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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)

#181

Post by ry4nf »

noSyncCloud wrote: post #143
ry4nf wrote: post #113

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

I thought about Sherdog after I posted but mma.tv/mixedmartialarts.com aka "the underground" was what I was thinking about

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

#182

Post by xorcist »

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…

> The alt.* groups were always mostly a cesspool,

Well, there was a lot of fun in the chaos too. Stuff like alt.pave.the.earth had a culture around it.

There was serious stuff too, like alt.save.the.earth. Also things like alt.os.linux (later renamed to comp.os.linux)

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

#183

Post by gbuechler »

I earned the down payment for my first house on misc.jobs.offered

Had an client that I had an ongoing search contract to fill their needs for Unix Sys Ads at the NAS facility at NASA in Mt. View. Cool client that got me into playing Flight Simulator on SGI Power Series in their lobby.

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

#184

Post by rglullis »

bluGill wrote: post #169
rglullis wrote: post #96

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The only intuitive interface is the nipple. Everything else is learned. Now, it might be that the learning curve is steeper than the existing solutions, but think of all the things you had to learn while using reddit: - what is a sub? - What is the difference between posting a link, a text, an image? - How does voting affect the front-page? - What is Karma? - What is a DM? Now, think of things you'll probably have to…

As any women (or man watching this) who has tried to nurse a newborn baby can tell you, the nipple is not very intuitive. It is a lot of effort to teach a baby to use a nipple correctly. Few know how to teach this skill anymore and so a lot of mothers spend a lot of money on bottles/formula. (formula is fine for those who can't make nursing work in their life, but where it would work many use formula anyway because i…

You are right. Millions of years of evolution, thousands of mammal species, but none of them really could feed properly until Homo Sapiens came around with a proper "nursing 101" class and invented baby formula.

Life would be impossible without it.

(I do my best to avoid snarky responses, but do you realize how your comment amounts to pointless pontification?)

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

#186

Post by dredmorbius »

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.

Netscape Navigator, the GNOME Pan newsreader, KDE's KNode newsreader, Forte Agent for MS Windows, and of course Emacs's Gnus, along with compatibility tools for a bunch of email clients (mutt, Sylpheed, Alpine, etc.).

Most ISPs had some sort of bundled software package which included a rudimentary Usenet client as well.

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

#187

Post by amiga386 »

dredmorbius wrote: post #4
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…

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…

If you were to ask Usenet at the time, they would chiefly cite the eternal September (which you do mention in your article), although, clearly, it kept going for longer than that. Perhaps the eternal September is just one of the contributing factors to losing control of its shared culture and values?

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eternal_September

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

#188

Post by c22 »

throw0101b wrote: post #133
shagie wrote: post #124

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> but once you figure out how to get on usenet (which I no longer know how to do!) it is a much better experience. Get a reader and sign up on https://www.eternal-september.org The days of open servers are gone, but fairly permissive authenticated servers exist.

For those that do not know the reference: > Eternal September or the September that never ended[1] is Usenet slang for a period beginning around 1993[2] when Internet service providers[2] began offering Usenet access to many new users. The flood of new users overwhelmed the existing culture for online forums and the ability to enforce existing norms. AOL followed with their Usenet gateway service in March 1994,[3] le…

Your quote buries the lede:

During the 1980s and early 1990s, Usenet and the Internet were generally the domain of dedicated computer professionals and hobbyists; new users joined slowly, in small numbers, and observed and learned the social conventions of online interaction without having much of an impact on the experienced users. The only exception to this was September of every year, when large numbers of first-year college students gained access to the Internet and Usenet through their universities. These large groups of new users who had not yet learned online etiquette created a nuisance for the experienced users, who came to dread September every year.

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

#189

Post by wkat4242 »

mettamage wrote: post #63
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…

> Interestingly, Hacker News has a fairly low barrier of entry and high quality discussions. I made an account around the time when I started reading HN for the first time. I was a master student in computer science. Other than the reason to be able to create things out of my imagination, another reason why I studied computer science is because I felt too dumb to grok the field. So it was me stretching myself out of…

Maybe it's good that it has a high barrier of entry though.. If it would become too mainstream it would get lost in the currents of mainstream news. I don't want to read about the Kardashians here.

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

#190

Post by bluGill »

rglullis wrote: post #184
bluGill wrote: post #169

Earlier quoted context omitted.

As any women (or man watching this) who has tried to nurse a newborn baby can tell you, the nipple is not very intuitive. It is a lot of effort to teach a baby to use a nipple correctly. Few know how to teach this skill anymore and so a lot of mothers spend a lot of money on bottles/formula. (formula is fine for those who can't make nursing work in their life, but where it would work many use formula anyway because i…

You are right. Millions of years of evolution, thousands of mammal species, but none of them really could feed properly until Homo Sapiens came around with a proper "nursing 101" class and invented baby formula. Life would be impossible without it. (I do my best to avoid snarky responses, but do you realize how your comment amounts to pointless pontification?)

Evolution works for survival, at some point it 'decided' that since humans can teach other we don't need the instinct anymore. If you study at all you will find plenty of similar things across many different species.
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