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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)

#141

Post by flyinghamster »

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 wouldn't say phpBB is dead, its latest release is from February of this year. On the other hand, unless you're already a participant on such a forum, you just might have trouble finding it in today's search hellscape.

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

#142

Post by shagie »

rglullis wrote: post #81
tgv wrote: post #59

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Lemmy has quite a few negatives. It's small, highly fragmented, obscure to newcomers, and still has a vitriolic commenters, even in the more serious groups. And it doesn't have any PR/marketing. It's not going to take off.

> It's not going to take off. It already did: https://fedidb.org/software/lemmy It will be a slow descent for reddit, but if you take the "rule" of social media that splits content creators/active participants/lurkers as 1/9/90%, and if we assume that a substantial amount of the 1% is moving away from reddit, then it stands to reason that the other 99% will end up following the creators. Yeah, network effects are sti…

> It will be a slow descent for reddit, but if you take the "rule" of social media that splits content creators/active participants/lurkers as 1/9/90%, and if we assume that a substantial amount of the 1% is moving away from reddit, then it stands to reason that the other 99% will end up following the creators.

In the domains of programming, suggesting that many of the 1% have moved away from Reddit, that is extremely optimistic... though that may be my visibility into fragmentation of communities across Lemmy.

    https://lemmy.ml/c/java
    https://programming.dev/c/java
From what I've seen, the content that has taken off on Lemmy tends to be the lower effort "ask Lemmy", memes, and similar.

Instances on beehaw tend to be more thriving, but this may also be a function of more active moderation... which is one of those things that people rail about being unfair and Stack Overflow over moderates (that's another thread).

The people who left Reddit appear to mostly be moderators who have gotten tired of moderating rather than people who are creating content / posts / commenting on Reddit.

    https://programming.dev/c/cs_career_questions
290 subscribers, most recent question was 8 days ago.

    https://www.reddit.com/r/cscareerquestions/
1M subscribers (yes, bots, inactive and all), 25th oldest question was 9 hours ago.

There was a surge a few weeks ago (especially as people hit private subs) - but it hasn't been sustained.

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

#143

Post by noSyncCloud »

ry4nf wrote: post #113
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).

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.

Talking about Sherdog I presume?

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

#144

Post by janitor61 »

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…

One of the cool things I saw on BBSes back in the day - that I have yet to see replicated - was 'real time chat' in telechat, or being able to see what the other person is typing out as they enter it on their keyboard. It was captivating and made it really feel like an intimate conversation with another person. That could have just been the novelty of it all, as well... ICQ had a similar feature IIRC?.

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

#145

Post by jafo1989 »

janitor61 wrote: post #144
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…

One of the cool things I saw on BBSes back in the day - that I have yet to see replicated - was 'real time chat' in telechat, or being able to see what the other person is typing out as they enter it on their keyboard. It was captivating and made it really feel like an intimate conversation with another person. That could have just been the novelty of it all, as well... ICQ had a similar feature IIRC?.

age SysOp

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

#146

Post by readingnews »

the_af wrote: post #98
TacticalCoder wrote: post #92

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There are many forums for specific communities: specific car brands, sometimes even specific car models , watches, keyboards even (!), etc. I'm on forums like these and they're doing totally fine. And if anything with the recent Reddit SNAFU the last thing users there want is for some central authority in SV to decide what they're allowed to talk about.

Ah, interesting. To be clear, I also meant for specific communities: like for specific hobbies or tabletop games, or niche interests. They've all abandoned forums and, regrettably, moved on to Facebook or Discord. I'll never understand why they choose Discord, a closed chat platform, for forum type discussions. At this point I feel like Quixote tilting at the wind mills.

I am not so sure they all went FB/Discord, some I use(d) for example:

https://www.watchuseek.com/

https://www.rolexforums.com/

https://www.audioasylum.com/

https://www.audioheritage.org/vbulletin/

https://el34world.com/Forum/index.php (A simple machines forum, this guy has been here forever, and he wrote his entire online shop himself)

https://www.civicx.com

There are a LOT of niche forums out there that are not FB/Discord, and keeping track of them is a pain. I do wish newsgroups were still a thing for hobbies.

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

#147

Post by 1vuio0pswjnm7 »

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 have a nagging feeling that we've dumbed things down terribly."

What was Google's end game in acquiring DejaNews. Make way for "Google Groups". It's baffling. The comp.unix.* groups became less accessible for so many years, and perhaps inaccessible in some cases. Fixing accessibility problems was obviously low priority. Whatever their motives, Google indeed dumbed things down terribly.

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

#148

Post by jwells89 »

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…

On the topic of usability, I wonder if perhaps it's a matter of familiarity.

I missed the heyday of Usenet by several years and instead landed right in the middle of the phpBB/InvisionBB/vBulletin era, but also made heavy use of RSS/Atom and was curious about other protocols, and so at one point played around with Usenet by way of the Panic client Unison[0].

It might've just been the client (though that'd be surprising, given Panic's knack for UI design) but I didn't find it any more intuitive than web forums. The ability to search numerous groups at once was nice though.

That's not to say that web forums were or are good however. They're a step above something like Discord at least because they're open, but forum search is notoriously bad and I've never come across forum software where navigation isn't somewhat clunky.

[0]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Unison_(Usenet_client)

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

#149

Post by hattmall »

the_af wrote: post #100
Sharlin wrote: post #93

Earlier quoted context omitted.

And the two big reasons to move to Reddit were (a) single interface and login and (b) threaded conversations. Which is to say, Reddit (well, Slashdot really) reinvented the things that Usenet had had but which had been lost in the migration to traditional web-based forums.

Cool! I didn't know threaded conversations were a concept from usenet. I do wonder though, why on earth are so many communities moving to facebook and Discord, the two platforms that are decidedly worse than either usenet or phpbb. Some have come to realize facebook was a mistake, but may be committing an even worse one by moving to Discord.

Both of those formats suck, but people moved there because the reach is strong with mobile access.

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

#150

Post by the_af »

flyinghamster wrote: post #141
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).

I wouldn't say phpBB is dead, its latest release is from February of this year. On the other hand, unless you're already a participant on such a forum, you just might have trouble finding it in today's search hellscape.

Maybe it's just my experience. Every phpbb community I was part of moved years away to Facebook, Reddit or (now) Discord. Some of the forums linger on, almost completely deserted by their former users :/
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