22 ms·

Why did Usenet fail?

172 points by edent 3y ago

EwanG 3y ago
Quick summary - As K-Mart did to Sears, and then WalMart did to K-Mart, so Reddit has done to Usenet.
- tenebrisalietum 3y ago
  - Reddit didn't do anything to Usenet. Reddit postdates Usenet's glory days by over a decade. - Sears, a dying company, bought K-Mart, and they died together. K-Mart didn't do anything to Sears. - Walmart didn't do anything to K-Mart except sell stuff cheaper and work on its supply chain. Wikipedia article says this: "Unlike its competitors Walmart and Target, Kmart failed to invest in computer technology to manage its supply chain." I don't understand the analogy at all.
- bigbillheck 3y ago
  Not entirely sure about your summary or your historical analysis there buddy.
- johannes1234321 3y ago
  I would argue that Facebook had a much bigger impact pulling users there. As did multiple independent web forums (based on phpBB etc.) which allowed closed communities and moderation and we're more approachable for beginners.
- arbitrage 3y ago
  Not really. Usenet was circling the drain a long time before Reddit was a gleam in Ohanian's eye.
- jabroni_salad 3y ago
  If we want to pin it to a single entity I would say one of these two: AOL's CD mailers, or microsoft/apple including an http browser in their operating systems.
blakesterz 3y ago
"I should briefly mention Google buying the Deja News archive, promising to revitalise Usenet, and then promptly abandoning it. Cheers Google. Choogle." Oh wow, I totally forgot about that. I remember it being a really big deal at the time, and now I barely even remember.
- senko 3y ago
  It's even worse than that. Here, Google pulled one from the Microsoft playbook: embrace, extend, extinguish. Google bought DejaNews, rebranded it into Google Groups (embrace) and then proceed to Googlify it, making it less and less Usenet-y and more and more Google specific (extend), until only the Google-specific mailing lists remained (extinguish). Edit: see https://web.archive.org/web/20010226023947/http://groups.google.com/ https://web.archive.org/web/20010226023947/http://groups.goo...
  - thrashh 3y ago
    Umm according to Wikipedia, Deja News was turning into a shopping site, going bankrupt and shutting down the Usenet archive. So Google came in and saved it. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Google_Groups#Deja_News https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Google_Groups#Deja_News
    - jghn 3y ago
      Yeah. At the time I remember the sentiment being more "woah, this is amazing" and less "boo, corporate overlords taking over".
      - anigbrowl 3y ago
        Yeah, and then they let it sink as they have with so many other cool things they built.
        bentcorner 3y ago
        It certainly smacks of being someone's promo project where they moved on to other things after the migration and the project fizzled out without leadership.
logifail 3y ago
> Thirdly was the user interface. Usenet looked dull. In a world of animated GIFs and MySpace colour schemes, Usenet didn't even have avatar images! Sure, the spartan nature meant that you could focus on a conversation - but it didn't feel as modern and exciting as the web did "Modern and exciting" beat "being able to focus on a conversation" :( Being able to focus is right at the top of my list of priorities. Surely I'm not the only one?
- edent 3y ago
  How can I focus on a threaded conversation if I can't visually see the difference between the participants? Quickly looking at an avatar is easier than reading an email address. Having even basic HTML formatting helps lay out a post - which makes it easier to concentrate on it. But that was something eschewed by most Usenet clients and posters. Similarly, inline images are great for illustrating a point. I don't have to lose focus by clicking on a link and going to another tab to see what's being discussed.
  - iso1631 3y ago
    > How can I focus on a threaded conversation if I can't visually see the difference between the participants? Quickly looking at an avatar is easier than reading an email address. You post this on a threaded discussion forum without avatars, one you've frequented for a decade
    - edent 3y ago
      Yes - and I find it rather tedious. Why do you think that every other major SN has avatar images? It's because most users find it a better experience. I also have my own CSS for HN which makes it much more pleasant (for me) and I I've started using https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30668137 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30668137
      - mr_mitm 3y ago
        You could have your Usenet client to the same thing. Generate some sort of image out of the email address.
notfried 3y ago
I know until at least recently, warez/piracy on Usenet was still a thing. Are there other use cases now for Usenet nowadays?
- u801e 3y ago
  > Are there other use cases now for Usenet nowadays? Maybe not usenet itself, but NNTP gateways can be used to browse mailing lists.
slyall 3y ago
Largely agree with the author's viewpoint. Compared to the Web and Web forums it was very hard for new people to pick up. Even for people who had mastered the software the lack of ability to get rid of bad people was a problem. One "Kook" could single-handedly jam up server groups ( eg https://www.geocities.w/donfool/ https://www.geocities.w/donfool/ ). The interface however was still pretty unmatched to this day unmatched. You could and did get threads of 1000 posts from 100 people that were perfectly threaded, readable and referred to points in previous posts. The requirement for each ISP to run their own server was a problem. If you wanted binaries then you would need a relatively expensive server (or group of servers) plus quite a lot of bandwidth.
- Projectiboga 3y ago
  ISPs had binaries until around 2007 when NYS AG Andrew Cuomo did a favor for big media under the headline of combating 43 child pics.
deleted 3y ago
[deleted]
NoZebra120vClip 3y ago
It seems that "failure" is a rather strong word. Usenet served its purpose at a point in time and then faded into obscurity, though it keeps chugging away in a niche, appealing to some. It's like saying that IRC failed. What forum community, social network or media platform has been permanent and outlasted everything else? It seems that on every social network, people migrate, people abandon platforms, and losing critical mass can be fatal to the platform, and then it just passes on to the next one, having served its purpose; did MySpace "fail" or did it simply cede the crown to Facebook? I remember Usenet fondly, though perhaps through rose-colored glasses. It was already full of trolls, flamewars, disruption and discord. Yet I cut my teeth there as a young sysadmin. I listened at the feet of experts, literal prominent experts in the field, who had spare time to just freely share their knowledge, because the Internet was an R&E community! I learned a lot about reputation and trust in the digital age. I gained "Internet street smarts" there. I believe that it shaped a lot of people's lives, for better or worse, and that's not a failure by any measure.
- shadowgovt 3y ago
  Yep. Protocol-backed stuff on the Internet "fails" the way civilizations "go into decline" in the board game Small World; they aren't removed from the board, but they no longer serve any purpose other than taking up space that the active civilizations haven't taken over yet.
  - NoZebra120vClip 3y ago
    Exactly, it's protocol-backed, and that's the beauty of free, open source software and standards. As long as anyone care to maintain the client and/or servers, or even if very old code still works, you have a viable service. It's not a monolith that's beholden to the whims and fortunes of a single corporation that can just shut it down. Consider the enormous outcry when a single company has to shut down an entire platform, like a popular MMO or something, and then compare that to what happens when an IRC network has a schism, like the Freenode controversy: yep there was drama, but everyone took their toys and migrated to an identical network and now we have two. I come from MUDding communities myself, and there is no shortage of old and crusty wizards who cling to their MUD servers and have kept them open, going on 30 years now! Clients come and go, Internet standards change, and social network fads happen, and we're still playing a game that doesn't bother supporting TLS, MFA, Unicode, or graphics. MUDs never failed, they simply achieved posterity and faded from sight.
vidanay 3y ago
> Thirdly was the user interface. Usenet looked dull. In a world of animated GIFs and MySpace colour schemes, Usenet didn't even have avatar images! Sure, the spartan nature meant that you could focus on a conversation - but it didn't feel as modern and exciting as the web did. NNTP software was fragile. Forté Agent was a masterpiece. Change my mind.
- nerdbert 3y ago
  > Usenet didn't even have avatar images! Now let's not forget my 40-line ASCII-art sigfile.
  - jghn 3y ago
    alt.fan.warlord would like a word
    - UncleSlacky 3y ago
      and BIFF.
- senko 3y ago
  > Forté Agent was a masterpiece. Yes. Also, my social network feeds could benefit from a killfile feature ...
  - pierat 3y ago
    https://docs.joinmastodon.org/user/moderating/ https://docs.joinmastodon.org/user/moderating/ There's a wide variety of ways to self-moderate content. Andd you can block whole servers from your account as well. And if stuff is terrible, you can report to your instance's admin (if you're not running your own). And barring that, you can also report to their instance's admin. Given enough harassment or badness, servers can block harassing servers.
- mmcgaha 3y ago
  Around the time frame of the beta versions of agent coming out in early 1995, the Windows world really surpassed unix for internet usability. Obviously netscape was netscape but agent vs tin, mirc vs ircii, or eudora vs pine, the windows software getting churned out was peak usability as far as I am concerned.
howard941 3y ago
ISPs decommissioned their news servers. That's what killed netnews.
- jmclnx 3y ago
  >ISPs decommissioned their news servers Yes, this is the number 1 reason. But USENET is still being used and there are many people still using it. And there are places where you can signup for free access, this is one but there are many others: http://www.eternal-september.org/ http://www.eternal-september.org/ One thing to remember, you never see a post from your teenage self on USENET being dragged up by your employer causing you to be fired or loose out on a job. Why, privacy still exists on USENET. Also I guess he never heard of killfiles :) These days I have a rather large one compared to what I had many years ago. See a post you do not want to see anymore, add it to your killfile and maybe the person who sent it.
  - u801e 3y ago
    > One thing to remember, you never see a post from your teenage self on USENET being dragged up by your employer causing you to be fired or loose out on a job. Why, privacy still exists on USENET. Google at one point did a very good job at indexing usenet posts and including them in their search results. If I searched for the name I used when posting to usenet, I would get hundreds of results of posts I made. But if I try searching now, very few results from usenet come up (perhaps because of the age of the posts). > Also I guess he never heard of killfiles :) I'm actually surprised he didn't mention that in his article.
- sokoloff 3y ago
  That seems like it’s reversing cause and effect, though. If lots of ISP customers were using their nntp servers, ISPs would have been quite likely to maintain them in order to be competitive.
  - narag 3y ago
    They didn't. What seems logical doesn't need to be true. Maintaining servers was hard, they decided to not compete on that. They were trying to minimize any kind of customer support by humans, the number one cost center for any digital company. Lucky for them that the like of Google and Reddit externalized mail and forum services.
redprince 3y ago
I've used Usenet quite extensively in its heyday. At one point I even ran a Usenet site with dozens of peers and thousands of users. All on a very beefy (for its time) Sun E450. In my opinion Usenets greatest strength was also its downfall. It is a distributed system without central authority over who could connect to the network or firm control over groups and their contents. To connect to it as a peer, you just had to find at least one Usenet site willing to exchange messages (peer) with you. Usually that wasn't a problem. ISPs, universities, organizations of all kinds were running their own servers, offering Usenet client access to their customers and members for no additional charge. In a distributed system without central authority, innovation is exceedingly hard though. The protocols and features were basically set in stone. Taking the concept of offering discussions among users to a centralized or closed system made it possible to innovate very fast and offer superior features to the users. As the article pointed out, that wasn't the only protocol which got picked up that way and innovated upon until it displaced its origins. Since Usenet is still frozen feature wise were it was 30 or more years ago, I don't see a revival coming anytime soon.
- liotier 3y ago
  > without central authority over who could connect to the network or firm control over groups and their contents Moderation. In public forums, everything else is trivial and moderation is the invisible stinking hairy elephant in the room. To the question "why isn't there a decentralized open protocol free software X" the answer is moderation. Think or it as the discreet but efficient bouncers without which a sufficiently popular public place cannot maintain a welcoming atmosphere. Newsgroups became sufficiently popular, death by inadequate moderation ensued.
  - NoMoreNicksLeft 3y ago
    Obviously, this is why 4chan died back in 2012. If only they had moderation, they might still be around today.
    - amadeuspagel 3y ago
      4chan has moderation.
WarOnPrivacy 3y ago
In the 90s I used to edit out CSAM related groups, from the downloaded list in Netscape's built in NNTP client. Customers who were surfing usenet for the first time were reasonably horrified by the group names. After a time I got unhappy about this and went to see if I could determine a physical hosting location of the content. I don't recall the particulars, just that I came up with an AT&T subsidiary - something polkadot - sitting at a Canadian address, near the US border. I wasn't willing to reach out to the FBI blindly and couldn't locate anyone who know anyone in the bureau. I knew someone who knew the head of the [state] Family Association and that person was well connected politically. After some back and forth I gave up on the whole thing. That guy was fairly obsessed with stamping out homosexuality and couldn't be bothered with abused children. I moved on.
- temporal828 3y ago
  > In the 90s I used to edit out CSAM related groups, from the downloaded list in Netscape's built in NNTP client. This list gets downloaded from whatever server you configure and is then local to your machine. Editing it would only affect what you see on your own client. > After a time I got unhappy about this and went to see if I could determine a physical hosting location of the content. Usenet is a distributed system - every server that didn't filter the group was hosting the content. They were typically viewed as common carriers. (It sounds like you were tracing your own ISP's server?) On that note some from upstate New York may remember that the attorney general tried to garner votes by raiding and seizing servers from a few local ISPs (Dreamscape, RIP), which in the end didn't work out. > I wasn't willing to reach out to the FBI blindly and couldn't locate anyone who know anyone in the bureau. The FBI was quite well aware of the content on Usenet and very adept at navigating it in its heydey. They used it in a number of investigations to track down producers including breaking into trusted rings that communicated with PGP encrypted communications on Usenet. You wouldn't have informed them of anything they didn't know.
  - WarOnPrivacy 3y ago
    > Editing it would only affect what you see on your own client. I know. I mentioned I was editing list on clients' (plural) PCs. > Usenet is a distributed system - every server that didn't filter the group was hosting the content. Right. I had found a physical address of hard drives containing the data. That it wasn't the only location of the data might not have mattered to an LEO. It all depended on how many gold stars this type of bust generated (at that time). Hindsight recognizes here that the odds were against LEO being particularly interested. External political pressure may have changed that. > It sounds like you were tracing your own ISP's server? Multiple clients, multiple ISPs. IIRC I determined that AT&T was supplying NNTP to all of them. > On that note some from upstate New York may remember that the attorney general tried to garner votes by raiding and seizing servers from a few local ISPs (Dreamscape, RIP), which in the end didn't work out. When one grandstands in the press, one takes one's chances. Quiet LEO actions work a differently shuffled deck. > The FBI was quite well aware of the content on Usenet and very adept at navigating it in its heydey. Absolutely. However, the one action they never, ever, ever took was anything at all against the corporate hosts and suppliers of that data. There are many strong possibilities for this, some understandable and some corrupt.
goodpoint 3y ago
Usenet did not fail. It was killed. It's different.
ThinkingGuy 3y ago
Possibly slightly off-topic: Are there any free (as in speech) web-based NNTP front-ends that are relative ly up to date, and still maintained? On my home server I can pull up my email, texts, and RSS feeds in a web browser. It would be nice to do the same with newsgroups, instead of having to run Pan (even though I get the same feeling of nostalgia from its UI as the author does).
- davisr 3y ago
  Yes--the DLang forums are what I'd consider the best. > About (https://forum.dlang.org/help#about https://forum.dlang.org/help#about) > This website is powered by DFeed, an NNTP / mailing list web frontend / forum software, news aggregator and IRC bot. DFeed was written mostly by Vladimir Panteleev. The source code is available under the GNU Affero General Public License on GitHub: https://github.com/CyberShadow/DFeed https://github.com/CyberShadow/DFeed > This DFeed instance (forum.dlang.org) is a frontend to the DigitalMars NNTP server and mailing lists. Portions of the web interface (including style and graphics) are Copyright © by Digital Mars.
- teddyh 3y ago
  Anything wrong with Mozilla Thunderbird?
  - ThinkingGuy 3y ago
    Only that it's not installed on every computer I use :)
pixl97 3y ago
Why did usenet fail: 1) It couldn't serve ads in a controlled manner. The lack of monetization made sure that most people paid for usenet access allowing 'free' http driven apps to take over. 2) Most ISPs didn't provide much information if they had a NNTP server users could use, and NNTP readers didn't come with most users computers. HTTP did. 3) It wasn't exciting to new users. Web went from mostly text to multimedia as internet connection speeds increased.
- u801e 3y ago
  > Most ISPs didn't provide much information if they had a NNTP server users could use, and NNTP readers didn't come with most users computers. HTTP did. Until Outlook Express was replaced by Windows Mail, most users computers did come with a NNTP client.
deleted 3y ago
[deleted]
throwawaaarrgh 3y ago
Usenet didn't fail. People are just dumb and follow trends.
- deleted 3y ago
  [deleted]
rbanffy 3y ago
> Dropbox is FTP with a better UX Nope. Dropbox is NFS with an asynchronous client with lots of local persistent cache. > WhatsApp groups are just ListServes That's a huge oversimplification. All in all, I wish I have built something that was the backbone of internet discussions for decades. Truth is, we all moved on. At one time, newsgroups was the only space where we could have threaded discussions. Now we have lots of other, more targeted, options. All the issues the author mentioned could be fixed. We can use AI to rate comments (at the client), and build a decentralized reputation system (maybe a good use for blockchain, finally).
slooonz 3y ago
I’d add barriers of entry. Not high, but way higher that anything that is publicly readable on the internet and therefore indexed on Google. I can discover interesting subreddits by pure chance by following a google search on a question I have. Or following a link on a blog There’s no chance of that happening on Usenet. For most users, search/discovery is a web thing (web search, links) and there’s no link from the web to usenet. Therefore if you don't know anything interesting on usenet you can't easily discover it. Any interesting post/discussion cannot be simply linked on a tweet (or, for that matters, on IRC). Usenet is completely insular. A web forum is not. Were I a Usenet enthusiast, that would be my 1st priority. Public archives of most important hierarchies (comp.* for example), indexed on Google, easily linkable.
- jghn 3y ago
  When I first started using usenet in the early 90s, I spent days going through the entire list of newsgroups my provider had. IIRC it was somewhere around 6000 groups at the time. Found all sorts of interesting things that way. To your point, that's not exactly a scalable solution and not one that most people would do :) I'd counter that though with the aspect of one stop shopping, which e.g. Reddit also has. One thing that kept me on Usenet far longer than most was that with one app (my newsreader) I could access limitless topic specific forums. Instead of having to go to a bunch of different sites, each with their own logins & quirks, etc. To this day I still prefer applications like that, for instance it is something I really appreciated about Twitter until recent changes.
- shadowgovt 3y ago
  One of the reasons HTTP ate the world is simply the fact that everyone already has a user interface program installed to use an HTTP-vended service. In this day and age, that need to install one more thing (unless you're on mobile) is itself a huge barrier to entry.
- u801e 3y ago
  > I can discover interesting subreddits by pure chance by following a google search on a question I have. Or following a link on a blog > There’s no chance of that happening on Usenet. You could the list of newsgroups for phrases that could lead you to an interesting group. Other times, someone in the group may mention the other group if you mention your interest in a comment. At least, that's how I found a lot of different newsgroups when I was regularly reading and posting to usenet.
Delphiza 3y ago
alt.binaries killed usenet. Apart from pron clogging up bandwidth, alt.binaries became a good vector to distribute viruses, child pron, and a bunch of other things that ISPs, and their dial-up customers, were becoming increasingly concerned about. Its openness in an increasingly more dangerous, scammy, and criminal world was always going to be its own undoing. There must have been a stage where Pamela Anderson took up most of the world's storage and bandwidth just from synchronising usenet feeds.
- temporal828 3y ago
  > alt.binaries killed usenet. In 2023 Usenet is solely commercially viable for alt.binaries.
  - korse 3y ago
    I'm surprised people aren't mentioning this more. Usenet may be dead for discussion, but it certainly isn't a dead technology. edit: I guess they are. Took a second to search around the comments.
    - u801e 3y ago
      From what I've read, they're transferring multiple petabytes of data a day between different backbone NNTP server farms.
      - korse 3y ago
        This is true. Pretty much all alt.binaries though and there is an interesting ecosystem of tools, forums and providers that you need to be aware of in order to access content.
Scarblac 3y ago
Binaries, imo. At some point Usenet became synonymous to illegal downloads for people, and it became too costly to support.
- rootusrootus 3y ago
  Warez, and porn. Neither of which are easy to defend when an ISP is looking to address the costs of a Usenet feed. Towards the end, we had close to 100 Mbps full time just for the feed, as I recall. Then we outsourced it to cut that cost. But then management decided none of our customers needed alt.binaries and we dropped it altogether. The effect on churn was negligible.
  - badcppdev 3y ago
    Totally agree with this. Why would any commercial ISP want to offer this as a service? There was very little upside and massive potential liabilities because they were storing and supplying unmoderated content that in the very best case was pirated music and movies.
- kolinko 3y ago
  I'm not sure binares were too big of an issue - most server simply didn't carry groups that allowed binaries. The spam issue was the real deal breaker imho - you either had a fully moderated group, or you had a fully unmoderated one with spam left and right. Also, for me it was social media - web groups, however lacking the interface was, had more variety in their subjects.
ubermonkey 3y ago
It didn't fail. It was a smashing, world-changing success. Success, though, doesn't always mean immortality.
- B1FF_PSUVM 3y ago
  "Just resting."
- intrasight 3y ago
  Came to say the same. Usenet was amazing - in it's time. If that's "failure" then lots of apps would be happy to fail.
webdoodle 3y ago
I enjoy reading old usenet posts of mine. The confident yet naive bravado almost makes me feel young again.
anigbrowl 3y ago
It didn't fail, it's just that GUI chat UIs like AOL and later web forums were more visually attractive, and were able to incorporate graphics. Usenet relied on uuencode for any sort of binary attachment which was a pain in the ass. There was also a high degree of snobbishness that made it unwelcoming to new users, who naturally went to other fora where they weren't treated like children. The other problem was spam. Usenet had excellent moderation/blocking capabilities for the time ('welcome to my killfile' was the last thing many trolls heard from a person), but relied on a general consensus that spam is cancer. Then Laurence Canter and Martha Siegel single-handedly broke usenet in one afternoon nearly 30 years ago, and I still feel annoyed whenever I think of them. People like this exemplify everything that is toxic about capitalism. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Laurence_Canter_and_Martha_Siegel https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Laurence_Canter_and_Martha_Sie...
- lanstin 3y ago
  There was an AOL newsgroup reader, curtesy of Jeff Warrington. The AOL posters were mostly still treated like children, but not unfairly.
mattmcknight 3y ago
I presumed it was spam. It was a system designed for maybe 1 million non-commercial users The presence of large numbers of users and commercial users were unmanageable. I used it quite extensive in 1992-6, but after that it was a mostly inferior, and the surviving groups I followed became closed mailing lists.
cobaltoxide 3y ago
Spam
aaomidi 3y ago
I am still confused on how to access usenet for free tbh. Everytime I've looked into it seems weirdly expensive.
- floren 3y ago
  The expensive services are expensive because they include alt.binaries.*, which are used for piracy. http://www.eternal-september.org/ http://www.eternal-september.org/ gives free access to the text groups
bsdetector 3y ago
Seems like nobody has mentioned a huge reason Usenet failed: It needed a client program. Digg/slashdot didn't succeed because they were flashier or moderated or had less illegal content or privately developed or any of these other reasons given, it was because people could just follow a link to a web page and they're in. Even today reddit or discord do everything they can to convert web users to app users for obvious reasons, but they must have that web version for casual users or they'll die off to whoever does have one. So ultimately what killed Usenet was Section 230. Without that services could do simple copying/caching like NNTP (protected under telecom rules) but the actual presentation had to be done on the user's computer. And consequently were 230 repealed it wouldn't be the end of the social media world, but rather the resurgence of Usenet-like models where all the presentation is done by a client program.
- xingped 3y ago
  This is one of the big reasons, I think. I hear about Usenet all the time, but whenever I try to go looking for it in the past to figure it out, it just makes no sense to me and I cannot figure out how to get to it. To me it's just this nebulous thing that exists somewhere, but I have no idea where.
  - walterbell 3y ago
    Some ISPs still provide Usenet feeds, or there are commercial Usenet providers in many countries, similar to email. Usenet can be accessed via the OSS Thunderbird client, or OSS Usenet clients. https://www.fastusenet.org/thunderbird-windows-tutorial.html https://www.fastusenet.org/thunderbird-windows-tutorial.html
  - osswid 3y ago
    Go to telehack.com and type 'notes'. It's not comprehensive, but will give you a taste of the flavor of what Usenet was like.
  - UncleSlacky 3y ago
    You can get a free account here (text groups only, not binaries): https://www.eternal-september.org/ https://www.eternal-september.org/ You can access Usenet via Thunderbird (or Pan, mentioned in the article).
debacle 3y ago
Every Usenet replacement (but Craigslist and 4chan) has burned through hundreds of millions of VC cash only to eventually fizzle out. Maybe digital space and presence needs to be a social utility.
Earw0rm 3y ago
Usenet was - by the standards of the early 00's, which is when it began to decline - slow, and asynchronous. Posts could take hours to days to propagate, which meant conversation threads would go off in multiple directions at once. Technology that was transformative during the BBS-to-early-internet transition became a liability ten years on. Slashdot, PHPBB and later on Reddit offered synchronous, low-latency, single-point-of-truth updates to thread/post order. The promise of self-configured "agents" for content filtering never really caught on - they were too time-consuming for anyone bar a few geeks and academics to manage. The social media "feed" is an evolution of the same idea, but there's not really any self-configuration - instead the system is programmed by the platform's owners to adapt to your behavioural feedback.
- radicalbyte 3y ago
  I disagree: between 1994-5 and about 2005 I made heavy use of a "private" NNTP server (for the Edge Magazine forums). Compared to early web forums it was super fast - you could sync all of the messages in about two minutes. Then you could disconnect your modem, read + reply etc. Then go online an hour later to send reply + update the feed. Broadband changed the game: once the internet was fast and always-on then web forums pretty much took over. We lost something though: the beauty of NNTP was that you could easily keep your own archive of discussions of the groups you were interested in. Search worked and it as offline. Oh and no adverts or tracking!
  - Earw0rm 3y ago
    I'm talking about server to server message propagation, not client/server - agreed, the Usenet clients were much faster and had better feature-sets than any web forum running on Netscape or the early versions of IE. That part was great, but messages could take hours to even days to propagate across the whole network. The sync-reply-upload work flow was indeed useful - especially so in countries where you had to pay by the minute to be online.
    - radicalbyte 3y ago
      Absolutely - the federated case (I was rather active on the tolkien, c64 and various computing groups) was terrible. We used to use email lists for real discussion with plain text messages (shame that isn't a thing anymore). It was an excellent experience in the non-federated case.
mrweasel 3y ago
I don't really agree, but also don't have a better explanation. Moderation and clients would have been solved, had Usenet continued to be huge. Email have had it's fair share of problems, including spam, but has always managed to survive because nothing has been able to replace it and it's still valuable. You could argue that development of attractive clients have died down in the past decade for email as well. Panic kept their Unison client alive for way longer than they needed to, and that looked pretty. Personally I would love to see Usenet replace localized Facebook groups. It seems like every small town have a Facebook group, and if you have no presents on Facebook, you get no information. Usenet would be a perfect fit, no central authority to monetize and control the group, you'd be able to read about activities in your neighborhood, while having no account or an account with an organisation you trust. The ISPs might not want to pick up the tab for running the servers, but they kept doing it for years after Usenet became a ghost town.
- u801e 3y ago
  > Personally I would love to see Usenet replace localized Facebook groups. It actually happened the other way around. Local ISPs had newsgroups that had limited distribution where people local to you would post about upcoming events, things they were looking to rent or buy, things they wanted to sell, etc. > The ISPs might not want to pick up the tab for running the servers There's nothing really stopping a local ISP from running a server that's not connected to an upstream feed and requiring credentials to post. That would be localized and a lot more relevant to those in the community if they really wanted a local discussion forum.
KingOfCoders 3y ago
I had much fun in Usenet (you can find many of my posts on comp.sys.amiga.advocacy), I've learned a lot, wrote a lot in English for the first time. There was another post some months ago here that argued success is not tied to survival. To me Usenet was a huge success and didn't fail in any way, just because people are no longer using it doesn't mean it failed.
unreal37 3y ago
Nobody made money on Usenet. It was a "cost" for all ISPs and eventually Google. So maybe that's why it failed.
dariosalvi78 3y ago
I used it quite a lot around 97 / 98, it was a great way to meet people and discuss serios and not-so-serious topics with people around the world. It was technically interesting and a very powerful tool. Then it got flooded with "replica watches" and "girls nextdoor porn", huge attachments and shady stuff.
rocket_surgeron 3y ago
Usenet didn't fail, you failed it. There are servers up right now. People using it at this very moment. Why did you leave? Digg? Slashdot?
pmontra 3y ago
Did Usenet fail or did it succeed until something better came up? Nobody would say that telegraph failed, do we agree on that? And yet we started using landline phones, fax, email, SMS and all sort of messaging systems on mobile phones.
segmondy 3y ago
Google.
ck2 3y ago
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Newsgroup_spam https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Newsgroup_spam
zmix 3y ago
I don't think Usenet failed. It declined. It was a platform for "first hour" internet users, the early "internet natives", mostly nerds, like us. When the masses appeared on the "intarwebs" the web would be the place to go, with all it's flashy hypermedia and uniform way of use (no separate client needed, same philosophy, etc.) The Usenet simply got replaced by web forums.
tptacek 3y ago
I've said this a bunch of times before, but I don't see this take in a lot of Usenet postmortems, and I think it's truer than most of what people say about Usenet. Piracy killed Usenet. I ran a Freenix-competitive NNTP installation for a very popular ISP in Chicago in the 1990s. Usenet was by far the most demanding infrastructure we ran: we ran striped RAID arrays, read replicas†, transit servers --- all of this on the only expensive Sun hardware we had in our fleet. At one point, we independently reinvented the INN history cache, and there were a couple sites near the top of the Freenix leaderboard in part due to IRC conversations about our dumb patch. All this is just to say I feel like I have some bona fides here. Keeping up with the Usenet everybody laments today was not this demanding. You could easily have done it with a Pentium FreeBSD server and a fast disk. But customers wouldn't let you. The open secret about Usenet was that it was a binary distribution system first and a discussion forum second. Unlike discussion groups, keeping up with full-feed binary groups was a fucking nightmare. Usenet is the stupidest mechanism for distributing binaries you can possibly imagine: just imagine BitTorrent, but entirely Base64'd, and without the forward error correction --- your file was in 100 pieces, and if you lost one of them, you were just fucked. If users couldn't reliably download pirated games or porn from your Usenet servers, they'd loudly complain and tank your reviews for running a bad Usenet setup. And woe betide any ISP that claimed to do NNTP on anything less than a binary full feed. The rest of the story is obvious. ISP operators had better things to do with their time and money than cater to the small minority of angry cost-center users who used Usenet this way, and so they outsourced Usenet altogether. Usenet centralized because binary groups forced it to, and once it was centralized there was no reason not to just stick it on a website. Web forums are better than Usenet was back in the day, so arguably, over the long term, not much was really lost. Reddit today is very much like Usenet was like in the mid-1990s, and they at least have a reliable archive. Apart from the archives of my old comp.security.unix posts, all I really miss about Usenet was the competitive systems engineering aspect of it. I'd love to go back in time and take another whack at Usenet knowing some of what I know now; I didn't realize how fun a problem it was at the time: a real system people actually cared about with a leaderboard. † These things sound very boring now but were most definitely not boring in 1995.
- radicalbyte 3y ago
  Nowadays usenet really is nothing but a binary transfer system. Such a shame.
jantypas2 3y ago
There was another reason Usenet died -- people want other people to do the work. Oh, they'll pay for it to a degree, but Usenet wasn't plug-and-play. To make Usenet work, everyone had to cooperate and most people just don't want the work. AOL wasn't even close, but it was someone else's problem to run and maintain. Hostly, my own vies here, but if Reddit just had an NNTP bridge, people would flock to it and never know the differece. I remember running a node -- it was a constant battle to maintain space on the spools and deal with my own users. And, for what? It cost us money and while everyone said they wanted it, no one wanted to help with the work or pay for it. Add to that the number of groups that just want "zombie" on us, and it died.
- u801e 3y ago
  > If Reddit just had an NNTP bridge, people would flock to it and never know the differece. I never really looked into it, but if someone were to make a NNTP bridge for reddit, Hacker News, and other similar websites, would it be against their respective TOSs?
superkuh 3y ago
I still post on usenet a couple times per month. You gotta be the change you want to see in the world.
rocketnasa 3y ago
Back in the 1990's, the in-person User Groups were a thing of the past and we didn't have Patreon style support donation system wasn't widely accepted. Funding was mostly out of owner/operator budget like it was in the BBS days. Usenet was part of the ISP plan, part of your monthly dial-up (or otherwise) costs. Who paid to moderate and solve problems was starting to fail under the load and the easy ability to mass spam.
sombragris 3y ago
Two points completely unrelated between them: 1. A large part of the world completely ignored Usenet. ISPs began offering Net connectivity in my country in the late 1990s, but then no one (IIRC) had an Usenet server or archive; and if they had one, it was largely unadvertised. Connecting to a NNTP server not offered by your ISP might be doable, but it could be a paid-for thing, not very easy and not very reliable. So, too many people around the world did not get into their Eternal September. 2. There are good NNTP clients (and free software ones). Claws Mail has good NNTP support and is actively developed, and this is just one example.
gmiller123456 3y ago
I really hate to see the word "fail" used for something that was so incredibly successful, just because technology advanced enough to provide something better.
- margalabargala 3y ago
  I agree. By that metric, some other notable failures from history include: - Steam locomotives - Gutenberg's printing press - The IBM PC - The original iPhone - The Ford Model T - The telegraph, and landline telephones - The cotton gin - Black powder, cannons, etc - Wind-powered boats
kayo_20211030 3y ago
TIL that `annecdata` (properly `anecdata`, I think) is a word. Nice!.
2809 3y ago
Wait, it failed? Since when...?
zxcvbn4038 3y ago
Usenet didn't fail at all, it just went out of fashion after Google killed the usenet archive. Honestly, I think if we applied everything we've learned about http over the past thirty years and applied it to an updated nntp protocol then it would be quite formidable. The biggest issue that never was never resolved was on one hand you have the people who don't want people controlling what they read and say - and on the other hand you have the jerks that want to abuse that. If you've ever logged into a darknet forum and someone has uploaded hundreds of autopsy photos anywhere they could upload photos except the "autopsy photos" area, then that is exactly what used to happen on Usenet. It's probably the same guy doing it. Though personally I think having to do the occasional bulk delete is worth preserving freedom of expression.
groos 3y ago
Fail? According to Vernor Vinge, it's in use Galaxy-wide 20000+ years from now as the Net of a Million Lies. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/A_Fire_Upon_the_Deep https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/A_Fire_Upon_the_Deep
dredmorbius 3y ago
The failing of many reminiscences of Usenet is that they're entirely or largely from a user perspective. What's forgotten is that someone needed to host newsgroups, and that that prospect became increasingly untenable. Usenet died a death of a thousand cuts, though I'd argue four were the deepest and most lethal: 1. It got spammed to death. 2. It lost control over its culture, and that culture was crucial to its functioning. 3. It was too problematic for ISPs (or others) to provide ready access to it: spam, harassment, child pornography, and copyright violations all posed massive concerns. 4. There was no viable business model for providing the service. See: <https://old.reddit.com/r/dredmorbius/comments/3c3xyu/why_usenet_died/ https://old.reddit.com/r/dredmorbius/comments/3c3xyu/why_use...> All of those are significant, but I would (and did) argue that points 3 & 4 were the final nails in the coffin. Anti-spam measures and tightly-curated / moderated newsgroups could survive despite the spam, but with firms willing to brave the very real legal and financial risks, and without any other viable financial support, Usenet fell to a mix of mailing lists and early online blogging / forum software (phpBB, Slashdot, and others). There've been several attempts to revise or update Usnet (most notably Usenet II),. Those ... have also failed to take hold. (Though in fairness: social media is extremely fickle, many apparently well-structured, and occasionally well-capitalised, attempts have similarly foundered, and the limelite often moves on with time.) Gaining traction and viability is a mix of luck, timing, and execution (mostly getting out of your own way). Reddit can be seen as a response to points 1, 3, and 4. Reddit offers reasonably good spam defences, it has evolved protections against legally-problematic content (with some large bumps along the way), and it's attempting to develop advertising as a business angle. And has had some success at all of these. There were other factors as well. One of the more significant, and a challenge for any client-mediated (as opposed to server-based) protocol is that different client behaviours matter and may give rise to incompatibiilties. Where I witnessed this most glaringly was in email. During the 1990s I participated in a technical discussion where participants joined from Unix, Vax, Mainframe, and PC systems (and possibly others). Simple reply-acknowledgement and quoting practices differed widely and often clashed badly. I don't recall if Microsoft's email platform at the time (this pre-dated Outlook) clashed with Unix conventions, but hot holy hell did IBM's Lotus Notes Mail. And it was Annoying As Heck. Usenet ... didn't seem to get bitten by this too badly, or at least not until Web-based gateways to Usenet became commonplace. Though, come to think of it, email gateways also existed, and that mailing list was mirrored to a Usenet group, so yeah... The other factor of course was the emergence of more centralised alternatives, almost all Web based, to Usenet. By the late 1990s, phpBB and similar online fora were becoming the centre of discussions, and community sites such as Slashdot emerged. Those in significant part acted on the user-side of the equation. Where Usenet itself was increasingly a wasteland and feeds were hard to find, Web fora were easy, no-installation (the first SaaS models), and contained noxious behaviours far more effectively. But the real focus is on the business case: if there's no profit, and unlimited downside risk, commercial enterprise will flee, at which point widespread usage becomes highly improbable. Distributed protocols and networks (Mastodon, the Fediverse, etc.) should keep this in mind. A possible alternative is to follow Usenet's initial foundation: independent institutions (e.g., higher education), but that seems at best a limited and niche category.
zuminator 3y ago
In my experience the main factors that killed Usenet were 1) the World Wide Web and 2) spam. 1) Usenet was at one point a huge portion of internet traffic. But as the rest of the web ballooned in popularity, what was originally the big fish in a small pond became a small fish in a huge ocean. Eventually newer internet users skipped the Usenet experience entirely. And the zeitgeist went with them. People who spent time putting new information online stopped making newsgroups their first choice and started doing it on their own weblogs or on siloed websites. 2) As newsgroups hollowed out, the S/N ratio went way down. I think once they were about 30% spam, people just started giving up en masse. There's also the contributing factor of the old ISP services dying or morphing into media providers. Usenet was dialup friendly and the old 300/600/1200/2400/4800/9600/14400/19200/38400/57600 Kbps modem-serving ISPs would advertise their Usenet feed as a perk. It was 80 character, monochrome screen friendly. Once dialup became superseded by broadband, and computers turned into media and 3d gaming devices, and Napster/Limewire/eD2k made binary distribution so much more convenient for the masses, Usenet lost its raison d'être.
- u801e 3y ago
  > Usenet was at one point a huge portion of internet traffic. Usenet posts were just text that may have been several kilobytes in size at most. If you look at binary newsgroups, the current level of internet traffic is quite large[1] (though that was 12 years ago and is by now multiple petabytes per day). [1] https://www.ghacks.net/2011/01/26/usenet-traffic-growth-to-almost-9tb-per-day/ https://www.ghacks.net/2011/01/26/usenet-traffic-growth-to-a...
  - zuminator 3y ago
    The size of the daily Usenet feed is up to over 200TB a day now, even more than the 9TB number in your link. Although I imagine the total daily amount transferred by users is going to dwarf the size of the feed, one might still note for reference that total daily internet traffic is about 3EB which is around 15,000x that of a single full news service. In other words, good point! I hadn't realized that in nominal terms, Usenet was still growing like topsy (albeit likely shrinking as a total proportion of global traffic). [0] https://www.newsdemon.com/usenet-newsgroup-feed-size https://www.newsdemon.com/usenet-newsgroup-feed-size [1] https://techjury.net/blog/how-much-data-is-created-every-day/ https://techjury.net/blog/how-much-data-is-created-every-day...
retrocryptid 3y ago
Uhhh... USENET failed? News to me. I used it for over a decade. That doesn't sound like failure.
ShadowBanThis01 3y ago
"so CompuServe was my gateway to the Internet." I don't even remember CompuServe having Internet access. AOL, which came well after CompuServe, didn't even have it until they tacked it on as an afterthought (with a button on their toolbar).
panny 3y ago
Government picked the winner. Centralized HTTP over decentralized NNTP was easier for government to control. https://www.cnet.com/tech/tech-industry/n-y-attorney-general-forces-isps-to-curb-usenet-access/ https://www.cnet.com/tech/tech-industry/n-y-attorney-general...
u801e 3y ago
In my opinion, the main reason[1][2] for its decline in terms of text discussions was due to the deal that Andrew Cuomo (the attorney general of New York at the time) made with the major ISPs to restrict access to child pornography. This resulted in many ISPs discontinuing their usenet offering and cutting off their customers from it. Unless those customers made an effort to access usenet some other way, they stopped using it. [1] https://www.cnet.com/tech/tech-industry/n-y-attorney-general-forces-isps-to-curb-usenet-access/ https://www.cnet.com/tech/tech-industry/n-y-attorney-general... [2] https://www.cnet.com/tech/tech-industry/cuomo-strong-arms-comcast-over-usenet/ https://www.cnet.com/tech/tech-industry/cuomo-strong-arms-co...
ChicagoDave 3y ago
It died because of trolls and a horrible management system. You had “justify” moderation to some group and they turned everyone down. Eventually everyone created forums with their own moderation rules.
hakfoo 3y ago
I suspect it was a market failure. As home internet moved from a competitive dialup market to a handful of DSL/Cable players, all ancillary services dropped in importance. People weren't willing to take 128kbps ISDN instead of 10Mbps cable because they had better Usenet coverage or retention policies, or more personal home page storage, or better email services. These services, in turn, became obvious places to economize and scale back. Nobody uses them because we don't invest in them so we shouldn't invest in them. All everyone wants is port 80 and promising the largest number of "up to" MBps we can. So eventually ISP-infrastructure Usenet falls apart, and you're left with having to find an external service provider, which usually was competing for an entirely different market-- "we have the mostest and bestest alt.binaries, and we're going to charge prices close to what we pay for a streaming service in 2023, because that's an expensive customer to service" rather than "we have all the text-based communities you love, and realistically, each user clicking three banner ads a month would finance the bandwidth and disc space those use." I loved Usenet as a teen, but the family stayed on a crappy provider for too long, and they killed it. I got an account on a server being offered as a public service a few years later, only to find it shuttered within weeks of doing so. I just want to go back to 1997, writing terrible cringe RP on alt.fan.dragons.
simonblack 3y ago
Usenet didn't fail. It is still around, but nowhere near as vibrant as when it was 'the only game in town'. Yes it is slow, yes it is spartan. But like AM radio, it should still be kept as a no-frills alternative when things have to depend on low-bandwidth. Like FTP, it still has a use. But people are still attracted to "oooh, bright shiny thing!" rather than the spartan.
- u801e 3y ago
  > Yes it is slow People using it for binary downloads can pull down data at gigabit speeds. > it should still be kept as a no-frills alternative when things have to depend on low-bandwidth. It's unfortunate that most websites and other services require significant amounts of bandwidth. If I'm using a GPRS connection on my phone, websites other than Hacker News are not really usable. IRC and Usenet still work though.
  - simonblack 3y ago
    > Yes it is slow > People using it for binary downloads can pull down data at gigabit speeds. Sorry. I wasn't clear. I meant that being a 'store and forward' medium rather than a broadcast medium, it can take days to propagate to all clients, rather than talking specifically about the speed of transmission.
jrnichols 3y ago
it didn't fail, people just found something more shiny. what scared me off usenet was the reality that very very illegal porn was flooding into otherwise normal groups. the relentless onslaught of spammers & scammers was never ending. kill files were handy but eventually became unwieldy. it wasn't a client issue.. I was using what I considered to be the best Usenet client ever, Unison by Panic. I still use nntp via aioe.org to this day.
AmenBreak 3y ago
It didn't fail. Usenet's still quite busy depending on the group.

172 points by edent 3y ago

EwanG 3y ago

Quick summary - As K-Mart did to Sears, and then WalMart did to K-Mart, so Reddit has done to Usenet.

tenebrisalietum 3y ago
- Reddit didn't do anything to Usenet. Reddit postdates Usenet's glory days by over a decade. - Sears, a dying company, bought K-Mart, and they died together. K-Mart didn't do anything to Sears. - Walmart didn't do anything to K-Mart except sell stuff cheaper and work on its supply chain. Wikipedia article says this: "Unlike its competitors Walmart and Target, Kmart failed to invest in computer technology to manage its supply chain." I don't understand the analogy at all.
bigbillheck 3y ago
Not entirely sure about your summary or your historical analysis there buddy.
johannes1234321 3y ago
I would argue that Facebook had a much bigger impact pulling users there. As did multiple independent web forums (based on phpBB etc.) which allowed closed communities and moderation and we're more approachable for beginners.
arbitrage 3y ago
Not really. Usenet was circling the drain a long time before Reddit was a gleam in Ohanian's eye.
jabroni_salad 3y ago
If we want to pin it to a single entity I would say one of these two: AOL's CD mailers, or microsoft/apple including an http browser in their operating systems.

blakesterz 3y ago

"I should briefly mention Google buying the Deja News archive, promising to revitalise Usenet, and then promptly abandoning it. Cheers Google. Choogle." Oh wow, I totally forgot about that. I remember it being a really big deal at the time, and now I barely even remember.

senko 3y ago
It's even worse than that. Here, Google pulled one from the Microsoft playbook: embrace, extend, extinguish. Google bought DejaNews, rebranded it into Google Groups (embrace) and then proceed to Googlify it, making it less and less Usenet-y and more and more Google specific (extend), until only the Google-specific mailing lists remained (extinguish). Edit: see https://web.archive.org/web/20010226023947/http://groups.google.com/ https://web.archive.org/web/20010226023947/http://groups.goo...
- thrashh 3y ago
  Umm according to Wikipedia, Deja News was turning into a shopping site, going bankrupt and shutting down the Usenet archive. So Google came in and saved it. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Google_Groups#Deja_News https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Google_Groups#Deja_News
  - jghn 3y ago
    Yeah. At the time I remember the sentiment being more "woah, this is amazing" and less "boo, corporate overlords taking over".
    - anigbrowl 3y ago
      Yeah, and then they let it sink as they have with so many other cool things they built.
      - bentcorner 3y ago
        It certainly smacks of being someone's promo project where they moved on to other things after the migration and the project fizzled out without leadership.

logifail 3y ago

> Thirdly was the user interface. Usenet looked dull. In a world of animated GIFs and MySpace colour schemes, Usenet didn't even have avatar images! Sure, the spartan nature meant that you could focus on a conversation - but it didn't feel as modern and exciting as the web did "Modern and exciting" beat "being able to focus on a conversation" :( Being able to focus is right at the top of my list of priorities. Surely I'm not the only one?

edent 3y ago
How can I focus on a threaded conversation if I can't visually see the difference between the participants? Quickly looking at an avatar is easier than reading an email address. Having even basic HTML formatting helps lay out a post - which makes it easier to concentrate on it. But that was something eschewed by most Usenet clients and posters. Similarly, inline images are great for illustrating a point. I don't have to lose focus by clicking on a link and going to another tab to see what's being discussed.
- iso1631 3y ago
  > How can I focus on a threaded conversation if I can't visually see the difference between the participants? Quickly looking at an avatar is easier than reading an email address. You post this on a threaded discussion forum without avatars, one you've frequented for a decade
  - edent 3y ago
    Yes - and I find it rather tedious. Why do you think that every other major SN has avatar images? It's because most users find it a better experience. I also have my own CSS for HN which makes it much more pleasant (for me) and I I've started using https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30668137 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30668137
    - mr_mitm 3y ago
      You could have your Usenet client to the same thing. Generate some sort of image out of the email address.

notfried 3y ago

I know until at least recently, warez/piracy on Usenet was still a thing. Are there other use cases now for Usenet nowadays?

u801e 3y ago
> Are there other use cases now for Usenet nowadays? Maybe not usenet itself, but NNTP gateways can be used to browse mailing lists.

slyall 3y ago

Largely agree with the author's viewpoint. Compared to the Web and Web forums it was very hard for new people to pick up. Even for people who had mastered the software the lack of ability to get rid of bad people was a problem. One "Kook" could single-handedly jam up server groups ( eg https://www.geocities.w/donfool/ https://www.geocities.w/donfool/ ). The interface however was still pretty unmatched to this day unmatched. You could and did get threads of 1000 posts from 100 people that were perfectly threaded, readable and referred to points in previous posts. The requirement for each ISP to run their own server was a problem. If you wanted binaries then you would need a relatively expensive server (or group of servers) plus quite a lot of bandwidth.

Projectiboga 3y ago
ISPs had binaries until around 2007 when NYS AG Andrew Cuomo did a favor for big media under the headline of combating 43 child pics.

deleted 3y ago

[deleted]

NoZebra120vClip 3y ago

It seems that "failure" is a rather strong word. Usenet served its purpose at a point in time and then faded into obscurity, though it keeps chugging away in a niche, appealing to some. It's like saying that IRC failed. What forum community, social network or media platform has been permanent and outlasted everything else? It seems that on every social network, people migrate, people abandon platforms, and losing critical mass can be fatal to the platform, and then it just passes on to the next one, having served its purpose; did MySpace "fail" or did it simply cede the crown to Facebook? I remember Usenet fondly, though perhaps through rose-colored glasses. It was already full of trolls, flamewars, disruption and discord. Yet I cut my teeth there as a young sysadmin. I listened at the feet of experts, literal prominent experts in the field, who had spare time to just freely share their knowledge, because the Internet was an R&E community! I learned a lot about reputation and trust in the digital age. I gained "Internet street smarts" there. I believe that it shaped a lot of people's lives, for better or worse, and that's not a failure by any measure.

shadowgovt 3y ago
Yep. Protocol-backed stuff on the Internet "fails" the way civilizations "go into decline" in the board game Small World; they aren't removed from the board, but they no longer serve any purpose other than taking up space that the active civilizations haven't taken over yet.
- NoZebra120vClip 3y ago
  Exactly, it's protocol-backed, and that's the beauty of free, open source software and standards. As long as anyone care to maintain the client and/or servers, or even if very old code still works, you have a viable service. It's not a monolith that's beholden to the whims and fortunes of a single corporation that can just shut it down. Consider the enormous outcry when a single company has to shut down an entire platform, like a popular MMO or something, and then compare that to what happens when an IRC network has a schism, like the Freenode controversy: yep there was drama, but everyone took their toys and migrated to an identical network and now we have two. I come from MUDding communities myself, and there is no shortage of old and crusty wizards who cling to their MUD servers and have kept them open, going on 30 years now! Clients come and go, Internet standards change, and social network fads happen, and we're still playing a game that doesn't bother supporting TLS, MFA, Unicode, or graphics. MUDs never failed, they simply achieved posterity and faded from sight.

vidanay 3y ago

> Thirdly was the user interface. Usenet looked dull. In a world of animated GIFs and MySpace colour schemes, Usenet didn't even have avatar images! Sure, the spartan nature meant that you could focus on a conversation - but it didn't feel as modern and exciting as the web did. NNTP software was fragile. Forté Agent was a masterpiece. Change my mind.

nerdbert 3y ago
> Usenet didn't even have avatar images! Now let's not forget my 40-line ASCII-art sigfile.
- jghn 3y ago
  alt.fan.warlord would like a word
  - UncleSlacky 3y ago
    and BIFF.
senko 3y ago
> Forté Agent was a masterpiece. Yes. Also, my social network feeds could benefit from a killfile feature ...
- pierat 3y ago
  https://docs.joinmastodon.org/user/moderating/ https://docs.joinmastodon.org/user/moderating/ There's a wide variety of ways to self-moderate content. Andd you can block whole servers from your account as well. And if stuff is terrible, you can report to your instance's admin (if you're not running your own). And barring that, you can also report to their instance's admin. Given enough harassment or badness, servers can block harassing servers.
mmcgaha 3y ago
Around the time frame of the beta versions of agent coming out in early 1995, the Windows world really surpassed unix for internet usability. Obviously netscape was netscape but agent vs tin, mirc vs ircii, or eudora vs pine, the windows software getting churned out was peak usability as far as I am concerned.

howard941 3y ago

ISPs decommissioned their news servers. That's what killed netnews.

jmclnx 3y ago
>ISPs decommissioned their news servers Yes, this is the number 1 reason. But USENET is still being used and there are many people still using it. And there are places where you can signup for free access, this is one but there are many others: http://www.eternal-september.org/ http://www.eternal-september.org/ One thing to remember, you never see a post from your teenage self on USENET being dragged up by your employer causing you to be fired or loose out on a job. Why, privacy still exists on USENET. Also I guess he never heard of killfiles :) These days I have a rather large one compared to what I had many years ago. See a post you do not want to see anymore, add it to your killfile and maybe the person who sent it.
- u801e 3y ago
  > One thing to remember, you never see a post from your teenage self on USENET being dragged up by your employer causing you to be fired or loose out on a job. Why, privacy still exists on USENET. Google at one point did a very good job at indexing usenet posts and including them in their search results. If I searched for the name I used when posting to usenet, I would get hundreds of results of posts I made. But if I try searching now, very few results from usenet come up (perhaps because of the age of the posts). > Also I guess he never heard of killfiles :) I'm actually surprised he didn't mention that in his article.
sokoloff 3y ago
That seems like it’s reversing cause and effect, though. If lots of ISP customers were using their nntp servers, ISPs would have been quite likely to maintain them in order to be competitive.
- narag 3y ago
  They didn't. What seems logical doesn't need to be true. Maintaining servers was hard, they decided to not compete on that. They were trying to minimize any kind of customer support by humans, the number one cost center for any digital company. Lucky for them that the like of Google and Reddit externalized mail and forum services.

redprince 3y ago

I've used Usenet quite extensively in its heyday. At one point I even ran a Usenet site with dozens of peers and thousands of users. All on a very beefy (for its time) Sun E450. In my opinion Usenets greatest strength was also its downfall. It is a distributed system without central authority over who could connect to the network or firm control over groups and their contents. To connect to it as a peer, you just had to find at least one Usenet site willing to exchange messages (peer) with you. Usually that wasn't a problem. ISPs, universities, organizations of all kinds were running their own servers, offering Usenet client access to their customers and members for no additional charge. In a distributed system without central authority, innovation is exceedingly hard though. The protocols and features were basically set in stone. Taking the concept of offering discussions among users to a centralized or closed system made it possible to innovate very fast and offer superior features to the users. As the article pointed out, that wasn't the only protocol which got picked up that way and innovated upon until it displaced its origins. Since Usenet is still frozen feature wise were it was 30 or more years ago, I don't see a revival coming anytime soon.

liotier 3y ago
> without central authority over who could connect to the network or firm control over groups and their contents Moderation. In public forums, everything else is trivial and moderation is the invisible stinking hairy elephant in the room. To the question "why isn't there a decentralized open protocol free software X" the answer is moderation. Think or it as the discreet but efficient bouncers without which a sufficiently popular public place cannot maintain a welcoming atmosphere. Newsgroups became sufficiently popular, death by inadequate moderation ensued.
- NoMoreNicksLeft 3y ago
  Obviously, this is why 4chan died back in 2012. If only they had moderation, they might still be around today.
  - amadeuspagel 3y ago
    4chan has moderation.

WarOnPrivacy 3y ago

In the 90s I used to edit out CSAM related groups, from the downloaded list in Netscape's built in NNTP client. Customers who were surfing usenet for the first time were reasonably horrified by the group names. After a time I got unhappy about this and went to see if I could determine a physical hosting location of the content. I don't recall the particulars, just that I came up with an AT&T subsidiary - something polkadot - sitting at a Canadian address, near the US border. I wasn't willing to reach out to the FBI blindly and couldn't locate anyone who know anyone in the bureau. I knew someone who knew the head of the [state] Family Association and that person was well connected politically. After some back and forth I gave up on the whole thing. That guy was fairly obsessed with stamping out homosexuality and couldn't be bothered with abused children. I moved on.

temporal828 3y ago
> In the 90s I used to edit out CSAM related groups, from the downloaded list in Netscape's built in NNTP client. This list gets downloaded from whatever server you configure and is then local to your machine. Editing it would only affect what you see on your own client. > After a time I got unhappy about this and went to see if I could determine a physical hosting location of the content. Usenet is a distributed system - every server that didn't filter the group was hosting the content. They were typically viewed as common carriers. (It sounds like you were tracing your own ISP's server?) On that note some from upstate New York may remember that the attorney general tried to garner votes by raiding and seizing servers from a few local ISPs (Dreamscape, RIP), which in the end didn't work out. > I wasn't willing to reach out to the FBI blindly and couldn't locate anyone who know anyone in the bureau. The FBI was quite well aware of the content on Usenet and very adept at navigating it in its heydey. They used it in a number of investigations to track down producers including breaking into trusted rings that communicated with PGP encrypted communications on Usenet. You wouldn't have informed them of anything they didn't know.
- WarOnPrivacy 3y ago
  > Editing it would only affect what you see on your own client. I know. I mentioned I was editing list on clients' (plural) PCs. > Usenet is a distributed system - every server that didn't filter the group was hosting the content. Right. I had found a physical address of hard drives containing the data. That it wasn't the only location of the data might not have mattered to an LEO. It all depended on how many gold stars this type of bust generated (at that time). Hindsight recognizes here that the odds were against LEO being particularly interested. External political pressure may have changed that. > It sounds like you were tracing your own ISP's server? Multiple clients, multiple ISPs. IIRC I determined that AT&T was supplying NNTP to all of them. > On that note some from upstate New York may remember that the attorney general tried to garner votes by raiding and seizing servers from a few local ISPs (Dreamscape, RIP), which in the end didn't work out. When one grandstands in the press, one takes one's chances. Quiet LEO actions work a differently shuffled deck. > The FBI was quite well aware of the content on Usenet and very adept at navigating it in its heydey. Absolutely. However, the one action they never, ever, ever took was anything at all against the corporate hosts and suppliers of that data. There are many strong possibilities for this, some understandable and some corrupt.

goodpoint 3y ago

Usenet did not fail. It was killed. It's different.

ThinkingGuy 3y ago

Possibly slightly off-topic: Are there any free (as in speech) web-based NNTP front-ends that are relative ly up to date, and still maintained? On my home server I can pull up my email, texts, and RSS feeds in a web browser. It would be nice to do the same with newsgroups, instead of having to run Pan (even though I get the same feeling of nostalgia from its UI as the author does).

davisr 3y ago
Yes--the DLang forums are what I'd consider the best. > About (https://forum.dlang.org/help#about https://forum.dlang.org/help#about) > This website is powered by DFeed, an NNTP / mailing list web frontend / forum software, news aggregator and IRC bot. DFeed was written mostly by Vladimir Panteleev. The source code is available under the GNU Affero General Public License on GitHub: https://github.com/CyberShadow/DFeed https://github.com/CyberShadow/DFeed > This DFeed instance (forum.dlang.org) is a frontend to the DigitalMars NNTP server and mailing lists. Portions of the web interface (including style and graphics) are Copyright © by Digital Mars.
teddyh 3y ago
Anything wrong with Mozilla Thunderbird?
- ThinkingGuy 3y ago
  Only that it's not installed on every computer I use :)

pixl97 3y ago

Why did usenet fail: 1) It couldn't serve ads in a controlled manner. The lack of monetization made sure that most people paid for usenet access allowing 'free' http driven apps to take over. 2) Most ISPs didn't provide much information if they had a NNTP server users could use, and NNTP readers didn't come with most users computers. HTTP did. 3) It wasn't exciting to new users. Web went from mostly text to multimedia as internet connection speeds increased.

u801e 3y ago
> Most ISPs didn't provide much information if they had a NNTP server users could use, and NNTP readers didn't come with most users computers. HTTP did. Until Outlook Express was replaced by Windows Mail, most users computers did come with a NNTP client.

deleted 3y ago

[deleted]

throwawaaarrgh 3y ago

Usenet didn't fail. People are just dumb and follow trends.

deleted 3y ago
[deleted]

rbanffy 3y ago

> Dropbox is FTP with a better UX Nope. Dropbox is NFS with an asynchronous client with lots of local persistent cache. > WhatsApp groups are just ListServes That's a huge oversimplification. All in all, I wish I have built something that was the backbone of internet discussions for decades. Truth is, we all moved on. At one time, newsgroups was the only space where we could have threaded discussions. Now we have lots of other, more targeted, options. All the issues the author mentioned could be fixed. We can use AI to rate comments (at the client), and build a decentralized reputation system (maybe a good use for blockchain, finally).

slooonz 3y ago

I’d add barriers of entry. Not high, but way higher that anything that is publicly readable on the internet and therefore indexed on Google. I can discover interesting subreddits by pure chance by following a google search on a question I have. Or following a link on a blog There’s no chance of that happening on Usenet. For most users, search/discovery is a web thing (web search, links) and there’s no link from the web to usenet. Therefore if you don't know anything interesting on usenet you can't easily discover it. Any interesting post/discussion cannot be simply linked on a tweet (or, for that matters, on IRC). Usenet is completely insular. A web forum is not. Were I a Usenet enthusiast, that would be my 1st priority. Public archives of most important hierarchies (comp.* for example), indexed on Google, easily linkable.

jghn 3y ago
When I first started using usenet in the early 90s, I spent days going through the entire list of newsgroups my provider had. IIRC it was somewhere around 6000 groups at the time. Found all sorts of interesting things that way. To your point, that's not exactly a scalable solution and not one that most people would do :) I'd counter that though with the aspect of one stop shopping, which e.g. Reddit also has. One thing that kept me on Usenet far longer than most was that with one app (my newsreader) I could access limitless topic specific forums. Instead of having to go to a bunch of different sites, each with their own logins & quirks, etc. To this day I still prefer applications like that, for instance it is something I really appreciated about Twitter until recent changes.
shadowgovt 3y ago
One of the reasons HTTP ate the world is simply the fact that everyone already has a user interface program installed to use an HTTP-vended service. In this day and age, that need to install one more thing (unless you're on mobile) is itself a huge barrier to entry.
u801e 3y ago
> I can discover interesting subreddits by pure chance by following a google search on a question I have. Or following a link on a blog > There’s no chance of that happening on Usenet. You could the list of newsgroups for phrases that could lead you to an interesting group. Other times, someone in the group may mention the other group if you mention your interest in a comment. At least, that's how I found a lot of different newsgroups when I was regularly reading and posting to usenet.

Delphiza 3y ago

alt.binaries killed usenet. Apart from pron clogging up bandwidth, alt.binaries became a good vector to distribute viruses, child pron, and a bunch of other things that ISPs, and their dial-up customers, were becoming increasingly concerned about. Its openness in an increasingly more dangerous, scammy, and criminal world was always going to be its own undoing. There must have been a stage where Pamela Anderson took up most of the world's storage and bandwidth just from synchronising usenet feeds.

temporal828 3y ago
> alt.binaries killed usenet. In 2023 Usenet is solely commercially viable for alt.binaries.
- korse 3y ago
  I'm surprised people aren't mentioning this more. Usenet may be dead for discussion, but it certainly isn't a dead technology. edit: I guess they are. Took a second to search around the comments.
  - u801e 3y ago
    From what I've read, they're transferring multiple petabytes of data a day between different backbone NNTP server farms.
    - korse 3y ago
      This is true. Pretty much all alt.binaries though and there is an interesting ecosystem of tools, forums and providers that you need to be aware of in order to access content.

Scarblac 3y ago

Binaries, imo. At some point Usenet became synonymous to illegal downloads for people, and it became too costly to support.

rootusrootus 3y ago
Warez, and porn. Neither of which are easy to defend when an ISP is looking to address the costs of a Usenet feed. Towards the end, we had close to 100 Mbps full time just for the feed, as I recall. Then we outsourced it to cut that cost. But then management decided none of our customers needed alt.binaries and we dropped it altogether. The effect on churn was negligible.
- badcppdev 3y ago
  Totally agree with this. Why would any commercial ISP want to offer this as a service? There was very little upside and massive potential liabilities because they were storing and supplying unmoderated content that in the very best case was pirated music and movies.
kolinko 3y ago
I'm not sure binares were too big of an issue - most server simply didn't carry groups that allowed binaries. The spam issue was the real deal breaker imho - you either had a fully moderated group, or you had a fully unmoderated one with spam left and right. Also, for me it was social media - web groups, however lacking the interface was, had more variety in their subjects.

ubermonkey 3y ago

It didn't fail. It was a smashing, world-changing success. Success, though, doesn't always mean immortality.

B1FF_PSUVM 3y ago
"Just resting."
intrasight 3y ago
Came to say the same. Usenet was amazing - in it's time. If that's "failure" then lots of apps would be happy to fail.

webdoodle 3y ago

I enjoy reading old usenet posts of mine. The confident yet naive bravado almost makes me feel young again.

anigbrowl 3y ago

It didn't fail, it's just that GUI chat UIs like AOL and later web forums were more visually attractive, and were able to incorporate graphics. Usenet relied on uuencode for any sort of binary attachment which was a pain in the ass. There was also a high degree of snobbishness that made it unwelcoming to new users, who naturally went to other fora where they weren't treated like children. The other problem was spam. Usenet had excellent moderation/blocking capabilities for the time ('welcome to my killfile' was the last thing many trolls heard from a person), but relied on a general consensus that spam is cancer. Then Laurence Canter and Martha Siegel single-handedly broke usenet in one afternoon nearly 30 years ago, and I still feel annoyed whenever I think of them. People like this exemplify everything that is toxic about capitalism. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Laurence_Canter_and_Martha_Siegel https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Laurence_Canter_and_Martha_Sie...

lanstin 3y ago
There was an AOL newsgroup reader, curtesy of Jeff Warrington. The AOL posters were mostly still treated like children, but not unfairly.

mattmcknight 3y ago

I presumed it was spam. It was a system designed for maybe 1 million non-commercial users The presence of large numbers of users and commercial users were unmanageable. I used it quite extensive in 1992-6, but after that it was a mostly inferior, and the surviving groups I followed became closed mailing lists.

cobaltoxide 3y ago

Spam

aaomidi 3y ago

I am still confused on how to access usenet for free tbh. Everytime I've looked into it seems weirdly expensive.

floren 3y ago
The expensive services are expensive because they include alt.binaries.*, which are used for piracy. http://www.eternal-september.org/ http://www.eternal-september.org/ gives free access to the text groups

bsdetector 3y ago

Seems like nobody has mentioned a huge reason Usenet failed: It needed a client program. Digg/slashdot didn't succeed because they were flashier or moderated or had less illegal content or privately developed or any of these other reasons given, it was because people could just follow a link to a web page and they're in. Even today reddit or discord do everything they can to convert web users to app users for obvious reasons, but they must have that web version for casual users or they'll die off to whoever does have one. So ultimately what killed Usenet was Section 230. Without that services could do simple copying/caching like NNTP (protected under telecom rules) but the actual presentation had to be done on the user's computer. And consequently were 230 repealed it wouldn't be the end of the social media world, but rather the resurgence of Usenet-like models where all the presentation is done by a client program.

xingped 3y ago
This is one of the big reasons, I think. I hear about Usenet all the time, but whenever I try to go looking for it in the past to figure it out, it just makes no sense to me and I cannot figure out how to get to it. To me it's just this nebulous thing that exists somewhere, but I have no idea where.
- walterbell 3y ago
  Some ISPs still provide Usenet feeds, or there are commercial Usenet providers in many countries, similar to email. Usenet can be accessed via the OSS Thunderbird client, or OSS Usenet clients. https://www.fastusenet.org/thunderbird-windows-tutorial.html https://www.fastusenet.org/thunderbird-windows-tutorial.html
- osswid 3y ago
  Go to telehack.com and type 'notes'. It's not comprehensive, but will give you a taste of the flavor of what Usenet was like.
- UncleSlacky 3y ago
  You can get a free account here (text groups only, not binaries): https://www.eternal-september.org/ https://www.eternal-september.org/ You can access Usenet via Thunderbird (or Pan, mentioned in the article).

debacle 3y ago

Every Usenet replacement (but Craigslist and 4chan) has burned through hundreds of millions of VC cash only to eventually fizzle out. Maybe digital space and presence needs to be a social utility.

Earw0rm 3y ago

Usenet was - by the standards of the early 00's, which is when it began to decline - slow, and asynchronous. Posts could take hours to days to propagate, which meant conversation threads would go off in multiple directions at once. Technology that was transformative during the BBS-to-early-internet transition became a liability ten years on. Slashdot, PHPBB and later on Reddit offered synchronous, low-latency, single-point-of-truth updates to thread/post order. The promise of self-configured "agents" for content filtering never really caught on - they were too time-consuming for anyone bar a few geeks and academics to manage. The social media "feed" is an evolution of the same idea, but there's not really any self-configuration - instead the system is programmed by the platform's owners to adapt to your behavioural feedback.

radicalbyte 3y ago
I disagree: between 1994-5 and about 2005 I made heavy use of a "private" NNTP server (for the Edge Magazine forums). Compared to early web forums it was super fast - you could sync all of the messages in about two minutes. Then you could disconnect your modem, read + reply etc. Then go online an hour later to send reply + update the feed. Broadband changed the game: once the internet was fast and always-on then web forums pretty much took over. We lost something though: the beauty of NNTP was that you could easily keep your own archive of discussions of the groups you were interested in. Search worked and it as offline. Oh and no adverts or tracking!
- Earw0rm 3y ago
  I'm talking about server to server message propagation, not client/server - agreed, the Usenet clients were much faster and had better feature-sets than any web forum running on Netscape or the early versions of IE. That part was great, but messages could take hours to even days to propagate across the whole network. The sync-reply-upload work flow was indeed useful - especially so in countries where you had to pay by the minute to be online.
  - radicalbyte 3y ago
    Absolutely - the federated case (I was rather active on the tolkien, c64 and various computing groups) was terrible. We used to use email lists for real discussion with plain text messages (shame that isn't a thing anymore). It was an excellent experience in the non-federated case.

mrweasel 3y ago

I don't really agree, but also don't have a better explanation. Moderation and clients would have been solved, had Usenet continued to be huge. Email have had it's fair share of problems, including spam, but has always managed to survive because nothing has been able to replace it and it's still valuable. You could argue that development of attractive clients have died down in the past decade for email as well. Panic kept their Unison client alive for way longer than they needed to, and that looked pretty. Personally I would love to see Usenet replace localized Facebook groups. It seems like every small town have a Facebook group, and if you have no presents on Facebook, you get no information. Usenet would be a perfect fit, no central authority to monetize and control the group, you'd be able to read about activities in your neighborhood, while having no account or an account with an organisation you trust. The ISPs might not want to pick up the tab for running the servers, but they kept doing it for years after Usenet became a ghost town.

u801e 3y ago
> Personally I would love to see Usenet replace localized Facebook groups. It actually happened the other way around. Local ISPs had newsgroups that had limited distribution where people local to you would post about upcoming events, things they were looking to rent or buy, things they wanted to sell, etc. > The ISPs might not want to pick up the tab for running the servers There's nothing really stopping a local ISP from running a server that's not connected to an upstream feed and requiring credentials to post. That would be localized and a lot more relevant to those in the community if they really wanted a local discussion forum.

KingOfCoders 3y ago

I had much fun in Usenet (you can find many of my posts on comp.sys.amiga.advocacy), I've learned a lot, wrote a lot in English for the first time. There was another post some months ago here that argued success is not tied to survival. To me Usenet was a huge success and didn't fail in any way, just because people are no longer using it doesn't mean it failed.

unreal37 3y ago

Nobody made money on Usenet. It was a "cost" for all ISPs and eventually Google. So maybe that's why it failed.

dariosalvi78 3y ago

I used it quite a lot around 97 / 98, it was a great way to meet people and discuss serios and not-so-serious topics with people around the world. It was technically interesting and a very powerful tool. Then it got flooded with "replica watches" and "girls nextdoor porn", huge attachments and shady stuff.

rocket_surgeron 3y ago

Usenet didn't fail, you failed it. There are servers up right now. People using it at this very moment. Why did you leave? Digg? Slashdot?

pmontra 3y ago

Did Usenet fail or did it succeed until something better came up? Nobody would say that telegraph failed, do we agree on that? And yet we started using landline phones, fax, email, SMS and all sort of messaging systems on mobile phones.

segmondy 3y ago

Google.

ck2 3y ago

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Newsgroup_spam https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Newsgroup_spam

zmix 3y ago

I don't think Usenet failed. It declined. It was a platform for "first hour" internet users, the early "internet natives", mostly nerds, like us. When the masses appeared on the "intarwebs" the web would be the place to go, with all it's flashy hypermedia and uniform way of use (no separate client needed, same philosophy, etc.) The Usenet simply got replaced by web forums.

tptacek 3y ago

I've said this a bunch of times before, but I don't see this take in a lot of Usenet postmortems, and I think it's truer than most of what people say about Usenet. Piracy killed Usenet. I ran a Freenix-competitive NNTP installation for a very popular ISP in Chicago in the 1990s. Usenet was by far the most demanding infrastructure we ran: we ran striped RAID arrays, read replicas†, transit servers --- all of this on the only expensive Sun hardware we had in our fleet. At one point, we independently reinvented the INN history cache, and there were a couple sites near the top of the Freenix leaderboard in part due to IRC conversations about our dumb patch. All this is just to say I feel like I have some bona fides here. Keeping up with the Usenet everybody laments today was not this demanding. You could easily have done it with a Pentium FreeBSD server and a fast disk. But customers wouldn't let you. The open secret about Usenet was that it was a binary distribution system first and a discussion forum second. Unlike discussion groups, keeping up with full-feed binary groups was a fucking nightmare. Usenet is the stupidest mechanism for distributing binaries you can possibly imagine: just imagine BitTorrent, but entirely Base64'd, and without the forward error correction --- your file was in 100 pieces, and if you lost one of them, you were just fucked. If users couldn't reliably download pirated games or porn from your Usenet servers, they'd loudly complain and tank your reviews for running a bad Usenet setup. And woe betide any ISP that claimed to do NNTP on anything less than a binary full feed. The rest of the story is obvious. ISP operators had better things to do with their time and money than cater to the small minority of angry cost-center users who used Usenet this way, and so they outsourced Usenet altogether. Usenet centralized because binary groups forced it to, and once it was centralized there was no reason not to just stick it on a website. Web forums are better than Usenet was back in the day, so arguably, over the long term, not much was really lost. Reddit today is very much like Usenet was like in the mid-1990s, and they at least have a reliable archive. Apart from the archives of my old comp.security.unix posts, all I really miss about Usenet was the competitive systems engineering aspect of it. I'd love to go back in time and take another whack at Usenet knowing some of what I know now; I didn't realize how fun a problem it was at the time: a real system people actually cared about with a leaderboard. † These things sound very boring now but were most definitely not boring in 1995.

radicalbyte 3y ago
Nowadays usenet really is nothing but a binary transfer system. Such a shame.

jantypas2 3y ago

There was another reason Usenet died -- people want other people to do the work. Oh, they'll pay for it to a degree, but Usenet wasn't plug-and-play. To make Usenet work, everyone had to cooperate and most people just don't want the work. AOL wasn't even close, but it was someone else's problem to run and maintain. Hostly, my own vies here, but if Reddit just had an NNTP bridge, people would flock to it and never know the differece. I remember running a node -- it was a constant battle to maintain space on the spools and deal with my own users. And, for what? It cost us money and while everyone said they wanted it, no one wanted to help with the work or pay for it. Add to that the number of groups that just want "zombie" on us, and it died.

u801e 3y ago
> If Reddit just had an NNTP bridge, people would flock to it and never know the differece. I never really looked into it, but if someone were to make a NNTP bridge for reddit, Hacker News, and other similar websites, would it be against their respective TOSs?

superkuh 3y ago

I still post on usenet a couple times per month. You gotta be the change you want to see in the world.

rocketnasa 3y ago

Back in the 1990's, the in-person User Groups were a thing of the past and we didn't have Patreon style support donation system wasn't widely accepted. Funding was mostly out of owner/operator budget like it was in the BBS days. Usenet was part of the ISP plan, part of your monthly dial-up (or otherwise) costs. Who paid to moderate and solve problems was starting to fail under the load and the easy ability to mass spam.

sombragris 3y ago

Two points completely unrelated between them: 1. A large part of the world completely ignored Usenet. ISPs began offering Net connectivity in my country in the late 1990s, but then no one (IIRC) had an Usenet server or archive; and if they had one, it was largely unadvertised. Connecting to a NNTP server not offered by your ISP might be doable, but it could be a paid-for thing, not very easy and not very reliable. So, too many people around the world did not get into their Eternal September. 2. There are good NNTP clients (and free software ones). Claws Mail has good NNTP support and is actively developed, and this is just one example.

gmiller123456 3y ago

I really hate to see the word "fail" used for something that was so incredibly successful, just because technology advanced enough to provide something better.

margalabargala 3y ago
I agree. By that metric, some other notable failures from history include: - Steam locomotives - Gutenberg's printing press - The IBM PC - The original iPhone - The Ford Model T - The telegraph, and landline telephones - The cotton gin - Black powder, cannons, etc - Wind-powered boats

kayo_20211030 3y ago

TIL that `annecdata` (properly `anecdata`, I think) is a word. Nice!.

2809 3y ago

Wait, it failed? Since when...?

zxcvbn4038 3y ago

Usenet didn't fail at all, it just went out of fashion after Google killed the usenet archive. Honestly, I think if we applied everything we've learned about http over the past thirty years and applied it to an updated nntp protocol then it would be quite formidable. The biggest issue that never was never resolved was on one hand you have the people who don't want people controlling what they read and say - and on the other hand you have the jerks that want to abuse that. If you've ever logged into a darknet forum and someone has uploaded hundreds of autopsy photos anywhere they could upload photos except the "autopsy photos" area, then that is exactly what used to happen on Usenet. It's probably the same guy doing it. Though personally I think having to do the occasional bulk delete is worth preserving freedom of expression.

groos 3y ago

Fail? According to Vernor Vinge, it's in use Galaxy-wide 20000+ years from now as the Net of a Million Lies. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/A_Fire_Upon_the_Deep https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/A_Fire_Upon_the_Deep

dredmorbius 3y ago

The failing of many reminiscences of Usenet is that they're entirely or largely from a user perspective. What's forgotten is that someone needed to host newsgroups, and that that prospect became increasingly untenable. Usenet died a death of a thousand cuts, though I'd argue four were the deepest and most lethal: 1. It got spammed to death. 2. It lost control over its culture, and that culture was crucial to its functioning. 3. It was too problematic for ISPs (or others) to provide ready access to it: spam, harassment, child pornography, and copyright violations all posed massive concerns. 4. There was no viable business model for providing the service. See: <https://old.reddit.com/r/dredmorbius/comments/3c3xyu/why_usenet_died/ https://old.reddit.com/r/dredmorbius/comments/3c3xyu/why_use...> All of those are significant, but I would (and did) argue that points 3 & 4 were the final nails in the coffin. Anti-spam measures and tightly-curated / moderated newsgroups could survive despite the spam, but with firms willing to brave the very real legal and financial risks, and without any other viable financial support, Usenet fell to a mix of mailing lists and early online blogging / forum software (phpBB, Slashdot, and others). There've been several attempts to revise or update Usnet (most notably Usenet II),. Those ... have also failed to take hold. (Though in fairness: social media is extremely fickle, many apparently well-structured, and occasionally well-capitalised, attempts have similarly foundered, and the limelite often moves on with time.) Gaining traction and viability is a mix of luck, timing, and execution (mostly getting out of your own way). Reddit can be seen as a response to points 1, 3, and 4. Reddit offers reasonably good spam defences, it has evolved protections against legally-problematic content (with some large bumps along the way), and it's attempting to develop advertising as a business angle. And has had some success at all of these. There were other factors as well. One of the more significant, and a challenge for any client-mediated (as opposed to server-based) protocol is that different client behaviours matter and may give rise to incompatibiilties. Where I witnessed this most glaringly was in email. During the 1990s I participated in a technical discussion where participants joined from Unix, Vax, Mainframe, and PC systems (and possibly others). Simple reply-acknowledgement and quoting practices differed widely and often clashed badly. I don't recall if Microsoft's email platform at the time (this pre-dated Outlook) clashed with Unix conventions, but hot holy hell did IBM's Lotus Notes Mail. And it was Annoying As Heck. Usenet ... didn't seem to get bitten by this too badly, or at least not until Web-based gateways to Usenet became commonplace. Though, come to think of it, email gateways also existed, and that mailing list was mirrored to a Usenet group, so yeah... The other factor of course was the emergence of more centralised alternatives, almost all Web based, to Usenet. By the late 1990s, phpBB and similar online fora were becoming the centre of discussions, and community sites such as Slashdot emerged. Those in significant part acted on the user-side of the equation. Where Usenet itself was increasingly a wasteland and feeds were hard to find, Web fora were easy, no-installation (the first SaaS models), and contained noxious behaviours far more effectively. But the real focus is on the business case: if there's no profit, and unlimited downside risk, commercial enterprise will flee, at which point widespread usage becomes highly improbable. Distributed protocols and networks (Mastodon, the Fediverse, etc.) should keep this in mind. A possible alternative is to follow Usenet's initial foundation: independent institutions (e.g., higher education), but that seems at best a limited and niche category.

zuminator 3y ago

In my experience the main factors that killed Usenet were 1) the World Wide Web and 2) spam. 1) Usenet was at one point a huge portion of internet traffic. But as the rest of the web ballooned in popularity, what was originally the big fish in a small pond became a small fish in a huge ocean. Eventually newer internet users skipped the Usenet experience entirely. And the zeitgeist went with them. People who spent time putting new information online stopped making newsgroups their first choice and started doing it on their own weblogs or on siloed websites. 2) As newsgroups hollowed out, the S/N ratio went way down. I think once they were about 30% spam, people just started giving up en masse. There's also the contributing factor of the old ISP services dying or morphing into media providers. Usenet was dialup friendly and the old 300/600/1200/2400/4800/9600/14400/19200/38400/57600 Kbps modem-serving ISPs would advertise their Usenet feed as a perk. It was 80 character, monochrome screen friendly. Once dialup became superseded by broadband, and computers turned into media and 3d gaming devices, and Napster/Limewire/eD2k made binary distribution so much more convenient for the masses, Usenet lost its raison d'être.

u801e 3y ago
> Usenet was at one point a huge portion of internet traffic. Usenet posts were just text that may have been several kilobytes in size at most. If you look at binary newsgroups, the current level of internet traffic is quite large[1] (though that was 12 years ago and is by now multiple petabytes per day). [1] https://www.ghacks.net/2011/01/26/usenet-traffic-growth-to-almost-9tb-per-day/ https://www.ghacks.net/2011/01/26/usenet-traffic-growth-to-a...
- zuminator 3y ago
  The size of the daily Usenet feed is up to over 200TB a day now, even more than the 9TB number in your link. Although I imagine the total daily amount transferred by users is going to dwarf the size of the feed, one might still note for reference that total daily internet traffic is about 3EB which is around 15,000x that of a single full news service. In other words, good point! I hadn't realized that in nominal terms, Usenet was still growing like topsy (albeit likely shrinking as a total proportion of global traffic). [0] https://www.newsdemon.com/usenet-newsgroup-feed-size https://www.newsdemon.com/usenet-newsgroup-feed-size [1] https://techjury.net/blog/how-much-data-is-created-every-day/ https://techjury.net/blog/how-much-data-is-created-every-day...

retrocryptid 3y ago

Uhhh... USENET failed? News to me. I used it for over a decade. That doesn't sound like failure.

ShadowBanThis01 3y ago

"so CompuServe was my gateway to the Internet." I don't even remember CompuServe having Internet access. AOL, which came well after CompuServe, didn't even have it until they tacked it on as an afterthought (with a button on their toolbar).

panny 3y ago

Government picked the winner. Centralized HTTP over decentralized NNTP was easier for government to control. https://www.cnet.com/tech/tech-industry/n-y-attorney-general-forces-isps-to-curb-usenet-access/ https://www.cnet.com/tech/tech-industry/n-y-attorney-general...

u801e 3y ago

In my opinion, the main reason[1][2] for its decline in terms of text discussions was due to the deal that Andrew Cuomo (the attorney general of New York at the time) made with the major ISPs to restrict access to child pornography. This resulted in many ISPs discontinuing their usenet offering and cutting off their customers from it. Unless those customers made an effort to access usenet some other way, they stopped using it. [1] https://www.cnet.com/tech/tech-industry/n-y-attorney-general-forces-isps-to-curb-usenet-access/ https://www.cnet.com/tech/tech-industry/n-y-attorney-general... [2] https://www.cnet.com/tech/tech-industry/cuomo-strong-arms-comcast-over-usenet/ https://www.cnet.com/tech/tech-industry/cuomo-strong-arms-co...

ChicagoDave 3y ago

It died because of trolls and a horrible management system. You had “justify” moderation to some group and they turned everyone down. Eventually everyone created forums with their own moderation rules.

hakfoo 3y ago

I suspect it was a market failure. As home internet moved from a competitive dialup market to a handful of DSL/Cable players, all ancillary services dropped in importance. People weren't willing to take 128kbps ISDN instead of 10Mbps cable because they had better Usenet coverage or retention policies, or more personal home page storage, or better email services. These services, in turn, became obvious places to economize and scale back. Nobody uses them because we don't invest in them so we shouldn't invest in them. All everyone wants is port 80 and promising the largest number of "up to" MBps we can. So eventually ISP-infrastructure Usenet falls apart, and you're left with having to find an external service provider, which usually was competing for an entirely different market-- "we have the mostest and bestest alt.binaries, and we're going to charge prices close to what we pay for a streaming service in 2023, because that's an expensive customer to service" rather than "we have all the text-based communities you love, and realistically, each user clicking three banner ads a month would finance the bandwidth and disc space those use." I loved Usenet as a teen, but the family stayed on a crappy provider for too long, and they killed it. I got an account on a server being offered as a public service a few years later, only to find it shuttered within weeks of doing so. I just want to go back to 1997, writing terrible cringe RP on alt.fan.dragons.

simonblack 3y ago

Usenet didn't fail. It is still around, but nowhere near as vibrant as when it was 'the only game in town'. Yes it is slow, yes it is spartan. But like AM radio, it should still be kept as a no-frills alternative when things have to depend on low-bandwidth. Like FTP, it still has a use. But people are still attracted to "oooh, bright shiny thing!" rather than the spartan.

u801e 3y ago
> Yes it is slow People using it for binary downloads can pull down data at gigabit speeds. > it should still be kept as a no-frills alternative when things have to depend on low-bandwidth. It's unfortunate that most websites and other services require significant amounts of bandwidth. If I'm using a GPRS connection on my phone, websites other than Hacker News are not really usable. IRC and Usenet still work though.
- simonblack 3y ago
  > Yes it is slow > People using it for binary downloads can pull down data at gigabit speeds. Sorry. I wasn't clear. I meant that being a 'store and forward' medium rather than a broadcast medium, it can take days to propagate to all clients, rather than talking specifically about the speed of transmission.

jrnichols 3y ago

it didn't fail, people just found something more shiny. what scared me off usenet was the reality that very very illegal porn was flooding into otherwise normal groups. the relentless onslaught of spammers & scammers was never ending. kill files were handy but eventually became unwieldy. it wasn't a client issue.. I was using what I considered to be the best Usenet client ever, Unison by Panic. I still use nntp via aioe.org to this day.

AmenBreak 3y ago

It didn't fail. Usenet's still quite busy depending on the group.