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The article links to a free Usenet provider. I'm sure there are others also. The purpose for a PAID Usenet provider is for hosting binaries (i.e. piracy). Yo

The article links to a free Usenet provider. I'm sure there are others also. The purpose for a PAID Usenet provider is for hosting binaries (i.e. piracy). You're paying someone for the bandwidth, and ignore or deal with the DMCA takedown notices. There is little to no reason to have a paid Usenet account just to read or post on pure text forums, and NOT download porn or other pirated content. That was really one of the two things that killed Usenet in the 2000's. One was the rise of phpBB forums, and then Reddit. The other was the seediness of the Usenet binaries scene. As the "legit" users migrated to web-based forums, the pirates made up a larger and larger portion of those staying behind, and eventually the network effort flowed in reverse until critical mass was lost. I deeply miss that old Usenet culture of the 1990's. In comparison to HN and especially Reddit, Usenet was far less reverent, frumpy, and up-its-own-ass politically and socially. At the same time, it's impossible to try to recreate that on a forum today, without it breaking down into nothing but alt-right hate speech. The 1990's was a fun and quirky little period of Internet sanity, made possible only by how small and outside the mainstream the Internet still was.

BeetleB 3y ago
> The purpose for a PAID Usenet provider is for hosting binaries (i.e. piracy). You're paying someone for the bandwidth, and ignore or deal with the DMCA takedown notices. There is little to no reason to have a paid Usenet account just to read or post on pure text forums, and NOT download porn or other pirated content. This may reflect the state today, but back in the late 90's and early 00's, it was not. Even for the pure text forums, you had to pay someone. In the earlier days it was included in the ISP package, so you wouldn't see the costs. Or via your university. But I distinctly remember when my university dropped USENET lots of people complained because they couldn't get free access elsewhere. For me: I used BBS's before I used USENET. BBS groups ("conferences") were much more civil, and had much better discourse. The moderation was very effective. When I moved to USENET, it was quite chaotic by comparison. And then with the onset of spam, I went elsewhere.
- rsynnott 3y ago
  > But I distinctly remember when my university dropped USENET lots of people complained because they couldn't get free access elsewhere. Unless they dropped it _really_ early, there was dejanews/google groups, surely?
  - BeetleB 3y ago
    Was dejanews free? And could you access it with a proper news reader? Google Groups's interface sucks by comparison.
    - tptacek 3y ago
      You could post to it for free, but it was extremely clunky.
- zikduruqe 3y ago
  If you want to live those good old BBS days again - https://www.telnet.org/htm/places.htm https://www.telnet.org/htm/places.htm I played a few games of Tradewars on one of these a while ago. It sure brought back the days of being a sysop of my local BBS growing up.
  - nunobrito 3y ago
    telnet cavebbs.homeip.net Everyone is playing LORD (Legend Of the Red Dragon) there.
devbent 3y ago
The internet used to have a barrier to entry. That barrier is what helped ensure quality. If the only people who can join are those who are passionate enough to read a lot of documentation and jump through a lot of hoops, yeah, the quality of discourse will be better. Heck even /. Had better trolls in the day than what reddit has now.
tptacek 3y ago
Binaries also forced the centralization of Usenet, so that regional ISPs had no incentive to do anything but outsource it. It was unbelievably annoying to host a full-feed Usenet server in the late 1990s, and if you hosted anything less than one, people would arrange boycotts; better not to host Usenet at all. Reddit is, I think, a better version of Usenet culture than the original.
- queuebert 3y ago
  > Reddit is, I think, a better version of Usenet culture than the original. Reddit is slow, censored, and for-profit. How could that possibly be better than what we used to have? You still get spam, bots, and flame wars, but you also have a needless popularity contest with votes and mods.
  - tptacek 3y ago
    Usenet was also censored. Like Reddit, much of it was a free-for-all, but not all of it. But also: message boards don't exist on a simple spectrum of "free" to "censored". There are lots of other considerations. I gave one downthread to someone who suggested newsreaders had a better UX than Reddit: that's taking for granted really basic things, like search, that were space alien tech on Usenet. Another thing people who never used Usenet but idealize it are missing as a feature is "all the messages showing up for everybody", which is not nearly as straightforward a feature as Reddit and HN make it seem. This is something Mastodon users are discovering right now, and however annoying it is to run a single-user Mastodon server and deal with message threading, it was 10x worse on Usenet.
  - PreInternet01 3y ago
    Usenet was definitely slow (very, very slow, even), in the sense that posts made in the US might take up to 18 hours (or whenever dial-up got "cheap") to show up in the rest of the world, or vice versa. Even posts between locally-adjacent sites might take a few hours to propagate. This may, incidentally, help to explain why discourse on Usenet was generally considered to be superior to that, say, on Twitter. But YMMV. Also, Usenet was very much censored, in the sense that most sites would not even think about carrying most groups. In particular, alt.* and *.binaries.* would be unavailable pretty much anywhere that had "cost of bandwidth" or "reputation" concerns. And if you repeatedly posted abusive content to any Usenet group, you can bet that your account and/or entire site would be "cancelled" from the network pretty quickly by the infamous "Usenet cabal" (see https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Backbone_cabal https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Backbone_cabal). Not to mention that Usenet was the entire origin for the concept of the "killfile". Finally, the most popular Usenet hubs (say, UUnet) were very much for-profit...

BeetleB 3y ago

> The purpose for a PAID Usenet provider is for hosting binaries (i.e. piracy). You're paying someone for the bandwidth, and ignore or deal with the DMCA takedown notices. There is little to no reason to have a paid Usenet account just to read or post on pure text forums, and NOT download porn or other pirated content. This may reflect the state today, but back in the late 90's and early 00's, it was not. Even for the pure text forums, you had to pay someone. In the earlier days it was included in the ISP package, so you wouldn't see the costs. Or via your university. But I distinctly remember when my university dropped USENET lots of people complained because they couldn't get free access elsewhere. For me: I used BBS's before I used USENET. BBS groups ("conferences") were much more civil, and had much better discourse. The moderation was very effective. When I moved to USENET, it was quite chaotic by comparison. And then with the onset of spam, I went elsewhere.

rsynnott 3y ago
> But I distinctly remember when my university dropped USENET lots of people complained because they couldn't get free access elsewhere. Unless they dropped it _really_ early, there was dejanews/google groups, surely?
- BeetleB 3y ago
  Was dejanews free? And could you access it with a proper news reader? Google Groups's interface sucks by comparison.
  - tptacek 3y ago
    You could post to it for free, but it was extremely clunky.
zikduruqe 3y ago
If you want to live those good old BBS days again - https://www.telnet.org/htm/places.htm https://www.telnet.org/htm/places.htm I played a few games of Tradewars on one of these a while ago. It sure brought back the days of being a sysop of my local BBS growing up.
- nunobrito 3y ago
  telnet cavebbs.homeip.net Everyone is playing LORD (Legend Of the Red Dragon) there.

devbent 3y ago

The internet used to have a barrier to entry. That barrier is what helped ensure quality. If the only people who can join are those who are passionate enough to read a lot of documentation and jump through a lot of hoops, yeah, the quality of discourse will be better. Heck even /. Had better trolls in the day than what reddit has now.

tptacek 3y ago

Binaries also forced the centralization of Usenet, so that regional ISPs had no incentive to do anything but outsource it. It was unbelievably annoying to host a full-feed Usenet server in the late 1990s, and if you hosted anything less than one, people would arrange boycotts; better not to host Usenet at all. Reddit is, I think, a better version of Usenet culture than the original.

queuebert 3y ago
> Reddit is, I think, a better version of Usenet culture than the original. Reddit is slow, censored, and for-profit. How could that possibly be better than what we used to have? You still get spam, bots, and flame wars, but you also have a needless popularity contest with votes and mods.
- tptacek 3y ago
  Usenet was also censored. Like Reddit, much of it was a free-for-all, but not all of it. But also: message boards don't exist on a simple spectrum of "free" to "censored". There are lots of other considerations. I gave one downthread to someone who suggested newsreaders had a better UX than Reddit: that's taking for granted really basic things, like search, that were space alien tech on Usenet. Another thing people who never used Usenet but idealize it are missing as a feature is "all the messages showing up for everybody", which is not nearly as straightforward a feature as Reddit and HN make it seem. This is something Mastodon users are discovering right now, and however annoying it is to run a single-user Mastodon server and deal with message threading, it was 10x worse on Usenet.
- PreInternet01 3y ago
  Usenet was definitely slow (very, very slow, even), in the sense that posts made in the US might take up to 18 hours (or whenever dial-up got "cheap") to show up in the rest of the world, or vice versa. Even posts between locally-adjacent sites might take a few hours to propagate. This may, incidentally, help to explain why discourse on Usenet was generally considered to be superior to that, say, on Twitter. But YMMV. Also, Usenet was very much censored, in the sense that most sites would not even think about carrying most groups. In particular, alt.* and *.binaries.* would be unavailable pretty much anywhere that had "cost of bandwidth" or "reputation" concerns. And if you repeatedly posted abusive content to any Usenet group, you can bet that your account and/or entire site would be "cancelled" from the network pretty quickly by the infamous "Usenet cabal" (see https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Backbone_cabal https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Backbone_cabal). Not to mention that Usenet was the entire origin for the concept of the "killfile". Finally, the most popular Usenet hubs (say, UUnet) were very much for-profit...