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R.I.P Usenet: 1980-2008
Posted by
CmdrTaco
on Thu Jul 31, 2008 11:50 AM
from the we-hardly-knew-ye dept.
from the we-hardly-knew-ye dept.
CorinneI writes "In a way inconceivable in today's marketplace, Usenet was where people once went to talk — in days before the profit-centric Internet we have today. The series of bulletin boards called 'newsgroups' shared by thousands of computers, which traded new messages several times a day, is now a thing of the past."
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Usenet is dead... (Score:5, Funny)
It's about time. (Score:5, Funny)
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Hmm...Giganews and other services are still there (Score:5, Insightful)
Oh, and look, they have all the alt.* forums there too!
So, unless the entire Usenet network gets taken offline..which is unlikely, then no, it's far from dead.
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Re:Hmm...Giganews and other services are still the (Score:5, Insightful)
Holy Shit! Usenet is dead. For some reason my Xnews, open right now, seems to not have noticed.
Death Of Usenet has been predicted since its birth. Nothing to see here.
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Google Groups (Score:5, Insightful)
Just like MTV is now Youtube, USENET is now Google Groups.
Same thing, different name.
Re:Google Groups (Score:5, Insightful)
Or yahoo groups or Myspace groups or ......
Just not the same thing to be honest. The real problem for usenet and the Internet in general is that it is just to easy.
A lot of the good stuff from usenet has now migrated to mailing lists and online forums but it still isn't the same.. Ahh the good old days.
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Re:Google Groups (Score:5, Informative)
Actually Google Groups *is* the same thing as Usenet, because that is exactly what it is, a easy to use web front end to Usenet.
That is why Google Groups is infinitely better than Yahoo groups and the others you mention.
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Re:Google Groups (Score:5, Insightful)
Actually Google Groups *is* the same thing as Usenet, because that is exactly what it is, a [sic] easy to use web front end to Usenet.
That's awfully subjective. I find the GG interface to be an exercise in masochism.
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Re:Google Groups (Score:5, Insightful)
Google Groups *is* the same thing as Usenet, because that is exactly what it is, a easy to use web front end to Usenet.
Where "easy to use" means "one tenth the features of a decent newsreader, but slower and more awkward". Long live Gnus.
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Re:Google Groups (Score:5, Insightful)
While it might be a pretty modern front end to usenet it doesn't help the fact that the back end feed is slowly being strangled by spam, and now legislation.
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this was never about porn (Score:5, Interesting)
it was about alt.binaries.mp3s
Re:this was never about porn (Score:5, Funny)
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Re:this was never about porn (Score:5, Funny)
The ends justify the means. Thank you, Mr. Cuomo.
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WHAT? (Score:5, Informative)
Re:WHAT? (Score:5, Interesting)
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Re:WHAT? (Score:5, Funny)
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yellow journalism at it's worst (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:yellow journalism at it's worst (Score:5, Insightful)
A rumor repeated often enough eventually becomes fact......or at least a Wikipedia edit.
Layne
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Re:yellow journalism at it's worst (Score:5, Funny)
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Bullcrap (Score:5, Insightful)
Stupid headline. Usenet is still there. Stupid idiots who are slaves to only what their ISP spoon feeds them may drop off. So what.
Re:Bullcrap (Score:5, Informative)
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Re:Bullcrap (Score:5, Insightful)
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Premature (Score:5, Informative)
And that is by no means a complete list. If anything, usenet may actually return to a more usable medium again, now that it won't be free for all the spammers and trolls anymore. Then again, it may well not -- it's not like all the illegal traders will just give up and go away, so I guess it depends on how much money the **IA, the BSA, and the morality police want to spend on "eradicating the problem".
Re:Premature (Score:5, Informative)
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alt.terrible.news.horrify.cringe.wail (Score:5, Funny)
alt.beloved.usenet.gone?.withered?.dead?
alt.black.day.is.is.ever-shall-be
alt.thoughtful.pause.pause.pause.pause
alt.brief.check.make.perform.check
alt.noble.usenet.remains!.lives!.cheers!
alt.brave.usenet.!surrenders.!bows.!gone!
alt.silly.blog.!informs.!researches.!educates
alt.dumb.blogger.drools.mashes-keys-at-random.drools
alt.credulous.slashdot.reports.dramatises.alarms
alt.trusty."alt.adjective.noun.verb.verb.verb".remains.endures.twinkles
So what was your favorite newsgroup name? (Score:5, Funny)
Coz your post is dead accurate about the whole usenet sense of humor.
I loved:
alt.fan.tonya-harding.whack.whack.whack
alt.sex.bestiality.barney.die.die.die
and all the many alt.*.whilst.wearing.rubber.knickers groups.
Not that I ever *read* any of them, but it made my heart warm knowing they existed.
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Re:So what was your favorite newsgroup name? (Score:5, Funny)
alt.barney.die.die.die
alt.party-of-five.puke.puke.puke
alt.impeach.bush
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alt.ensign.wesley.die.die.die (sorry Wil) (Score:5, Interesting)
a.e.w.d.d.d had lots of imaginative posts on how Wesley should be done in, plus plenty of flame wars when people started conflating Wesley the character (yuck) with Wil the actor (cool frood).
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Article summary (Score:5, Funny)
"Before the Eternal September, but after the Great Renaming, I learned about sex on Usenet."
No need to read any further...
USENET always had a lot of porn (Score:5, Informative)
Glory days (Score:5, Interesting)
Then Eternal Spetember [wikipedia.org] happened, and chased most of the decent discussion to quieter and more moderated email lists and web forums.
Usenet's current status as a haven for spam and pirated binar^H^H^H NOTHING ELSE is a far cry from what it used to mean to a lot of people.
Uh... (Score:5, Insightful)
From TFA: "It's the porn that's putting nails in Usenet's coffin."
That would seem to fly in the face of everything I know about both human nature and the internet.
For me, the reasons my (once extensive) Usenet usage dropped off was 1) insane amounts of spam, and 2) ease of use of torrents (at least with regards to binaries).
I'm speechless (Score:5, Interesting)
Mind boggling. USENET. Dead. It doesn't even need an explanation as to why it's retarded, at least not to someone who has interesting (technical) discussions there on a regular basis.
Somebody's got to say it (Score:5, Funny)
Isn't it ironic (Score:5, Insightful)
Prohibition didn't work then, and it still doesn't work.
Irksome summary (Score:5, Interesting)
As with all the other stories on this: Boo-hoo, ISPs aren't giving away free usenet. If you really want it, find a 3rd party usenet server. If my ISP took away email, I wouldn't notice because I use a different address. Verizon took away my usenet and I didn't notice, because I use a 3rd party usenet server.
And again if you haven't read it in the comments of previous postings on this story, a 3rd party usenet server is practically REQUIRED for anonymous viewing/posting of the illicit content they are trying to prevent. The pedos all sign up with offshore providers and pay for it with anonymously mailed money-orders, and access it through anonymizing proxies. The ones who don't are quickly and easily arrested with a single warrant to the ISP. The smart ones, who survive, and are thus the big-time posters, are not and can not be prevented in this manner.
alt.binaries.* isn't killed by ISPs, it's killed by spam and superior communication mechanisms.
Don't bother reading the article... (Score:5, Insightful)
Don't bother reading the article. It is a non-interesting opinion/blog piece with very little supporting data.
My own little anecdote, I was on usenet (rec.windsurfing) earlier today. If it wasn't for the overwhelming spam, I'd continue to use some of the other groups as the people who are left are a pretty committed and knowledgable group.
Just a bad summary (Score:5, Informative)
USENET will be around for a long time to come (Score:5, Insightful)
USENET is doing just fine (Score:5, Informative)
Usenet is doing quite well. The programming-related newsgroups are in fine shape. "comp.lang.python", "comp.lang.javascript", and "comp.databases.mysql" have heavy traffic from knowledgeable people, including developers of the underlying systems. It's much faster to see the day's updates on Usenet than to page through the inflated dreck on a half dozen PHP-based forum systems.
I was a bit disappointed when the C++ standards committee moved their discussions off USENET, but that committee isn't getting anywhere anyway.
Mourning the end of September... (Score:5, Insightful)
This bloke isn't mourning Usenet, he's mourning the end of the September that Never Ended.
Usenet's biggest problems really started when AOL joined Usenet. The other ISPs followed on from that... people said that September ended when AOL left... not so, it won't end until the last big ISP is gone. Then maybe it'll be time for Usenet 2.0...
It's not dead (Score:5, Interesting)
It's resting (sorry, had to).
But more seriously, where's the #1 forum to discuss C programming? comp.lang.c. Where's the #1 forum to discuss DSP? comp.dsp, so much that other DSP "forums" only provide an interface to it. Where's the #1 spot to tell people your new theory as to how FTL travel is possible using hidden dimensions in the aether? sci.physics.
So you see, it's not dead, or even resting, some of its branches died, some others are still thriving.
Re:Pffft, been dying for years. (Score:5, Informative)
I'd say dumbed down interfaces. A good newsreader is much friendlier than a webforum. The problem is that you have to install it first.
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Re:Web 2.0 ftw (Score:5, Insightful)
Except that no Web 2.0 forum comes close to matching the features that any decent USENET client had 15 years ago. Things like real threading, filters, kill files, etc.
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Re:Web 2.0 ftw (Score:5, Interesting)
That's actually quite doable. Making forum software that is feature-competitive with newsreaders is totally viable. That's not what concerns me.
A bigger problem (which web mail suffers from, as well) is that web forums are a way for a server operator to make decisions about the features you get (as well as how/if it is integrated with other content, whether for good (I won't go into that, here) or ill (ads)), rather than leaving those decisions to the client.
I really see it as technological step backwards.
As an exercise in absurdity, imagine if we applied the same trend to the web itself. In addition to "web mail" and "web forums", imagine "web web", where your browser window contains a widget consisting of code loaded from someone else's server, and that widget has features similar to a web browser. Oh wait, we have that: Flash and Silverlight.
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Re:Web 2.0 ftw (Score:5, Insightful)
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Re:Web 2.0 ftw (Score:5, Insightful)
I don't think either explanation really matches reality. Usenet started to seriously deteriorate to the point most people I knew who were regulars started to drop it around 1995-1998. At that time, while there were web forums, they were still in the teething stage and no replacement for Usenet. That, for me, is the time Usenet "died". It began to be re-invented as a binaries distribution network shortly thereafter.
Why did it die? Spam. Spammers began to make swathes of Usenet unreadable. After a few managable carpetbombs, the serious spammers first attacked in earnest the alt.sex hierarchy (it's an interesting fact that comes as a surprise to many that back in the early nineties, alt.sex contained some of the most respected newsgroups in Usenet. alt.sex.bondage, for example, was originally started after a prank revealed massive interest in such a group, and it became one of the more respected groups thereafter.) The groups became unusable within two years, with a few migrating to "safer" areas out of the alt.* hierarchy. After that the rest of Usenet started to get similarly hit.
A few attempts were made to protect Usenet, from serious attempts to hold ISPs to account for their users (which caused more damage than it helped, as the legitimate customers of those ISPs were cut off from Usenet too and as a result drifted away, reducing the S/N ratio even further) to attempts to introduce various forms of moderation that, ultimately, also caused more damage.
People just gave up. Even the spammers started to give up after a few years largely because it wasn't worth their time any more, but by that time Usenet was dead anyway.
What's dying today isn't Usenet, at least not the network in operation back from 1980. It's a binaries distribution system, the one that took over from the mid-nineties onwards.
And frankly, I don't know about you, but I don't care about that one.
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e-mail and YouTube to follow (Score:5, Interesting)
I think the same thing is happening to e-mail, at least e-mail over public mail servers. With the advent of new communications methods, it's just getting less and less worth the energy required to cope with the parasites (spam and such). People can still exchange interesting stuff via YouTube, but I bet that gets destroyed by spam soon enough, too.
It's probably some rule of evolutionary biology: if you create a pool of low entropy, a cloud of parasites will spontaneously arive, like maggots to meat, to eat it and destroy it. Then I guess you move on to the next thing, huh?
Pity we don't simply hunt down and destroy the parasites in our own midst, so that we can spend less time and cleverness keeping ahead of them.
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Re:Web 2.0 ftw (Score:5, Insightful)
It's really a shame because as people have pointed out, the tools built into your average usenet client completely blow away most web forums for features, especially with threading, scoring, tracking, etc... Plus, the Usenet is fast, being a simple text protocol with built-in multicasting you can support communities of millions with virtually no drain on your personal resources. Web forums frequently crash and burn when they start to become popular because the centralized hardware requirements and the fact that you have to run a database means that once you start getting more than a few readers per second you have to start looking at specialized solutions or lose your community to database overload crashes and general slowness. Unfortunately, it is this feature that guarantee that any two bit joker with an internet connection could clobber a group with spam.
As it is so often true in life, we can't have nice things because some jackass will always try to mess it up.
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Re:Web 2.0 ftw (Score:5, Interesting)
What's dying today isn't Usenet, at least not the network in operation back from 1980. It's a binaries distribution system, the one that took over from the mid-nineties onwards.
And frankly, I don't know about you, but I don't care about that one.
Frankly, that's the only one I care about. Sure, there is TONS of porn, but there are also respectable (non porn) files out there as well. When my wife missed an episode of "Dancing With the Stars" a while back, where did I find a copy? Newsgroups. When the latest Ubuntu was released and my ISP was slowing BitTorrent to a crawl, where did I turn? Newsgroups. When I wanted some ideas for how to set up my garden, where did I turn to? You guessed it, Newsgroups!
There are some things that no Web site can offer that you can only find on Usenet. That stupid Dancing with the Stars thing is an example. It was not available on any website because it is protected (even though there was absolutely no other way of retrieving it). With ISP's starting to block P2P, we should always be able to fall back on good ol' usenet.
Which brings me to the point you mentioned about spammers. Spammers are relatively easy to avoid on Usenet. The bigger problem is spyware, viruses and trojans. However, the beauty of Usenet is that someone can reply to a post with bad intent and say something like, "Do not download! VIRUS!!!" You can't do that on a non reputable or hijacked website. All you can do is hope that the file you downloaded really is the XP drivers for a new "Vista Only" system and not a virus that will zap your HDD.
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