rein that in, the alt hierarchy was created and vastly more groups were created. But most of the non-tech groups were not archived so that discussion is gone. Arguably fortunately: we were young and stupid and posted embarrassing stuff using our real names and affiliations.