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Trying to find some life on the Usenet (2020)

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Re: Trying to find some life on the Usenet (2020)

#111

Post by the_af »

bluGill wrote: post #106
the_af wrote: post #86

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> So now we have to live with those "forums" Which forums do you mean? Every community I was part of has moved to facebook groups, Reddit or Discord. PhpBB has gone the way of the dodo (regrettably, since those were the "good old days" for me, since I never used usenet).

Facebook, reddit, discord. It doesn't matter, all of them are inferior to usenet in usability. Usenet fails in the easy to get started with, but once you figure out how to get on usenet (which I no longer know how to do!) it is a much better experience. Usenet has the concept of "I already read this", so you can have long discussions. All other forums when you get more than a few dozen posts it is hard to track what…

Facebook is the worst of the lot. The UX of groups for niche interests is terrible: hard to find/follow conversations, some messages get randomly hidden or highlighted, you can never go back to where you were in a conversation.

Yet, for some reason, years ago most niche communities I belonged to ditched perfectly serviceable phpbb forums and moved to Facebook. Now there's a second exodus to Discord, as braindead as the one before.

And I truly don't understand Reddit to Discord. It has little or nothing to do with moderation or disagreement with Reddit policies, mind you. At least the ones I've seen, the reason is as vague as "wouldn't it be cool to have a Discord?". Why is never answered clearly.

Re: Trying to find some life on the Usenet (2020)

#112

Post by intothemild »

jwr wrote: post #48

I don't think the OP actually used Usenet back in the day. The alt.* groups were always mostly a cesspool, there were very few usable ones past roughly 1995. The comp.* hierarchy was rather good and that's where the action was. I feel sorry that USENET is gone. The experience of using a good NNTP newsreader was way way better than the terrible phpBB forums that supplanted it. And the next generation of programmers si…

I don't think he's really using it now either. He has a reply to that post where he says that "some folks say that [there's piracy] alive in Usenet" but says he doesn't know if that's true.

It's very true and the reason why he can't find anything textual on Usenet... Usenet is now filesharing primarily.

Re: Trying to find some life on the Usenet (2020)

#113

Post by ry4nf »

the_af wrote: post #86
jwr wrote: post #48

I don't think the OP actually used Usenet back in the day. The alt.* groups were always mostly a cesspool, there were very few usable ones past roughly 1995. The comp.* hierarchy was rather good and that's where the action was. I feel sorry that USENET is gone. The experience of using a good NNTP newsreader was way way better than the terrible phpBB forums that supplanted it. And the next generation of programmers si…

> So now we have to live with those "forums" Which forums do you mean? Every community I was part of has moved to facebook groups, Reddit or Discord. PhpBB has gone the way of the dodo (regrettably, since those were the "good old days" for me, since I never used usenet).

I hated to see that. One of the few forums that's still around from my youth is one of the original MMA forums that was almost like "Facebook for MMA". People like Dana White, Bas Rutten, Joe Rogan, Enson Inoue and many more posted there on a somewhat regular basis until the social media takeover. The forum is still around but barely active.

Re: Trying to find some life on the Usenet (2020)

#114

Post by flyinghamster »

taotau wrote: post #56
renegade-otter wrote: post #51

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Good times. News Rover was part of my life back then. I should note that the BINARY usenet is still on fire, if you know what that's used for, that is. My first experience with the Internet was via WebTV, and WebTV had a gated Usenet - only the users had access to it. It was just full of red hot, vicious flame wars. In retrospect, it was the harbinger of things to come with social media in general. Take away the barr…

Coincidentally, i bought myself a Synology NAS this weekend with the honest intention of using it mainly as a backup device, but while browsing the built in apps, i noticed a lot of the media download and streaming apps mentioned BT and NZB... took me a couple of seconds to realize what NZB referred to, but Im not really surprised that NZB has become an active protocol again, given how many consumer services make you…

> I ran a local NNTP relay on my home phone back in the day. I recall spending quite a bit of time filtering out a lot of the binary groups.

There was a very nice, easy-to-use NNTP server that was intended for small sites with few users, called leafnode. It is in a mature but still-maintained state. https://www.leafnode.org/status.shtml

I ran it on a laptop so I could slurp up my newsgroups and read them on the train with tin.

Re: Trying to find some life on the Usenet (2020)

#115

Post by fouc »

jsnell wrote: post #43

The author seems to have been working alphabetically, and didn't even get out of alt (for me the thread stops at alt.f*). So it's not exactly delivering on what title of the HN submission promises. Is there more to the thread, actually looking at all 65k groups or a fair sample of them? Where can one find it?

you have to click on the corresponding message where the thread continues/forks from. Sometimes it's the last message, sometimes you have to go back a few messages.

It continues again from here: https://mastodon.sdf.org/@cfenollosa/103470433583276145

Re: Trying to find some life on the Usenet (2020)

#116

Post by onli »

erremerre wrote: post #77
glimshe wrote: post #31

First the BBSs, then Usenet... I think that one good thing from these services was the relatively high barrier of entry. Today, online services are all about low friction signup, which makes a lot of sense in the highly competitive Internet of 2023. But when computers were somewhat niche and you really had to figure out how to get things working, users were a lot more committed and thus the quality of discussions was…

The fact that you dont get notified when someone's replies to you bothers me a lot. I have not answered some messages because of that reason...

You can use https://www.hnreplies.com/ for that :)

Re: Trying to find some life on the Usenet (2020)

#117

Post by POSSIBLE_FACT »

glimshe wrote: post #31

First the BBSs, then Usenet... I think that one good thing from these services was the relatively high barrier of entry. Today, online services are all about low friction signup, which makes a lot of sense in the highly competitive Internet of 2023. But when computers were somewhat niche and you really had to figure out how to get things working, users were a lot more committed and thus the quality of discussions was…

it was in 1992 that i discovered what long distance calls actually cost, when my young dumb ass called up about 12 different non-local BBSes in search of more daily turns on Legend of the Red Dragon.. i didnt know modems would incur long distance fees just like phones... i was a special child

Re: Trying to find some life on the Usenet (2020)

#118

Post by throwaway847t »

bawolff wrote: post #37
gorbachev wrote: post #34

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There was more to it. 1. The clients were kind of a pain for anyone but comp.sci nerds 2. It was butt ugly. Web forums killed it, because you could make them pretty 3. Not only spam, but the troll bots just destroyed everything. I can't remember why exactly this started happening, but there were a dedicated pool of assholes spamming Usenet groups they didn't like with garbage or vile crap posing as regular contributo…

> The clients were kind of a pain for anyone but comp.sci nerds News clients were built into most email clients and were pretty user friendly. I dont think you needed to be a nerd to use it. Web forums were also pretty ugly in the late 90s.

I agree. Windows 9x included Outlook Express which had a built in news reader in addition to mail. If you could setup your mail you could also setup the news reader.

I think most of the ISPs that I used either had a setup program that configured it automatically along with mail/dns, or provided clear instructions on how to set it up manually.

I may be in the minority, but I actually liked Outlook Express.

Re: Trying to find some life on the Usenet (2020)

#119

Post by superkuh »

I can't read this article because it's behind the typical mastodon post-v3 javascript execution wall. So... did they not notice the activity in alt.startrek somehow? I know I was posting back then with others and alt.startrek remains minimally active to this day.

Re: Trying to find some life on the Usenet (2020)

#120

Post by flyinghamster »

prometheus76 wrote: post #90
glimshe wrote: post #31

First the BBSs, then Usenet... I think that one good thing from these services was the relatively high barrier of entry. Today, online services are all about low friction signup, which makes a lot of sense in the highly competitive Internet of 2023. But when computers were somewhat niche and you really had to figure out how to get things working, users were a lot more committed and thus the quality of discussions was…

I lived in a small town in Nevada in the early 90s, and I ran one of the local BBSs. Every six months or so, we would have an IRL party and meet other BBS sysops and the users. It was really fun to finally be able to put faces with usernames. BBSs kind of served as a filtering device for finding other people like you. In a small town, it was easy to feel isolated and lonely for being a nerd, but then you find this co…

I think one of the key aspects of the dialup BBS days was that long-distance connections were (sometimes very) expensive, and so BBS systems tended to be populated by locals. There were some networked BBS systems, though (FidoNet and WWIV spring to mind).

I played around with FidoNet back in the late 1980s/early 90s, when Usenet was not available to me, and FidoNet's Usenet-like echomail system had some very active groups. But even with FidoNet, there was very much a local-to-regional focus. Networks were organized geographically, and Net 115 (Chicago area) had some social gatherings. But FidoNet collapsed pretty quickly once the internet came to the public.

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