8 ms·
2013, the year of Usenet
- sasoon 13y agoAs a fun project, I have created web interface to Usenet with standard 3 panes like Thunderbird. It is free and without ads, has around 15,000 newsgroups, can be used without creating an account. http://www.newswebreader.com http://www.newswebreader.com
- moreentropy 13y agoThat bit about total anonymity is just not true. Usually you would use your organization's news server (because every ISP/university had one), so you could be easily located. Plus, it was part of the netiquette to post using your real name / well known identity. Thinking of the 90s internet makes me all sentimental.
- na85 13y agoThings were better, then. Yeah we had to contend with flash sites and low bandwidth, and didn't have slick css3 and backnode.js but the web was more fun in those days.
- Finster 13y agoFlash sites? If the content didn't load in lynx it wasn't worth viewing.
- krapp 13y agoI used Lynx once.
- acheron 13y agoI still think this sometimes.
- dredmorbius 13y agoI fall back on text-mode readers (usually w3m) for sites which are too broken in GUI browsers. It works rather more often than you'd expect (in large part because web crawlers need text).
- npsimons 13y agoSometimes?
- jere 13y agoThat's funny because "Eternal September" was coined in 1994 (i.e. people were exclaiming "things were better then" in reference to the time before September 1993). It reminds me of "I Used to Love H.E.R." a song released in 1994 about how great rap used to be. http://rapgenius.com/Common-i-used-to-love-her-lyrics http://rapgenius.com/Common-i-used-to-love-her-lyrics
- na85 13y agoI've known about the Eternal September for quite some time, but I'm not sure why it's funny. Eternal September is/was a usenet meme, not really having much relation to the world wide web.
- jere 13y agoSure, you're probably more knowledgeable about it than me. I was only observing that "things used to be better" is a constant theme and when one has nostalgia for a certain time, it's worth noting that people active then were reminiscing about an even earlier time.
- na85 13y agoWell sure, but all that seems to indicate to me is that things are always getting worse.
- mtaubman 13y agoWhat's changed more over time -- "things" or your perception of them?
- stephenaturner 13y agoHow about it's just an indicator that people always think things are getting worse. Every generation is always nostalgic for the time just before the current generation...
- sanskritabelt 13y agoThe article isn't loading for me, but there was the anon.penet.fi anonymizer, at least until it got shut down by, IIRC, the scientologists.
- diegoarmando 13y agoWhat is this usenet?
- greenyoda 13y agohttps://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Usenet https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Usenet
- mwfunk 13y agohttp://lmgtfy.com/?q=usenet http://lmgtfy.com/?q=usenet
- subsection1h 13y agoplonk
- Havoc 13y ago>brief resurgence distributing binaries - images, video, warez - but even that era faded The author is clearly not sufficiently connected. Binaries are going stronger than ever.
- LandoCalrissian 13y agoThis is all I thought Usenet was used for at this point.
- tomphoolery 13y agoPeople still discuss stuff... :) Most people these days know of Usenet as a source for pirated content, but people still do talk there... https://groups.google.com/forum/#!forum/alt.callahans https://groups.google.com/forum/#!forum/alt.callahans I always felt like Usenet was slow, and the idea that you'd have to ask the server for new changes (like email) rather than getting them pushed down to you is what I believe "killed" the platform. Plus, Usenet was distributed so you had to wait until a message propagated to the server you connected on. Discussion platforms built on the Web are (were?) far less difficult to keep together than Usenet, because a company can pay a staff of people to keep the content up and there's only one place to get the content. Say what you will about anonymity and secure communication, but Usenet died because it was hard to use...not because it was a bad idea.
- Steuard 13y agoI never spent any time there, but it warms my heart to hear that alt.callahans is still alive. My impression of Usenet's death is closely related to your "hard to use" summary: it required people to install and configure a separate client, in an era when many forums were becoming available through the web browser folks already had. (Standalone email clients are far less popular today than they used to be, too. But Usenet didn't remain essential until web interfaces became usable the way that email did.)
- throwaway0094 13y agoThe TV networks, MPAA, RIAA started issuing automated DMCA notices in early 2013, making it more or less useless for content. Have things changed?
- agentultra 13y agoDon't get me going about FidoNet[0] either... there are still good usenet servers out there[1]. Update added a link for those who are unfamiliar with FidoNet [0] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/FidoNet http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/FidoNet [1] http://www.eternal-september.org/ http://www.eternal-september.org/
- buckbova 13y agoI've been on easynews on and off for quite some time. It's got some good web tools. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Easynews http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Easynews
- dredmorbius 13y agoUsenet, or something very much like it, with a markup language (to allow for rich content), a paired messaging protocol (to allow for directly contacting individuals in chat / private message mode), and associated content distribution (images, video) could, I've felt for years, displace virtually all of existing social media. The primary missing elements are filtering (as noted) and a distributed search capability.
- vezzy-fnord 13y agoReddit is more-or-less the Usenet of the masses, but without private messaging (and the fact that it's hosted on the World Wide Web).
- jonesetc 13y agoreddit has private messaging.
- vezzy-fnord 13y agoAh. Then my first statement stands, I guess.
- dredmorbius 13y agoI pretty much agree with you. One of the failings of Reddit over G+ is that it doesn't have the equivalent of a personal "user subreddit" page. I realized I could fix that: http://reddit.com/r/dredmorbius http://reddit.com/r/dredmorbius (not that what's there will be of interest to most, but it's a neat convention / hack IMO).
- subsection1h 13y agoplonk Reddit doesn't have killfiles. For me, the killfile is Usenet's killer feature.
- dredmorbius 13y agoRES offers "hide user" feature (among many others). http://www.reddit.com/r/Enhancement/wiki/faq http://www.reddit.com/r/Enhancement/wiki/faq That's effectively a killfile. Posts are suppressed, and you don't receive notifications. The ability to tag users (you supply whatever text you want), or friend them (you can find their submissions more easily, but not their comments) are also pretty cool features.
- zandorg 13y agoThis is my search engine for Usenet, currently only for the 1980s but I hope to have 2003 onwards searchable soon. I have about 2TB of news from 2003 which just needs indexing and uploading. http://www.dejadejadeja.com/10years/ http://www.dejadejadeja.com/10years/ My goal is to give people an alternative to 'Google Groups'. It's built on PHP and MySQL.
- Steuard 13y agoI take it you're missing the 90s? (Alas, most of my Usenet usage was between 1994 and 2003.)
- zandorg 13y agoIt's not possible to get Usenet from the 90s, as it simply isn't archived. 80s is archived via Internet Archive and you can get 10 years worth from 2003 via Usenet king GigaNews. Google Groups has the 90s, but it's locked behind a 'Googlewall'.
- mrottenkolber 13y ago> Google Groups has the 90s, but it's locked behind a 'Googlewall'. And I believe that is a crime against humanity.
- infectoid 13y agoDon't know if I'm being silly here, but is it worth just asking them for it? I'm sure there is some sentimental types in Google that would be cool with what you're doing.
- acuozzo 13y agoThanks for this. It looks awesome!!!
- dredmorbius 13y agoOnce you've got this a bit more solid, I'd strongly urge you to submit this to HN.
- 27182818284 13y agoI've always felt that Reddit is Usenet 2.0. Calling it "the frontpage of the Internet" is a way better slogan, though. (Alexis said Paul Graham used that term on the WTP book tour during his lecture.)
- kbar13 13y agoWhat's the first rule of usenet?
- InclinedPlane 13y agoUsenet isn't going to make a comeback, it's a relic of a different sort of internet than the one that exists today. Though something similar may end up existing in the future, it will likely have a lot of new features (like karma or trust networking or some such) that make the spam and trolling problems tractable. For reference, I spent a lot of time on usenet back in the '90s, using "tin" as my newsreader. I even helped created a newsgroup in the "big 8" heirarchy. There were a lot of fantastic things about those days but I don't think we can ever get them back easily, too much was dependent on the community being small.
- infectoid 13y agoI kind of have to agree with you. But I also don't think this is a bad thing. I'm glad I was there to see it all happen and despite the groans I may receive I think reddit (as mentioned by other commenters) is a perfect evolution of what was. It encourages small communities to exist in the form of sub-reddits which has allowed it to survive the several massive growth phases in the last several years. Part of the reason that places like reddit and HN are still working is because, I believe, they follow that same attitude from the usenet days. It's more about the discussions and cross-pollination of thoughts (whether you agree or not). Most importantly, it helps to break through that filter bubble that looms over us all. While I feel privileged to have seen the world pre and post internet, I'm excited to see how we will be communicating in the next 20 years. As I get older it seems harder to keep an open mind (yes, I can be very sentimental when it comes to old computer tech, BBS The Documentary is my ideal nerd porn) but I have to keep reminding myself that many great things aren't recognized as such until after the fact. If I'm honest with myself, I think I've read and participated in some of the most thought provoking and hilarious on-line discussion from the early 2000's onwards. I'll stop blabbering now.
- InclinedPlane 13y agoReddit and HN can be alright, but they are a shadow of what was normal back in usenet's glory days. Some sub-reddits can be quite good, especially with heavy moderation, but they have all of the problems of usenet except worse. Most discussions on HN/reddit have a 48-hour time horizon, if that, whereas usenet could easily support threads lasting for weeks or months, with obvious effects on the quality of discussion. Also, web-based discussion makes it difficult to get rid of the clutter of read messages and manages threading poorly so discussions that were perfectly fine when everyone was using newsreaders would today be unwieldy.
- kin 13y agoI had no idea Usenet was like a community or something. I primarily use it to download stuff.
- Steuard 13y agoOh, god, it was glorious. Or at least, a lot of parts of it were. I made good friends on the Tolkien newsgroups there, back when they were the place for discussions of his work (with multiple world-famous scholars taking part, and intense debates between many deeply knowledgeable people that could last for weeks). Nothing I've found today can compare. Heck, even the huge, high traffic groups like rec.humor had a real sense of community if you watched for a while and got to know the regulars. I still miss it (obviously).
- nichochar 13y agoDon't talk about it, stop upvoting god dammnit
- Zoomla 13y agoI would be curious to know if an IRC log from the 90s exist at all (major networks), even if it's only behind a "Google-wall"
- elktea 13y agoAre you releasing the source to your NNTP web forum?
- jondiggsit 13y agosigh.... The first rule of Usenet: You do not talk about usenet. Didn't he get the memo?