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Usenet, what have you become? (2012)

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Re: Usenet, what have you become? (2012)

#51

Post by vmlinuz »

stinos wrote: post #10
windlep wrote: post #3

In the past 3 years on usenet, something has changed though. Perhaps in response to this article and/or the others talking about it. Some studios are getting drastically faster at getting their content pulled within minutes of nzb's appearing on the index sites. It's not as if its difficult to scan the groups and topics and issue take-down's on posts to the NSP's.

This. Some shows seem impossible to get via usenet and I end up looking for torrents anyway. (Also some shows seem not popular enough, so again torrents to the rescue). Which still is a major PITA as I never looked into something like SickBeard but for torrents. Any recommendations?

You might find there's a SickBeard fork for torrents called SickRage...

Re: Usenet, what have you become? (2012)

#52

Post by brownbat »

ams6110 wrote: post #12
brownbat wrote: post #8

> You get one thing – [release day availability] I'd bet it's not zero days, but one stop shopping. So the consumer saves the overhead of wondering, "wait, is this on Hulu? Netflix? Amazon? iPlayer?" The entire catalog is in one place. I think Netflix and Amazon are getting to the point where their catalogs are deeper than usenet. Of course, most film junkie's "essential 100" lists will still probably hit somewhere l…

Netflix (and probably Amazon too -- I have Prime but the UI for the video service is so bad I normally don't bother with it) is falling into the cable model of hundreds of channels but nothing to watch. More often than not I will spend 15-20 minutes browsing Netflix to find something interesting that I haven't already watched, and end up just switching it off because there's not much there.

Too true.

They used to run competitions to improve their recommendation engine, because it was a big cost for a customer to get shipped a lemon.

They stopped that, I think they're running a different game now, where they just juice the expected rating to convince people to stream stuff that's really just ok.

Re: Usenet, what have you become? (2012)

#53

Post by naveen99 »

na85 wrote: post #27
ljk wrote: post #19

Earlier quoted context omitted.

could you explain here?

A surprising number of people aren't able to separate the concepts of "the internet" and "the world wide web". When you try to explain that USENET is a whole separate entity from the web, running along side it on the Internet, their eyes tend to glaze over.

They understood napster just fine.

Re: Usenet, what have you become? (2012)

#54

Post by naveen99 »

res0nat0r wrote: post #20
bane wrote: post #15

So, today's desktops and high-speed internet connections are more than enough to just have personal Usenet servers instead of subscribing to somebody else's (or having your ISP shut down there's), anybody know what it would take to do this for real? (after all I remember having access to full Usenet servers being served off ancient computers hooked into a T-1)

Sure, if you have the bandwidth and hard drive space to mirror 25+ TB of new content a day...

Text only should be doable. All of Reddit is less than a terabyte.

Re: Usenet, what have you become? (2012)

#55

Post by Animats »

eXpl0it3r wrote: post #41
Animats wrote: post #26

There's still "eternal-september.org", which offers the non-binary USENET groups. The "comp.lang" hierarchy is still widely used, and the main discussions of changes to the C and C++ standard are still on USENET. There is almost no spam.

One of these web-server setup fails again. The site is only accessible with the www. sub-domain: http://www.eternal-september.org/

No, no, "news.eternal-september.org", using NNTP.

Re: Usenet, what have you become? (2012)

#56

Post by rvern »

I don't agree with the claims that Usenet is dead, or that it isn't used for actual discussion anymore. I am subscribed to many newsgroups and most of them are very active. They work in all regards like mailing lists: you will find support lists for programming languages or software, announcement lists, and discussion groups about humanities, politics and many other subjects you might be interested in. People who ask questions actually get answers.

There is spam, yes, but almost all of it is in newsgroups that receive no messages other than spam, and there is no point in subscribing to these newsgroups in the first place. You can filter the rest away with SpamAssassin or Bogofilter.

You can get free access from news.solani.org or www.eternal-september.org to the non-binary newsgroups, where all the interesting discussion happens. Any client like Gnus or Thunderbird can do.

Re: Usenet, what have you become? (2012)

#57

Post by cpach »

eXpl0it3r wrote: post #41
Animats wrote: post #26

There's still "eternal-september.org", which offers the non-binary USENET groups. The "comp.lang" hierarchy is still widely used, and the main discussions of changes to the C and C++ standard are still on USENET. There is almost no spam.

One of these web-server setup fails again. The site is only accessible with the www. sub-domain: http://www.eternal-september.org/

http://eternal-september.org works fine in my browser.

Re: Usenet, what have you become? (2012)

#58

Post by yoha »

icebraining wrote: post #43
seibelj wrote: post #29

I was a loyal giganews user for 10+ years. Then the content creators started getting content pulled very quickly, sometimes within days of upload, and the whole thing started becoming a huge hassle. By this point I was making enough money that $30 a month split between a few streaming services and a few bucks occasionally for a movie on amazon prime wasn't a big deal. It feels good to pay for quality. But as a young…

Piracy still has the better catalog; until not long ago, you couldn't even watch Star Wars online.

    telnet towel.blinkenlights.nl

Re: Usenet, what have you become? (2012)

#59

Post by eXpl0it3r »

cpach wrote: post #57
eXpl0it3r wrote: post #41

Earlier quoted context omitted.

One of these web-server setup fails again. The site is only accessible with the www. sub-domain: http://www.eternal-september.org/

http://eternal-september.org works fine in my browser.

Not in Chrome. I just get "ERR_NAME_NOT_RESOLVED".

Re: Usenet, what have you become? (2012)

#60

Post by patrickfl »

usenetthrowa wrote: post #47
usenetthrowa wrote: post #28

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Usenet (NNTP) is a protocol somewhat similar to email. Unlike email, the default communication style is in "groups" (sort of like a mailing list for a specific topic). One posts individual messages (like one email) to a group; replies are threaded, much like mailing list discussions. Historically the groups were organized somewhat hierarchically. The end result, with a good news reader program, is somewhat like a lar…

Follow-up: > One posts individual messages (like one email) to a group Messages can be posted to more than one group; this is called "cross-posting", much like with email mailing lists. > The end result, with a good news reader program, is somewhat like a large global collection of topic-specific forums. You can also choose to "subscribe" to a subset of the available groups; your news program is able to pull metadata…

follow up - unlike email, the groups are actually publicly viewable, whereas email you needed a username and password.
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