8 ms·

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

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.
  - slyall 3y ago
    I'm going to call "mostly wrong" on the server-to-server propagation. By 2000 the NNTP mesh was very interconnected and fast. Sites competed[1] to get messages propagated fast. Especially text messages. Any site hooked into the mesh was going to be offered any article multiple times within seconds of it being posted. Slow articles would happen but only during outages or with sites that were not following good practice. [1] Via http://top1000.anthologeek.net/ http://top1000.anthologeek.net/
  - EdwardDiego 3y ago
    That reminds me of the days of FidoNet [0] and Barren Realms Elite [1] where the inter-BBS propagation delay made your BBS's attacks on another BBS even more tense and exciting, and well, it felt realistic that sending your forces to another "planet" took time to happen and for results to be reported. [0]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/FidoNet https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/FidoNet [1]: https://www.johndaileysoftware.com/products/bbsdoors/barrenrealmselite https://www.johndaileysoftware.com/products/bbsdoors/barrenr...
    - nicpottier 3y ago
      Woah, I remember playing BRE, which must have been close to 30 years ago. Impressed the author still has a site for it much less that you can purchase it!
  - inopinatus 3y ago
    Propagation time was never the problem. I ran a major European node in the 90s and our propagation times were in the seconds. We absolutely obsessed about it. Only dialup leaf nodes took longer, but that was and remains a feature, not a bug. I've been using NNTP as a Gossip-type protocol for eventually-consistent pub/sub telemetry, monitoring, and notifications between partially-connected nodes in an unstable mesh ever since. Just not in public. Let’s be careful to separate the message protocol from the system it supported. Usenet’s carcinogenic inability to self-regulate at scale arose from the absence of distributed authority and negative feedback loops in the control plane, something we’d aim to build in algebraically and cryptographically if designed today. Alas, VC backing directs most research in this subsector towards systems enabling consumer surveillance.
- jjav 3y ago
  > Then go online an hour later to send reply + update the feed. Usenet was truly special and an awesome design. Every iteration of something newer has been strictly worse. Mailing lists, forums, and now proprietary platforms controlled by a single corporation. At every step, features and functionality have been lost. In the early 90s I used to travel coast to coast a lot, so I pulled all the newsgroups I was following to my laptop and spent the flights reading and responding to posts. Then I'd sync at the other coast before flying back.
TylerE 3y ago
What really killed it was alt.binaries.*. Vastly bloated bandwidth/storage requirements, so ISPs either killed NNTP altogther, or stopped giving a crap and you'd start, like, randomly dropping 10% of messages, which amounts to the same thing.
- vikingerik 3y ago
  I don't think this was true. It was entirely common practice for an ISP to ignore alt.binaries but carry all the rest of Usenet fairly reliably. To the point where users would rebuke each other for posting binary content in a non alt.binaries hierarchy, lest the ISPs detect that as a stealth binary group and drop that too. What killed Usenet was as the parent said - users are better served by the centralized management and reliability of a web forum, they don't need or care about decentralization and peering. The same thing happened for Discord and Slack replacing IRC.
  - radicalbyte 3y ago
    Discord/Slack replaced IRC because IRC ran over a set of ports which could (and would) be blocked by almost every corporate firewall. I still remember the day that my friendly Systems Administrator left and the new guy nuked our IRC access :(
    - quickthrower2 3y ago
      Probably the reason that took over is they are well funded and have marketing and/or salespeople. And they have emojis, file uploads, etc and they are just generally easier to use. Not that IRC is hard, but it is geeky enough.
      - bsder 3y ago
        > Not that IRC is hard This totally understates the idiocy of IRC. I was a full-blown operator/system administrator across both mainframes and Unix workstations for years. And I never truly felt like I grokked IRC. Whenever I had to go into a channel, it was always a screwy dance of mishmash of how to get a directory, how to appease the channel bot, how to even bloody just log in, etc. And God help you if you didn't have the preferred client for the channel. "Bye bye, N00b." Sorry, I weep for the centralization of these kinds of services. I don't weep even in the slightest for how IRC actually got implemented.
pmoriarty 3y ago
Web was just the new shiny. People like the new shiny. Forum posts also had embedded images, and didn't require installing/configuring/maintaining a separate application.. all you needed was your web browser.
listenallyall 3y ago
> Slashdot, PHPBB and later on Reddit offered synchronous, low-latency, single-point-of-truth updates to thread/post order. ...and reputation/karma, avatars, post counts, moderation, search, categories, emojis, anonymity (email address not exposed), notifications...
- u801e 3y ago
  > anonymity (email address not exposed) Quite a few people posted under pseudonyms with fake email addresses on usenet. > notifications When you downloaded new headers from the server, the client would highlight the new messages in a way that made it very easy to see which messages you haven't seen and whether you got any replies to your message. Try doing that in Hacker News, reddit, Facebook, Twitter, etc.
  - listenallyall 3y ago
    Don't Reddit and Twitter email you when you get a reply -- or at least have the option to get an email? With Usenet you had to go check.
    - u801e 3y ago
      > Don't Reddit and Twitter email you when you get a reply -- or at least have the option to get an email? Yes, but you would have to check a completely different service to see whether you got any replies. Most people would probably refresh the comments page or click on the notification icon directly in the page. > With Usenet you had to go check. Clients could be configured to check for message every X minutes/hours, etc, but just clicking on "Get messages" would show unread messages. And you could easily find replies to your comment(s) since the thread pane would essentially provide an indexed view of the entire thread including every subthread that you could expand/collapse. The other advantage was that you could see new messages in context. On the other hand, when clicking the notification icon in reddit, you see new messages in isolation and would have to click on the context link to see what they're referring to.
redprince 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. Maybe that was your particular experience but generally that wasn't the case unless we're talking about a server connected via UUCP to the rest of the world, possibly with a dialup link between the servers and transferring news articles every few hours or once a day. NNTP employs a flooding algorithm whereby every server offers all messages received to every peer except the ones showing up in the Path Header of the message. Peers were first offered the unique Message-Id each message has and could then decline or accept the transfer. Programs like innfeed implemented this conversation as a bidirectional streaming protocol (RFC4644). We're talking seconds for a text posting to be propagated to every half decently connected news server on the planet.
nirui 3y ago
In addition to been slow, I would also add another factor: lack of notification method, which exasperated the problem of it's "slow"ness. Another thing is, in effect, Usenet is a tried-to-be globally governed forum service runs on servers that's been configured differently. Some server don't allow large attachments, some don't allow HTML message, some moderator likes to delete while others don't... The protocol don't really help it too. NNTP for example, is neither a high efficient nor resilient protocol. If your mail got too large, or your link is unstable, you'll have some nightmares trying to send it out. NNTP is also not a well-designed protocol, which makes client-end life-improving optimization very hard, as a result of it, some NNTP clients (Thunderbird and Outlook) will just let the user handle every error encountered, which is very annoying for the user. So for me, Usenet is just simply outdated. That's all there is to it.
- u801e 3y ago
  > lack of notification method The way usenet clients worked was when new message headers were downloaded, the client would highlight unread messages. It's pretty similar to email where when you receive new messages, you can tell that they haven't been read before you read them. Websites like Hacker News, Reddit, Facebook, etc lack this feature. Facebook, for instance, does have a notification system, but makes it very difficult to find the specific reply to your post or comment because it frequently filters out comments from being displayed unless "all comments" is selected from the drop down. Once that selection is made, you have to expand every thread to find the reply to your comment. > Usenet is a tried-to-be globally governed forum service Globally governed by whom? The only real governance was the creation of new groups in the Big 8 hierarchy. And, unless the group was moderated, anyone could post or reply to a comment. > Some server don't allow large attachments, some don't allow HTML message Text groups had conventions disallowing HTML or attachments, so very few people used them (unless their client wasn't configured properly). > The protocol don't really help it too. NNTP for example, is neither a high efficient nor resilient protocol. If your mail got too large, or your link is unstable, you'll have some nightmares trying to send it out. Message size isn't an issue for plain text messages and all major usenet services have no issues handling articles up to 750 Kb in size (for binary groups). > NNTP is also not a well-designed protocol What specifically is not well designed? > NNTP clients (Thunderbird and Outlook) Outlook never supported NNTP > will just let the user handle every error encountered What errors are you specifically referring to? > So for me, Usenet is just simply outdated. That's all there is to it. Based on what you've posted, it doesn't seem like you have much if any first hand experience using a NNTP client or have read any of the related RFC documents documenting the NNTP application level protocol.

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.
- slyall 3y ago
  I'm going to call "mostly wrong" on the server-to-server propagation. By 2000 the NNTP mesh was very interconnected and fast. Sites competed[1] to get messages propagated fast. Especially text messages. Any site hooked into the mesh was going to be offered any article multiple times within seconds of it being posted. Slow articles would happen but only during outages or with sites that were not following good practice. [1] Via http://top1000.anthologeek.net/ http://top1000.anthologeek.net/
- EdwardDiego 3y ago
  That reminds me of the days of FidoNet [0] and Barren Realms Elite [1] where the inter-BBS propagation delay made your BBS's attacks on another BBS even more tense and exciting, and well, it felt realistic that sending your forces to another "planet" took time to happen and for results to be reported. [0]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/FidoNet https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/FidoNet [1]: https://www.johndaileysoftware.com/products/bbsdoors/barrenrealmselite https://www.johndaileysoftware.com/products/bbsdoors/barrenr...
  - nicpottier 3y ago
    Woah, I remember playing BRE, which must have been close to 30 years ago. Impressed the author still has a site for it much less that you can purchase it!
- inopinatus 3y ago
  Propagation time was never the problem. I ran a major European node in the 90s and our propagation times were in the seconds. We absolutely obsessed about it. Only dialup leaf nodes took longer, but that was and remains a feature, not a bug. I've been using NNTP as a Gossip-type protocol for eventually-consistent pub/sub telemetry, monitoring, and notifications between partially-connected nodes in an unstable mesh ever since. Just not in public. Let’s be careful to separate the message protocol from the system it supported. Usenet’s carcinogenic inability to self-regulate at scale arose from the absence of distributed authority and negative feedback loops in the control plane, something we’d aim to build in algebraically and cryptographically if designed today. Alas, VC backing directs most research in this subsector towards systems enabling consumer surveillance.
jjav 3y ago
> Then go online an hour later to send reply + update the feed. Usenet was truly special and an awesome design. Every iteration of something newer has been strictly worse. Mailing lists, forums, and now proprietary platforms controlled by a single corporation. At every step, features and functionality have been lost. In the early 90s I used to travel coast to coast a lot, so I pulled all the newsgroups I was following to my laptop and spent the flights reading and responding to posts. Then I'd sync at the other coast before flying back.

TylerE 3y ago

What really killed it was alt.binaries.*. Vastly bloated bandwidth/storage requirements, so ISPs either killed NNTP altogther, or stopped giving a crap and you'd start, like, randomly dropping 10% of messages, which amounts to the same thing.

vikingerik 3y ago
I don't think this was true. It was entirely common practice for an ISP to ignore alt.binaries but carry all the rest of Usenet fairly reliably. To the point where users would rebuke each other for posting binary content in a non alt.binaries hierarchy, lest the ISPs detect that as a stealth binary group and drop that too. What killed Usenet was as the parent said - users are better served by the centralized management and reliability of a web forum, they don't need or care about decentralization and peering. The same thing happened for Discord and Slack replacing IRC.
- radicalbyte 3y ago
  Discord/Slack replaced IRC because IRC ran over a set of ports which could (and would) be blocked by almost every corporate firewall. I still remember the day that my friendly Systems Administrator left and the new guy nuked our IRC access :(
  - quickthrower2 3y ago
    Probably the reason that took over is they are well funded and have marketing and/or salespeople. And they have emojis, file uploads, etc and they are just generally easier to use. Not that IRC is hard, but it is geeky enough.
    - bsder 3y ago
      > Not that IRC is hard This totally understates the idiocy of IRC. I was a full-blown operator/system administrator across both mainframes and Unix workstations for years. And I never truly felt like I grokked IRC. Whenever I had to go into a channel, it was always a screwy dance of mishmash of how to get a directory, how to appease the channel bot, how to even bloody just log in, etc. And God help you if you didn't have the preferred client for the channel. "Bye bye, N00b." Sorry, I weep for the centralization of these kinds of services. I don't weep even in the slightest for how IRC actually got implemented.

pmoriarty 3y ago

Web was just the new shiny. People like the new shiny. Forum posts also had embedded images, and didn't require installing/configuring/maintaining a separate application.. all you needed was your web browser.

listenallyall 3y ago

> Slashdot, PHPBB and later on Reddit offered synchronous, low-latency, single-point-of-truth updates to thread/post order. ...and reputation/karma, avatars, post counts, moderation, search, categories, emojis, anonymity (email address not exposed), notifications...

u801e 3y ago
> anonymity (email address not exposed) Quite a few people posted under pseudonyms with fake email addresses on usenet. > notifications When you downloaded new headers from the server, the client would highlight the new messages in a way that made it very easy to see which messages you haven't seen and whether you got any replies to your message. Try doing that in Hacker News, reddit, Facebook, Twitter, etc.
- listenallyall 3y ago
  Don't Reddit and Twitter email you when you get a reply -- or at least have the option to get an email? With Usenet you had to go check.
  - u801e 3y ago
    > Don't Reddit and Twitter email you when you get a reply -- or at least have the option to get an email? Yes, but you would have to check a completely different service to see whether you got any replies. Most people would probably refresh the comments page or click on the notification icon directly in the page. > With Usenet you had to go check. Clients could be configured to check for message every X minutes/hours, etc, but just clicking on "Get messages" would show unread messages. And you could easily find replies to your comment(s) since the thread pane would essentially provide an indexed view of the entire thread including every subthread that you could expand/collapse. The other advantage was that you could see new messages in context. On the other hand, when clicking the notification icon in reddit, you see new messages in isolation and would have to click on the context link to see what they're referring to.

redprince 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. Maybe that was your particular experience but generally that wasn't the case unless we're talking about a server connected via UUCP to the rest of the world, possibly with a dialup link between the servers and transferring news articles every few hours or once a day. NNTP employs a flooding algorithm whereby every server offers all messages received to every peer except the ones showing up in the Path Header of the message. Peers were first offered the unique Message-Id each message has and could then decline or accept the transfer. Programs like innfeed implemented this conversation as a bidirectional streaming protocol (RFC4644). We're talking seconds for a text posting to be propagated to every half decently connected news server on the planet.

nirui 3y ago

In addition to been slow, I would also add another factor: lack of notification method, which exasperated the problem of it's "slow"ness. Another thing is, in effect, Usenet is a tried-to-be globally governed forum service runs on servers that's been configured differently. Some server don't allow large attachments, some don't allow HTML message, some moderator likes to delete while others don't... The protocol don't really help it too. NNTP for example, is neither a high efficient nor resilient protocol. If your mail got too large, or your link is unstable, you'll have some nightmares trying to send it out. NNTP is also not a well-designed protocol, which makes client-end life-improving optimization very hard, as a result of it, some NNTP clients (Thunderbird and Outlook) will just let the user handle every error encountered, which is very annoying for the user. So for me, Usenet is just simply outdated. That's all there is to it.

u801e 3y ago
> lack of notification method The way usenet clients worked was when new message headers were downloaded, the client would highlight unread messages. It's pretty similar to email where when you receive new messages, you can tell that they haven't been read before you read them. Websites like Hacker News, Reddit, Facebook, etc lack this feature. Facebook, for instance, does have a notification system, but makes it very difficult to find the specific reply to your post or comment because it frequently filters out comments from being displayed unless "all comments" is selected from the drop down. Once that selection is made, you have to expand every thread to find the reply to your comment. > Usenet is a tried-to-be globally governed forum service Globally governed by whom? The only real governance was the creation of new groups in the Big 8 hierarchy. And, unless the group was moderated, anyone could post or reply to a comment. > Some server don't allow large attachments, some don't allow HTML message Text groups had conventions disallowing HTML or attachments, so very few people used them (unless their client wasn't configured properly). > The protocol don't really help it too. NNTP for example, is neither a high efficient nor resilient protocol. If your mail got too large, or your link is unstable, you'll have some nightmares trying to send it out. Message size isn't an issue for plain text messages and all major usenet services have no issues handling articles up to 750 Kb in size (for binary groups). > NNTP is also not a well-designed protocol What specifically is not well designed? > NNTP clients (Thunderbird and Outlook) Outlook never supported NNTP > will just let the user handle every error encountered What errors are you specifically referring to? > So for me, Usenet is just simply outdated. That's all there is to it. Based on what you've posted, it doesn't seem like you have much if any first hand experience using a NNTP client or have read any of the related RFC documents documenting the NNTP application level protocol.