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USENET rises again?

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Re: USENET rises again?

#151

Post by jjav »

wackget wrote: post #5

As a programmer of over 30 years I still have never used Usenet and the reason is the barrier to entry. There is way too much friction. You need a paid (!) subscription to a provider, potentially a subscription to an indexer, plus client software. All of this to access what is essentially a pure text forum. Frankly I am not interested in jumping through hoops to access something which an "average person" would have n…

> As a programmer of over 30 years...

> You need a paid (!) subscription

30 years ago (and I'd say even 20 years ago) every ISP had their own usenet feed just like they had their own email server. It's only fairly recently this has become a bit of a barrier (although as many have noted in this discussion, free ones exist so not much of a barrier). My ISP discontinued their usenet server in 2016, fairly recently.

Installing a client is one package-install command away, not exactly a barrier.

Re: USENET rises again?

#152

Post by stewbrew »

BearhatBeer wrote: post #146
jtode wrote: post #95

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The spam is the biggest issue. We never solved it there, and it's only being controlled on usenet's imitators through tight control, which is not a feature of usenet. One setup I could see working is a pubkey setup where anyone who posts, always encrypts with their private key, and anyone you want to hear from, you add their public key to your list of keys you decrypt to read. Aggregators can occupy public keys as th…

Usenet faded because ISPs all conspired to drop it, en masse, in the early 2000's. Used to be every ISP from Comcast down to the mom and pops had Usenet. Now it's not just uncommon, it's nearly impossible to find any ISP that has their own Usenet feed. And yes the excuse given to drop it was piracy.

I assume they dropped it because they couldn't monetize it, i.e. spam you with personalized ads and the like. Probably the same reason why RSS News feeds were dropped.

Re: USENET rises again?

#153

Post by jjav »

PreInternet01 wrote: post #115
queuebert wrote: post #67

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Reddit is, I think, a better version of Usenet culture than the original. Reddit is slow, censored, and for-profit. How could that possibly be better than what we used to have? You still get spam, bots, and flame wars, but you also have a needless popularity contest with votes and mods.

Usenet was definitely slow (very, very slow, even), in the sense that posts made in the US might take up to 18 hours (or whenever dial-up got "cheap") to show up in the rest of the world, or vice versa. Even posts between locally-adjacent sites might take a few hours to propagate. This may, incidentally, help to explain why discourse on Usenet was generally considered to be superior to that, say, on Twitter. But YMMV…

> (or whenever dial-up got "cheap")

Right, but that was not due to nntp, it was due to the bandwidth economics of the times. I ran a small site that only connected once a day when the phone call was cheaper. But if you have a permanent connection largely unconstrained on bandwidth, it'll be faster.

> This may, incidentally, help to explain why discourse on Usenet was generally considered to be superior to that, say, on Twitter.

But yes, that as well. When a response takes at least 2 days, there is an incentive to write well and thoroughly. The instant response chat-type forums of today encourage meaningless ping-pong responses.

> Also, Usenet was very much censored, in the sense that most sites would not even think about carrying most groups

This is a very fundamental difference between a distributed ecosystem like usenet and a centralized walled garden. A specific usenet site, as you say, might choose to not carry certain newsgroups. That is local control, not usenet censorship. Usenet as a whole still distributes it. If you want access you can just switch to a different usenet provider. You can also run your own provider! That's what makes it so wonderful. You are in control, not some single central site. There is no central site.

Re: USENET rises again?

#154

Post by MetaWhirledPeas »

jghn wrote: post #148
listenallyall wrote: post #143

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I believe the main reason usenet faded I believe it was due to AOL and CompuServe forums, which were most importantly, new, novel, friendly and easy. Technical people were "above" AOL and so those Usenet communities survived a few more years, but ultimately succumbed to web forums which were superior to Usenet in almost every way. Unfortunately, web forums were mostly hollowed out due to social media, and now that…

Just my opinion but I can't think of a single way in which I found web forums of the early 2000s to be superior to usenet.

Discoverability? A novice could type something into Web Crawler and get a forum back as a search result. Then they could click the link and begin reading and participating immediately. Was Usenet ever that easy?

Re: USENET rises again?

#156

Post by jtode »

MetaWhirledPeas wrote: post #154
jghn wrote: post #148

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Just my opinion but I can't think of a single way in which I found web forums of the early 2000s to be superior to usenet.

Discoverability? A novice could type something into Web Crawler and get a forum back as a search result. Then they could click the link and begin reading and participating immediately. Was Usenet ever that easy?

There was a time when "Groups" was section of google search and they indexed the whole thing.

Re: USENET rises again?

#157

Post by sigio »

dvdkon wrote: post #138
mindcrime wrote: post #96

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Sorry, but you make it sound like there are many. That allow posting, and free, I think I only know one. It's been a while since I looked. I could have sworn there were at least a handful, but either A. I might be mis-remembering or B. the landscape might have changed since I checked last. That said, there seem to be quite few who offer cheap if not actually free access. And by "cheap" I mean, on the order of $10.00…

I don't think 10USD/month for access to a forum is anywhere near cheap or even reasonable, no matter how big it is. I can't imagine anyone paying that for non-warez Usenet access.

Get a provider with a block account... 1GB will last forever on text-groups, and block accounts usually go for 10-1000GB for a few bucks

Re: USENET rises again?

#158

Post by olah_1 »

tptacek wrote: post #29
mindcrime wrote: post #18

I was in an AI conference yesterday, and there was a bunch of discussion in the chat about Slack channels, Discord servers, etc. So I was literally just lamenting the state of shared discussion forums, and commented that we all need to go back to Usenet and drop all these lame "walled garden" proprietary forums. I'd like to tell people "install Thunderbird, sign up for a free Usenet provider, and join comp.ai, comp.m…

The thing you want exists. It's called the Fediverse. Don't like the politics? You wouldn't have liked Usenet in its heyday either.

ActivityPub servers own your account. This is a non-starter for me unless someone holds server admins accountable to laws or some kind of liability

Re: USENET rises again?

#159

Post by jjav »

tptacek wrote: post #26
vouaobrasil wrote: post #14

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I agree, the alternatives are mostly better...except for the interface. I'm not saying that Usenet was great, but damn Reddit is such an ugly site. I actually can't bear to look at it. Hackernews is pretty nicely designed though.

Every web-based message board has a better interface than the Usenet newsreaders did, if only because web message boards have more affordances for features than newsreaders do.

> Every web-based message board has a better interface than the Usenet newsreaders did

This is a fascinatingly different opinion I can't wrap my head around.

To me it seems self-evident that every web-based or proprietary app message board interface is immensely worse than even the most primitive usenet reader of the 80s.

Re: USENET rises again?

#160

Post by glonq »

wackget wrote: post #5

As a programmer of over 30 years I still have never used Usenet and the reason is the barrier to entry. There is way too much friction. You need a paid (!) subscription to a provider, potentially a subscription to an indexer, plus client software. All of this to access what is essentially a pure text forum. Frankly I am not interested in jumping through hoops to access something which an "average person" would have n…

~30 years ago, the barrier to entry was minimal. There were many free news servers out there, and it was common for your ISP to offer one. Good client software was easy to find (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fort%C3%A9_Agent)

And yeah, the best part about usenet was that there were fewer "average people" on there. The Internet was great before AoL connected everybody else to it ;)

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