Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Trying to find some life on the Usenet (2020)

mastodon.sdf.org

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

171–180 of 217 posts

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

#171

Post by gadders »

denton-scratch wrote: post #73
gadders wrote: post #54

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>>I think that one good thing from these services was the relatively high barrier of entry. Talking of high barrier to entry, does anyone ever remember that hackers group that said you needed to hack something in your newsreader to make it not read-only so you could post?

Would that be alt.sysadmin.recovery? Your post had to have an "Approved:" header. You could say "Approved: yes", "Approved: no" or "Approved: xyzzy" - it didn't matter. I expect there were other groups that needed an Approved: header to post.

It was the same method as that, but the group was alt.hackers I think.

https://www.samiam.org/alt.hackers.html

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

#172

Post by Asraelite »

distcs wrote: post #122
fouc wrote: post #115

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

I scrolled through all of it and it still ends at alt.* which is a minuscule fraction of all of usenet. Where is the rest?

You gotta keep clicking the individual posts at the end to continue the thread (I really don't like the Twitter/Mastodon format because of stuff like this).

https://mastodon.sdf.org/@cfenollosa/103471067353770271

https://mastodon.sdf.org/@cfenollosa/103471732465361915

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

#173

Post by MysteryChessBox »

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…

Is this place really ugly though? I've always found this trend of claiming a website is ugly if it's content dense or minimalistic to be a bit disturbing. It does sound more like preference than anything else, I don't see anything wrong with what I perceive to be a clean design.

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

#174

Post by playingalong »

darau1 wrote: post #66
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 still stubbornly hope that one of these silicone valley boys will "invent" USENET, and package it up nicely for the masses. That'd be cool.

Sounds like a job for Apple Computers.

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

#175

Post by gte525u »

Sharlin wrote: post #93
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).

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.

At least my journey was more slashdot => digg => reddit. Reddit seemed to really take off when digg self immolated during their redesign.

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

#176

Post by brador »

hsjqllzlfkf wrote: post #2

This isn't trolling, genuine question from someone who joined the internet after Usenet was already gone: I keep seeing people wanting to build distributed this and distributed that. According to Wikipedia, usenet was already distributed. Why did it die? Edit: follow-up question, what about freenet? Are they the same thing? Are they different, compatible, implementations of the same protocol? Are they incompatible bu…

Usenet was discussion and file sharing. Replaced with real time chat and forums, and kazaa/emule/napster/direct respectively.

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

#177

Post by slowmovintarget »

gte525u wrote: post #175
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.

At least my journey was more slashdot => digg => reddit. Reddit seemed to really take off when digg self immolated during their redesign.

Add Compuserve => AOL => Newsgroups to the beginning and same.

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

#178

Post by dredmorbius »

amtamt wrote: post #76
dredmorbius wrote: post #6

"You know Usenet is almost-dead when there is not even spam in most groups." "Spammers have decided "it's not profitable to send a few bytes to these open boards anymore" and if you think about it it's kinda sad" As much as I hate spam, and I hate it a lot , yes, that's pretty damning evidence. You know a new comms platform has arrived when the spammers, scammers, griefers, and propagandists do. And you know it's dea…

That can also mean its time to start using Usenet again... and should keep it under radar this time.

Unless there's a change in the underlying management, motives, incentives, and financial support model, those problems will simply resurface.

And far more quickly this time than last.

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

#179

Post by dredmorbius »

fps_doug wrote: post #28
dredmorbius wrote: post #4

Earlier quoted context omitted.

1. It got spammed to death. 2. It lost control over its culture, and that culture was crucial to its functioning. 3. It was too problematic for ISPs (or others) to provide ready access to it: spam, harassment, child pornography, and copyright violations all posed massive concerns. 4. There was no viable business model for providing the service. https://web.archive.org/web/20230603024330/https://old.reddi... > (I'm au…

> 2. It lost control over its culture, and that culture was crucial to its functioning. This might strongly depend on the corner of usenet you were in, but there were large and important groups where elitism was absolutely cancerous, and a culture I don't miss. I frequented German end English groups, and can say that it was much worse in the German ones. Absolutely condescending attitude towards newcomers if they "mi…

A significant part of the culture was that Usenet was tied, almost exclusively, to selective-admission universities (and largely CompSci / EE students and faculty), a few high-tech companies (infotech and defence, largely), and a few government departments. Those institutions could exert reasonable disciplinary control over Usenet participants ... enough to avoid the grosser harms.

Yes, it was highly exclusive and exclusionary, and there were definitely toxic elements to the culture, but it wasn't entirely lacking in control or discipline as occurred later.

Note that Usenet did have some effective spam controls ("Cancelmoose", the Lumber Cabal, etc.), but overall effectiveness was limited by virtue of the distributed and noncentralised nature of the protocol, as well as the lack of any true participant authentication.

Slashdot was harshing on Usenet long before Reddit was, and various online forums (as you mention) before that.

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

#180

Post by dredmorbius »

rhplus wrote: post #53
dredmorbius wrote: post #4

Earlier quoted context omitted.

1. It got spammed to death. 2. It lost control over its culture, and that culture was crucial to its functioning. 3. It was too problematic for ISPs (or others) to provide ready access to it: spam, harassment, child pornography, and copyright violations all posed massive concerns. 4. There was no viable business model for providing the service. https://web.archive.org/web/20230603024330/https://old.reddi... > (I'm au…

Also: It was insecure, there was no trust model and no encryption, so no proof of authorship, no proof of server identity. It was too public. Not everyone wants their conversations out in the open.

Whilst authentication was generally lacking, PGP was available and tended to be used for, e.g., security announcements.

Not widely adopted, of course.

Post reply on HN