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I'm a zoomer dev and I have a question. The article here linked to google groups - https://groups.google.com/g/alt.fan.jwz https://groups.google.com/g/alt.fan.j
by aizk 1y ago
I'm a zoomer dev and I have a question.
The article here linked to google groups - https://groups.google.com/g/alt.fan.jwz https://groups.google.com/g/alt.fan.jwz
"Google Groups no longer supports new Usenet posts or subscriptions. Historical content remains viewable."
I've never even heard of google groups, and it's crazy to read conversations nearly as old as me.
What is/was UseNet? Was that the precursor to php bulletin boards in way / the forums of the 90s - 2000s? Would the zoomer equivalent be discord for my generation?
- bionsystem 1y ago"Usenet" has a wikipedia page which describes the network quite well. I used it in the late 2000s, not just for discussion as some groups were also hosting warez. Pretty sure you can still go there although it's unclear you'll get the post quality of the 80s-90s (back when I read discussions it was already a lot of trolling).
- jcranmer 1y agoProbably the closest modern equivalent to Usenet is Reddit--each newsgroup is roughly kind of like a subreddit, and, like Reddit, threading is quite the norm in newsgroups. The main difference is that Usenet wasn't centrally organized, messages tended to be rather longer than Reddit posts, and it's possible to cross-post on Usenet (post to multiple newsgroups with one message) in a way that it isn't on Reddit. (The pre-web antecedent of Discord would be IRC, latterly stuff like AOL chat rooms.) And if you think it's weird to read conversations nearly as old as you, I'm a millennial and I've read Usenet conversations older than I.
- dotancohen 1y ago> And if you think it's weird to read conversations nearly as old as you, I'm a millennial and I've read Usenet conversations older than I. I first read the Apollo transcripts when I was maybe 8 or 10 years old - this was deep into the 1980s but the Apollo missions were still before my time. Reading such material at 8 or 10 didn't feel unusual. Now, rereading as I near 50, they are surreal. The conversations, and the moon itself, have not changed one bit. But myself and the world around me are unrecognisable to the 10 year old me still reading over my shoulder.
- tptacek 1y agoMessages on Usenet did not, at least in the mid-1990s when I spent too much of every day on it, tend to be longer than Reddit posts. Reddit has better posts than Usenet.
- kasey_junk 1y agoThey were if you count all the binaries.
- TrueDuality 1y agoUsenet is still around and still fairly active, though by volume its probably more commonly used as the originating source for anything torrented nowadays. PHP bulletin boards is a good approximation if you squint. If you imagine being on a large number of topical mailing lists all filtered into their own inboxes you wouldn't be far off.
- dartharva 1y agoFor programming-specific contexts I think StackOverflow might be the better equivalent.
- jibal 1y agoAre zoomers incapable of looking things up? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Usenet https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Usenet
- rusk 1y agoWikipedia isn’t as prominent as it was in my day, and Google isn’t as good.
- jibal 1y agoEven if true this isn't relevant.
- rusk 1y ago[flagged]
- jibal 1y agoTotally false things are clear to you? Ah well. I'm not hating on anyone, fundamentally dishonest person. P.S. I helped develop the ARPANET and my name is mentioned in RFC 57. P.P.S. My comment included the Wikipedia link ... so much for having something useful to add ... I did, you apparently don't. The whole idea that asking HN--a form of social media with all of its problems--is asking experts but reading Wikipedia (not a "conventional communication channel")--written/curated/edited by experts isn't is completely nuts.
- rusk 1y ago> I'm not hating on anyone, fundamentally dishonest person. Quite. Wikipedia link is fine. Condescending snark is not. But you seem to be just “that kind of person” so maybe you just don’t really know you’re doing it and in your quieter moments wonder why your friends talk over you all the time.
- aizk 1y agoWikipedia is fine, I just wanted to start a conversation on this site because many users here were around when usenet was big.
- kragen 1y agoUsenet was a decentralized forum where anybody could participate and nobody could be banned. Despite this, the quality of discussion was usually very high. The user interfaces supported rather comprehensive threading and filtering capabilities, so you could block the people you wished you could ban. It was sort of destroyed by spam (since spammers couldn't be banned) but doesn't have much spam anymore because it's too obscure for spammers to bother with. There isn't a Zoomer equivalent, because the internet has been locked down since then, and anyone who attempts to offer an uncensored and uncensorable forum gets brigaded and maybe swatted, then cut off from the banking system. But Usenet still exists.
- ChrisMarshallNY 1y agoA classic interaction from Usenet (I suspect the Reddit comparison is apt), was someone coming upon a really nasty fight between a couple of trol- er, users. They expressed horror, and said something to the effect of “My god! I came to discuss cats!”. Another user commented something along the lines of “You have mistaken this forum for a place to exchange information. It is not. It is a public toilet. Jump on in.”
- Hilift 1y agoUsenet groups pre-dated the web. There were "discussion" groups like alt.startrek. However, by volume, uunet was extremely popular for distributing pictures like for desktop wallpaper. It was also 100% accessible by dialup modem, which would connect on a schedule and download updates from your upstream server. I connected two companies to the Internet between 1991-1993, and uunet was one use, email was the other. Small-ish ISP's around 1991-1994 usually accommodated uunet for business accounts. Our ISP was notable due to if someone complained about a post, they required the complaint to be made in writing/fax, and you had to provide your name and address.
- hollerith 1y agoThe newsgroups, a.k.a. net news, were the front page of the internet -- more so than Reddit ever was -- till the web started taking off in the very early 1990s. The only other service that might lay claim to that title would be IRC (Internet Relay Chat), but net news probably had about twice as many users. The big difference between those two services and the web was that most participants used text-only software (in terminals) to access them. Actually an even bigger difference is that (like all the other services on the internet back then) net news and IRC were run by volunteers. The average IQ on the internet back then was more than 130 (whereas of course today it is in the range of 102 to 105) -- and it was 98% or 99% men and much more libertarian than today. One thing that hasn't changed is that people back then tended to spent much more time on the internet (particularly, on the newsgroups, IRC, text-only MMORPGs) than is good for them. It was always called the newsgroups or "net news": calling it Usenet was started by the news industry when they started explaining the internet to the world in 1993 and 1994 because obviously "net news" is a horrible name (in their minds) for any service or scene that they did not control. More precisely, the newsgroups began on what is basically a "competitor" to the internet called Usenet, then migrated to the internet, so "Usenet news", i.e., that news-like service that started on Usenet, is not a terrible name for it, but "Usenet" by itself is kind of a bad name because it already meant something different, namely, this network (now probably long gone) that carried email and other services in addition to newsgroups.
- jibal 1y ago"calling it Usenet was started by the news industry" This, along with several of your other claims, is a fabrication. I actually participated in the vote on the name at the 1982 USENIX conference.