7 ms·

Usenet personality

112 points by mellosouls 9mo ago

bediger4000 9mo ago
I'm going to disagree with the summary of Serdar Argic. My belief is that the Turkish government financed a grad student at University of Minnesota, Ahmet Cosar, to do the spamming. It is as well known that Uunet, and early ISP, had a "pink contract" with Cosar that allowed him to spam. Cosar lost his student visa, had to return to Turkey.
_qua 9mo ago
B1FF sounds like he would have been right at home on weird Twitter
- BryantD 9mo ago
  As far as I know there is no link between, say, talk.bizarre and weird Twitter, but it's a sign that the same basic impulses are universal. I'm sure that in 1776, a few dedicated oddballs were creating snarky weird in-jokes on broadsides that nobody read except them.
duodecimal 9mo ago
I'm starting to think Archimedes Plutonium was wrong about his Plutonium Atom Totality conjecture.
- JackFr 9mo ago
  I remember being called out by name in an Archimedes Plutonium rant around 1993. I also had a post referenced in the comp.lang.c FAQ for a few years. That's the closest I've come to celebrity. The internet before the web brings back memories. I better not dwell to long or I'll have flashbacks t coding X/Motif UI's.
  - dan_pop 9mo ago
    >comp.lang.c Chapter and verse, please. Dan
    - JackFr 9mo ago
      Googled and I found it. It seems I inflated my own importance in the remembering. My post is part of an article on undefined behavior on the comp.lang.c FAQ's maintainer. https://www.eskimo.com/~scs/readings/undef.950321.html https://www.eskimo.com/~scs/readings/undef.950321.html
- libraryofbabel 9mo ago
  There is a gem of a sci.math thread where Archimedes Plutonium claims to have proved the Riemann Hypothesis and Terrance Tao (before he was quite as famous, but still!) replies to him pointing out his errors. Also TIL Archimedes Plutonium was actually his legal name.
huhkerrf 9mo ago
> skiing enthusiast banned by court order in 1999 from posting on the Usenet discussion group "rec.skiing.alpine", after engaging in a flame war with other online posters. The heated exchanges lasted for months, eventually escalating into death threats, until a police detective from Seattle posted a request for all involved to calm down. All involved did except Abraham... I'm sorry, this was probably annoying to all involved, but also so hilarious. Not least of which picturing a detective, who joined the force thinking he was going to solve murders and maybe even get a lead on D.B. Cooper sighing as he posted on a message board.
- arcfour 9mo ago
  https://groups.google.com/g/rec.skiing.alpine/c/frIx-J1XpnI https://groups.google.com/g/rec.skiing.alpine/c/frIx-J1XpnI Reading one of the original threads involving Scott is...really something. Boy, the early internet was very weird. Also, that dude is completely nuts.
  - deleted 9mo ago
    [deleted]
  - solstice 9mo ago
    I regret wasting ten minutes on reading all of that...
    - direwolf20 9mo ago
      I regret wasting five minutes on the Google "captcha" and then just glancing at the messages
huhkerrf 9mo ago
Didn't John Titor also post his warnings on Usenet?
- pwdisswordfishs 9mo ago
  [dead]
- firmretention 9mo ago
  I expected to see him in the list too, but after looking it up turns out he made his posts on web forums. I remember reading the compilations in the early days of the web and being fascinated by them.
chmod775 9mo ago
Most of these are negative in some way, except for the "Other personalities" section. There's a lesson here somewhere.
- netsharc 9mo ago
  Kibo seems pretty harmless, I found an archive of his and had a good laugh. That must've been in the 00's.
wang_li 9mo ago
The list lacks Derek Smart, so it's not a real list.
- orc00 9mo ago
  I was looking for this and finally found it in the comments. Derek Smart [1] is the indie developer behind the ambitious (and buggy) space sim Battlecruiser 3000AD [2]. He is known for his legendary Usenet presence in the 90s, and engaged in massive, aggressive flamewars with anyone who criticized his game or physics engine. He adopted the "combative game dev" archetype long before social media existed. Now that he has been mentioned, there's a small chance he will drop by. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Derek_Smart https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Derek_Smart [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Battlecruiser_3000AD https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Battlecruiser_3000AD
dmd 9mo ago
I have the dubious distinction of being in the Net.Legends.FAQ. I'm glad I didn't rise to the level of ending up in this Wikipedia article.
ericghildyal 9mo ago
I can't stop laughing at the first entry and this simple joke: > he gained international notoriety for his claims that [...] mass and time are equivalent. (With regard to the second claim, it was suggested on the "sci.astro.amateur" newsgroup that his demise be observed with a gram of silence.)
- flopsamjetsam 9mo ago
  ABIAN was always my friends and my favourite, from our time on Usenet! His all caps .sig with "equivalence of MASS and TIME" is something I will always treasure.
- direwolf20 9mo ago
  with some not–so–subtle changes, maybe he was onto something: angular momentum has the same units as energy.
  - kazinator 9mo ago
    Angular momentum has energy x time units. These unit equivalences have to be carefully interpreted. Like when things are multipled, are they in the same direction? Torque has the same units as work: force x distance, i.e. energy. But the force is perpendicular to the distance; it's completely different, and not a simple scalar value: torque is a vector with an orientation in space. Moving something against friction over 10cm, and using a 10cm bar to apply leverage, are entirely different.
    - direwolf20 9mo ago
      I meant torque, of course :)
      - deleted 9mo ago
        [deleted]
bityard 9mo ago
I am very convinced that a number of early X-Files plots (or sub-plots) were inspired by threads on Usenet.
swah 9mo ago
Happy to see Erik Naggum on this list - its the one I really remember the posts, mostly in a very "particular style" which was very entertaining to me (reading it a few years later). I kinda miss that style of poster and understand it cannot come back. But if the world is big and diverse then I prefer that that kind of people can exist.
lysace 9mo ago
I mean, there are certainly similarly odd and known HN personalities. They are different though, they have adapted to survive active moderation.
- decimalenough 9mo ago
  RIP Terry Devis. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/TempleOS https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/TempleOS
  - lysace 9mo ago
    Managed to find his HN user id and read what he wrote. I don't recommend anyone doing that. Just sadness.
    - deleted 9mo ago
      [deleted]
    - 39392829920 9mo ago
      It was extra sad watching the transition from when he was a perennial HN poster known only to a niche within a niche to 4chan discovering him and turning him into a meme because they loved his racist rants and started “jokingly” feeding his delusions in comments to his YouTube vlogs. Whenever I see praise for 4chan on HN as a last remnant of the “good” internet I think of that (and the girl I went to HS with who they cyber stalked while a minor almost to the point of suicide even after she deleted her entire online presence).
    - Bender 9mo ago
      Related [1][2] [1] - https://www.youtube.com/@terrydavisoldarchive5371/videos https://www.youtube.com/@terrydavisoldarchive5371/videos [2] - https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCJZTn-fPu-uIA55UI47_cXg/videos https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCJZTn-fPu-uIA55UI47_cXg/vid...
kstrauser 9mo ago
Wow, what a nostalgia trip. We had our fair share in the comp.sys.amiga.* groups. I feel bad about one in particular. Don't get me wrong: he was incredibly annoying and liked to jump into nearly every single thread and turn it into some persecution complex thing. I was unkind to him, as were many others. Looking back, it seems obvious to me that he had some mental issues and was battling demons the rest of us didn't see. I wish younger me had the wisdom to just killfile him and pretend he didn't exist. Whatever his problems, I'm sure I didn't make the world any nicer by yelling at him. Sorry, man. I'd have handled that differently now.
motohagiography 9mo ago
I doubt it is a thing anymore, but if you were in a NOC and said, "...there is no cabal." you could expect at least some portion of the people present to turn around and hail, "Long Live The Cabal!" It was a usenet admin shibboleth that I still laugh at every time I hear it. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/There_Is_No_Cabal https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/There_Is_No_Cabal
- direwolf20 9mo ago
  Narrator: there was, in fact, a cabal
  - weare138 9mo ago
    That's just what the cabal wants you to think.
ylee 9mo ago
Nothing has changed since Jerry Pournelle wrote 40 years ago when discussing online forums: >I noticed something: most of the irritation came from a handful of people, sometimes only one or two. If I could only ignore them, the computer conferences were still valuable. Alas, it's not always easy to do. This is what killed Usenet,[1] which 40 years ago offered much of the virtues of Reddit in decentralized form. The network's design has several flaws, most importantly no way for any central authority to completely delete posts (admins in moderated groups can only approve posts), since back in the late 1970s Usenet's designers expected that everyone with the werewithal to participate online would meet a minimum standard of behavior. Usenet has always had a spam problem, but as usage of the network declined as the rest of the Internet grew, spam's relative proportion of the overall traffic grew. That said, there are server- and client-side anti-spam tools of varying effectiveness. A related but bigger problem for Usenet is people with actual mental illness (kstrauser mentioned one); think "50 year olds with undiagnosed autism". Usenet is such a niche network nowadays that there has to be meaningful motivation to participate, and if the motivation is not a sincere interest in the subject it's, in my experience, going to be people with very troubled personal lives which their online behavior reflects. Again, as overall traffic declined, their relative contribution and visibility grew. This, not spam, is what has mostly killed Usenet. [1] I am talking about traditional non-binary Usenet here
- AndrewKemendo 9mo ago
  This is consistently true across all human organizations larger than a handful of people. Its a limitation of human communication and alignment I saw that happen to the ultramarathon subReddit which I founded and I’m the lead moderator. And when I was running a radio station it was consistently the same people who would call in. I see it even in some of the smaller group chats that I’m in You cannot have a stable community without these types of issues coming up beyond a few or so dozen people
- BigTTYGothGF 9mo ago
  Was that before or after he got kicked off arpanet?
  - 9mo ago
pfdietz 9mo ago
Globally 0.29% of people suffer from schizophrenia (lifetime risk of 1%) so it shouldn't have been surprising Usenet (or, really, any forum system without moderation or some similar kind of control) would experience their presence. Why wasn't Henry Spencer listed as a Usenet personality (the good kind)?
- lysace 9mo ago
  https://www.who.int/news-room/fact-sheets/detail/schizophrenia https://www.who.int/news-room/fact-sheets/detail/schizophren... Schizophrenia affects approximately 23 million people or 1 in 345 people (0.29%) worldwide. That's a lot of people.
technothrasher 9mo ago
Ah, The Usenet Oracle. I fondly remember late night drunken college Usenet Oracle sessions back in the early 90s, competing to see who could make it to the Best Of digests. It often ended up with us realizing eventually that nobody else was emailing the Oracle, so we were just getting each others questions.
bitwize 9mo ago
No mention of Scott Nudds? Scott Nudds was a guy who trolled comp.lang.c and a few other programming newsgroups. He was noted for his phrases "Unix and C are dying, this is a good thing." and "C pushers will do anything to defend their sick religion. I, on the other hand, prefer honesty." For a while, the usual reference to "making demons fly out of your nose" (a humorously valid potential response by the compiler when it encounters undefined behavior) was often replaced with "making Scott Nudds fly out of your nose". Wherever you are now, Scott Nudds, you are remembered. A hero and vanguard to the Rust Evangelism Strike Force—because C really is dying now, and that's probably a good thing. SsZERO is another, whom I've mentioned before, but his appeal was more limited: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42218587 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42218587
- direwolf20 9mo ago
  It's not valid for a compiler to make demons fly out of your nose, since compilers are constrained by the capabilities of your hardware and the laws of physics.
  - bitwize 9mo ago
    Well, if a compiler were to do so it would not be in violation of the standard. Whether or not such a thing is physically possible is an implementation detail outside the scope of the standard.
    - direwolf20 9mo ago
      The C standard isn't the only thing compilers have to comply with. HTTP doesn't specify what happens if the request method is XYZZY. An HTTP server that confirms to the HTTP specification (but not the laws of physics) could make demons fly out of your nose when receiving a request with a method of XYZZY. But nobody complains about that.
  - rstuart4133 9mo ago
    It's a C compiler, and it's allowed to anything if it sees UB.
direwolf20 9mo ago
Is that guy in comp.theory still saying he's solved the halting problem and been suppressed by big computer science for 25 years?
- jedbrooke 9mo ago
  maybe he’ll stop, maybe he won’t. There’s no way to know
jdkee 9mo ago
Not Usenet, but early www. https://www.timecube.net https://www.timecube.net
VSpike 9mo ago
I was surprised not to see Arthur T Murray in this list, as he was frequently seen in the newsgroups I used to read. https://www.nothingisreal.com/mentifex_faq.html https://www.nothingisreal.com/mentifex_faq.html
TomMasz 9mo ago
Kibo, now that's a name I haven't heard in a long time. The days of Usenet, uucp, and Telebit Trailblazers seem as long ago as the telegraph now.
RGamma 9mo ago
How much more intelligent and alive the internet used to be by default... I kinda miss that.
Xmd5a 9mo ago
> MI5Victim (Mike Corley, a.k.a. Boleslaw Tadeusz Szocik) – paranoid user who goes through periods of binge posting, claiming that MI5 They are all paranoids. The first three are interpretive paranoids. Sarfatti too. Nancy Lieder too, she might also be erotomaniac (another modality of paranoid personality), but I'd need to go further into this rabbit hole to be sure. The criminal ones correspond to quarreling or revendicative paranoid personality. Naggum too. And Baez is just a legend. Period.
astrange 9mo ago
> James Nicoll – science-fiction reviewer and retired game-store owner. As a Usenet personality, Nicoll is known for writing a widely quoted epigram on the English language, as well as for his contributions of concepts like the Nicoll-Dyson Laser and the "brain eater" to Usenet groups like "rec.arts.sf.written" and "rec.arts.sf.fandom"; and for his accounts of suffering a high number of accidents (known collectively as "Nicoll Events") recounted in these groups. A strange thing about boomer-era SF fandom is that they seem to think that popular fans are just as important people as, say, SF writers or actual scientists. This especially extended to SF conventions where you could become famous just as a guy who went to a lot of conventions. (SF conventions have a somewhat dysfunctional setup where as far as I can tell, the people who attend them spend the entire weekend fighting over who gets to host the next one. Anime conventions adopted a similar but simpler and better format which is actually capable of attracting normal people and young women.)
- pfdietz 9mo ago
  James is a prolific writer of book reviews. I find his reviews interesting and valuable. https://jamesdavisnicoll.com/ https://jamesdavisnicoll.com/
  - astrange 9mo ago
    > In addition to his influence as a first reader for the Science Fiction Book Club, a book reviewer for Bookspan, Publishers Weekly and Romantic Times, and a juror for the James Tiptree, Jr. Award,[4] Nicoll often offers ideas and concepts to other writers, primarily through the medium of Usenet. > Nicoll relates a number of life- and/or limb-threatening accidents that have happened to him, which he has told and retold on various science fiction fandom–related newsgroups. Over the years these stories have also been collected into Cally Soukup's List of Nicoll events.[23] > Inspired by Nicoll's collection of accidents, as well as his tendency to take in any stray cat that comes knocking, fantasy author Jo Walton wrote him a poem in 2002.[24] I don't think he is beating the allegations of a guy who just has a Wikipedia article because his friends wrote him one.
    - 9mo ago
nephihaha 9mo ago
There are rumours that Kurt Cobain posted on Usenet under a pseudonym. Interesting if true. I found Usenet much easier to handle than today's internet. That said I did read some print outs from mid nineties Usenet a few years ago, and I was shocked to be reminded how rude some people were. So nothing new there.
asjo 9mo ago
In case you feel like visiting usenet as it looked 40+ years ago, I run https://olduse.net/ https://olduse.net/ - which Joey Hess originally did as an art project - where you can connect a news reader (Thunderbird, Gnus, slrn, nn, tin, Pan, or even Lynx or ELinks, for instance) and read usenet delayed 40-46 years.

112 points by mellosouls 9mo ago

I'm going to disagree with the summary of Serdar Argic. My belief is that the Turkish government financed a grad student at University of Minnesota, Ahmet Cosar, to do the spamming. It is as well known that Uunet, and early ISP, had a "pink contract" with Cosar that allowed him to spam. Cosar lost his student visa, had to return to Turkey.

_qua 9mo ago

B1FF sounds like he would have been right at home on weird Twitter

BryantD 9mo ago
As far as I know there is no link between, say, talk.bizarre and weird Twitter, but it's a sign that the same basic impulses are universal. I'm sure that in 1776, a few dedicated oddballs were creating snarky weird in-jokes on broadsides that nobody read except them.

duodecimal 9mo ago

I'm starting to think Archimedes Plutonium was wrong about his Plutonium Atom Totality conjecture.

JackFr 9mo ago
I remember being called out by name in an Archimedes Plutonium rant around 1993. I also had a post referenced in the comp.lang.c FAQ for a few years. That's the closest I've come to celebrity. The internet before the web brings back memories. I better not dwell to long or I'll have flashbacks t coding X/Motif UI's.
- dan_pop 9mo ago
  >comp.lang.c Chapter and verse, please. Dan
  - JackFr 9mo ago
    Googled and I found it. It seems I inflated my own importance in the remembering. My post is part of an article on undefined behavior on the comp.lang.c FAQ's maintainer. https://www.eskimo.com/~scs/readings/undef.950321.html https://www.eskimo.com/~scs/readings/undef.950321.html
libraryofbabel 9mo ago
There is a gem of a sci.math thread where Archimedes Plutonium claims to have proved the Riemann Hypothesis and Terrance Tao (before he was quite as famous, but still!) replies to him pointing out his errors. Also TIL Archimedes Plutonium was actually his legal name.

huhkerrf 9mo ago

> skiing enthusiast banned by court order in 1999 from posting on the Usenet discussion group "rec.skiing.alpine", after engaging in a flame war with other online posters. The heated exchanges lasted for months, eventually escalating into death threats, until a police detective from Seattle posted a request for all involved to calm down. All involved did except Abraham... I'm sorry, this was probably annoying to all involved, but also so hilarious. Not least of which picturing a detective, who joined the force thinking he was going to solve murders and maybe even get a lead on D.B. Cooper sighing as he posted on a message board.

arcfour 9mo ago
https://groups.google.com/g/rec.skiing.alpine/c/frIx-J1XpnI https://groups.google.com/g/rec.skiing.alpine/c/frIx-J1XpnI Reading one of the original threads involving Scott is...really something. Boy, the early internet was very weird. Also, that dude is completely nuts.
- deleted 9mo ago
  [deleted]
- solstice 9mo ago
  I regret wasting ten minutes on reading all of that...
  - direwolf20 9mo ago
    I regret wasting five minutes on the Google "captcha" and then just glancing at the messages

huhkerrf 9mo ago

Didn't John Titor also post his warnings on Usenet?

pwdisswordfishs 9mo ago
[dead]
firmretention 9mo ago
I expected to see him in the list too, but after looking it up turns out he made his posts on web forums. I remember reading the compilations in the early days of the web and being fascinated by them.

chmod775 9mo ago

Most of these are negative in some way, except for the "Other personalities" section. There's a lesson here somewhere.

netsharc 9mo ago
Kibo seems pretty harmless, I found an archive of his and had a good laugh. That must've been in the 00's.

wang_li 9mo ago

The list lacks Derek Smart, so it's not a real list.

orc00 9mo ago
I was looking for this and finally found it in the comments. Derek Smart [1] is the indie developer behind the ambitious (and buggy) space sim Battlecruiser 3000AD [2]. He is known for his legendary Usenet presence in the 90s, and engaged in massive, aggressive flamewars with anyone who criticized his game or physics engine. He adopted the "combative game dev" archetype long before social media existed. Now that he has been mentioned, there's a small chance he will drop by. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Derek_Smart https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Derek_Smart [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Battlecruiser_3000AD https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Battlecruiser_3000AD

dmd 9mo ago

I have the dubious distinction of being in the Net.Legends.FAQ. I'm glad I didn't rise to the level of ending up in this Wikipedia article.

ericghildyal 9mo ago

I can't stop laughing at the first entry and this simple joke: > he gained international notoriety for his claims that [...] mass and time are equivalent. (With regard to the second claim, it was suggested on the "sci.astro.amateur" newsgroup that his demise be observed with a gram of silence.)

flopsamjetsam 9mo ago
ABIAN was always my friends and my favourite, from our time on Usenet! His all caps .sig with "equivalence of MASS and TIME" is something I will always treasure.
direwolf20 9mo ago
with some not–so–subtle changes, maybe he was onto something: angular momentum has the same units as energy.
- kazinator 9mo ago
  Angular momentum has energy x time units. These unit equivalences have to be carefully interpreted. Like when things are multipled, are they in the same direction? Torque has the same units as work: force x distance, i.e. energy. But the force is perpendicular to the distance; it's completely different, and not a simple scalar value: torque is a vector with an orientation in space. Moving something against friction over 10cm, and using a 10cm bar to apply leverage, are entirely different.
  - direwolf20 9mo ago
    I meant torque, of course :)
    - deleted 9mo ago
      [deleted]

bityard 9mo ago

I am very convinced that a number of early X-Files plots (or sub-plots) were inspired by threads on Usenet.

swah 9mo ago

Happy to see Erik Naggum on this list - its the one I really remember the posts, mostly in a very "particular style" which was very entertaining to me (reading it a few years later). I kinda miss that style of poster and understand it cannot come back. But if the world is big and diverse then I prefer that that kind of people can exist.

lysace 9mo ago

I mean, there are certainly similarly odd and known HN personalities. They are different though, they have adapted to survive active moderation.

decimalenough 9mo ago
RIP Terry Devis. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/TempleOS https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/TempleOS
- lysace 9mo ago
  Managed to find his HN user id and read what he wrote. I don't recommend anyone doing that. Just sadness.
  - deleted 9mo ago
    [deleted]
  - 39392829920 9mo ago
    It was extra sad watching the transition from when he was a perennial HN poster known only to a niche within a niche to 4chan discovering him and turning him into a meme because they loved his racist rants and started “jokingly” feeding his delusions in comments to his YouTube vlogs. Whenever I see praise for 4chan on HN as a last remnant of the “good” internet I think of that (and the girl I went to HS with who they cyber stalked while a minor almost to the point of suicide even after she deleted her entire online presence).
  - Bender 9mo ago
    Related [1][2] [1] - https://www.youtube.com/@terrydavisoldarchive5371/videos https://www.youtube.com/@terrydavisoldarchive5371/videos [2] - https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCJZTn-fPu-uIA55UI47_cXg/videos https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCJZTn-fPu-uIA55UI47_cXg/vid...

kstrauser 9mo ago

Wow, what a nostalgia trip. We had our fair share in the comp.sys.amiga.* groups. I feel bad about one in particular. Don't get me wrong: he was incredibly annoying and liked to jump into nearly every single thread and turn it into some persecution complex thing. I was unkind to him, as were many others. Looking back, it seems obvious to me that he had some mental issues and was battling demons the rest of us didn't see. I wish younger me had the wisdom to just killfile him and pretend he didn't exist. Whatever his problems, I'm sure I didn't make the world any nicer by yelling at him. Sorry, man. I'd have handled that differently now.

motohagiography 9mo ago

I doubt it is a thing anymore, but if you were in a NOC and said, "...there is no cabal." you could expect at least some portion of the people present to turn around and hail, "Long Live The Cabal!" It was a usenet admin shibboleth that I still laugh at every time I hear it. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/There_Is_No_Cabal https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/There_Is_No_Cabal

direwolf20 9mo ago
Narrator: there was, in fact, a cabal
- weare138 9mo ago
  That's just what the cabal wants you to think.

ylee 9mo ago

Nothing has changed since Jerry Pournelle wrote 40 years ago when discussing online forums: >I noticed something: most of the irritation came from a handful of people, sometimes only one or two. If I could only ignore them, the computer conferences were still valuable. Alas, it's not always easy to do. This is what killed Usenet,[1] which 40 years ago offered much of the virtues of Reddit in decentralized form. The network's design has several flaws, most importantly no way for any central authority to completely delete posts (admins in moderated groups can only approve posts), since back in the late 1970s Usenet's designers expected that everyone with the werewithal to participate online would meet a minimum standard of behavior. Usenet has always had a spam problem, but as usage of the network declined as the rest of the Internet grew, spam's relative proportion of the overall traffic grew. That said, there are server- and client-side anti-spam tools of varying effectiveness. A related but bigger problem for Usenet is people with actual mental illness (kstrauser mentioned one); think "50 year olds with undiagnosed autism". Usenet is such a niche network nowadays that there has to be meaningful motivation to participate, and if the motivation is not a sincere interest in the subject it's, in my experience, going to be people with very troubled personal lives which their online behavior reflects. Again, as overall traffic declined, their relative contribution and visibility grew. This, not spam, is what has mostly killed Usenet. [1] I am talking about traditional non-binary Usenet here

AndrewKemendo 9mo ago
This is consistently true across all human organizations larger than a handful of people. Its a limitation of human communication and alignment I saw that happen to the ultramarathon subReddit which I founded and I’m the lead moderator. And when I was running a radio station it was consistently the same people who would call in. I see it even in some of the smaller group chats that I’m in You cannot have a stable community without these types of issues coming up beyond a few or so dozen people
BigTTYGothGF 9mo ago
Was that before or after he got kicked off arpanet?
- 9mo ago

pfdietz 9mo ago

Globally 0.29% of people suffer from schizophrenia (lifetime risk of 1%) so it shouldn't have been surprising Usenet (or, really, any forum system without moderation or some similar kind of control) would experience their presence. Why wasn't Henry Spencer listed as a Usenet personality (the good kind)?

lysace 9mo ago
https://www.who.int/news-room/fact-sheets/detail/schizophrenia https://www.who.int/news-room/fact-sheets/detail/schizophren... Schizophrenia affects approximately 23 million people or 1 in 345 people (0.29%) worldwide. That's a lot of people.

technothrasher 9mo ago

Ah, The Usenet Oracle. I fondly remember late night drunken college Usenet Oracle sessions back in the early 90s, competing to see who could make it to the Best Of digests. It often ended up with us realizing eventually that nobody else was emailing the Oracle, so we were just getting each others questions.

bitwize 9mo ago

No mention of Scott Nudds? Scott Nudds was a guy who trolled comp.lang.c and a few other programming newsgroups. He was noted for his phrases "Unix and C are dying, this is a good thing." and "C pushers will do anything to defend their sick religion. I, on the other hand, prefer honesty." For a while, the usual reference to "making demons fly out of your nose" (a humorously valid potential response by the compiler when it encounters undefined behavior) was often replaced with "making Scott Nudds fly out of your nose". Wherever you are now, Scott Nudds, you are remembered. A hero and vanguard to the Rust Evangelism Strike Force—because C really is dying now, and that's probably a good thing. SsZERO is another, whom I've mentioned before, but his appeal was more limited: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42218587 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42218587

direwolf20 9mo ago
It's not valid for a compiler to make demons fly out of your nose, since compilers are constrained by the capabilities of your hardware and the laws of physics.
- bitwize 9mo ago
  Well, if a compiler were to do so it would not be in violation of the standard. Whether or not such a thing is physically possible is an implementation detail outside the scope of the standard.
  - direwolf20 9mo ago
    The C standard isn't the only thing compilers have to comply with. HTTP doesn't specify what happens if the request method is XYZZY. An HTTP server that confirms to the HTTP specification (but not the laws of physics) could make demons fly out of your nose when receiving a request with a method of XYZZY. But nobody complains about that.
- rstuart4133 9mo ago
  It's a C compiler, and it's allowed to anything if it sees UB.

direwolf20 9mo ago

Is that guy in comp.theory still saying he's solved the halting problem and been suppressed by big computer science for 25 years?

jedbrooke 9mo ago
maybe he’ll stop, maybe he won’t. There’s no way to know

jdkee 9mo ago

Not Usenet, but early www. https://www.timecube.net https://www.timecube.net

VSpike 9mo ago

I was surprised not to see Arthur T Murray in this list, as he was frequently seen in the newsgroups I used to read. https://www.nothingisreal.com/mentifex_faq.html https://www.nothingisreal.com/mentifex_faq.html

TomMasz 9mo ago

Kibo, now that's a name I haven't heard in a long time. The days of Usenet, uucp, and Telebit Trailblazers seem as long ago as the telegraph now.

RGamma 9mo ago

How much more intelligent and alive the internet used to be by default... I kinda miss that.

Xmd5a 9mo ago

> MI5Victim (Mike Corley, a.k.a. Boleslaw Tadeusz Szocik) – paranoid user who goes through periods of binge posting, claiming that MI5 They are all paranoids. The first three are interpretive paranoids. Sarfatti too. Nancy Lieder too, she might also be erotomaniac (another modality of paranoid personality), but I'd need to go further into this rabbit hole to be sure. The criminal ones correspond to quarreling or revendicative paranoid personality. Naggum too. And Baez is just a legend. Period.

astrange 9mo ago

> James Nicoll – science-fiction reviewer and retired game-store owner. As a Usenet personality, Nicoll is known for writing a widely quoted epigram on the English language, as well as for his contributions of concepts like the Nicoll-Dyson Laser and the "brain eater" to Usenet groups like "rec.arts.sf.written" and "rec.arts.sf.fandom"; and for his accounts of suffering a high number of accidents (known collectively as "Nicoll Events") recounted in these groups. A strange thing about boomer-era SF fandom is that they seem to think that popular fans are just as important people as, say, SF writers or actual scientists. This especially extended to SF conventions where you could become famous just as a guy who went to a lot of conventions. (SF conventions have a somewhat dysfunctional setup where as far as I can tell, the people who attend them spend the entire weekend fighting over who gets to host the next one. Anime conventions adopted a similar but simpler and better format which is actually capable of attracting normal people and young women.)

pfdietz 9mo ago
James is a prolific writer of book reviews. I find his reviews interesting and valuable. https://jamesdavisnicoll.com/ https://jamesdavisnicoll.com/
- astrange 9mo ago
  > In addition to his influence as a first reader for the Science Fiction Book Club, a book reviewer for Bookspan, Publishers Weekly and Romantic Times, and a juror for the James Tiptree, Jr. Award,[4] Nicoll often offers ideas and concepts to other writers, primarily through the medium of Usenet. > Nicoll relates a number of life- and/or limb-threatening accidents that have happened to him, which he has told and retold on various science fiction fandom–related newsgroups. Over the years these stories have also been collected into Cally Soukup's List of Nicoll events.[23] > Inspired by Nicoll's collection of accidents, as well as his tendency to take in any stray cat that comes knocking, fantasy author Jo Walton wrote him a poem in 2002.[24] I don't think he is beating the allegations of a guy who just has a Wikipedia article because his friends wrote him one.
  - 9mo ago

nephihaha 9mo ago

There are rumours that Kurt Cobain posted on Usenet under a pseudonym. Interesting if true. I found Usenet much easier to handle than today's internet. That said I did read some print outs from mid nineties Usenet a few years ago, and I was shocked to be reminded how rude some people were. So nothing new there.

asjo 9mo ago

In case you feel like visiting usenet as it looked 40+ years ago, I run https://olduse.net/ https://olduse.net/ - which Joey Hess originally did as an art project - where you can connect a news reader (Thunderbird, Gnus, slrn, nn, tin, Pan, or even Lynx or ELinks, for instance) and read usenet delayed 40-46 years.