181–190 of 235 posts
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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.
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…
The article links to a free Usenet provider. I'm sure there are others also. The purpose for a PAID Usenet provider is for hosting binaries (i.e. piracy). You're paying someone for the bandwidth, and ignore or deal with the DMCA takedown notices. There is little to no reason to have a paid Usenet account just to read or post on pure text forums, and NOT download porn or other pirated content. That was really one of t…
If the only people who can join are those who are passionate enough to read a lot of documentation and jump through a lot of hoops, yeah, the quality of discourse will be better.
Heck even /. Had better trolls in the day than what reddit has now.
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Usenet faded because the UX was terrible. It was common in the early 90s because it predates the world wide web, and most people back then were highly technical and could deal with the warts. Everything moved to the web, and Usenet clients were hit or miss. Neither Windows nor Mac came packaged with a client for it, so it certainly wasn't easily discoverable for people who joined the internet later. They probably nev…
Usenet doesn't have a UX by itself, it's a protocol. The user experience is entirely dictated by the software used to access it. And Outlook supported Usenet all the way from the word go. Macs didn't even come with any email clients back in those times, but popular ones supported Usenet and there were also Usenet-exclusive programs available.
But let's take something else from the same era and provide a comparison for the average user: yahoo.com. You typed it into the browser, and you were instantly presented with several hundred interesting links. No config necessary, just click and go. The UX needed to be that simple.
Actually discovering good channels on Usenet took time and investment. As opposed to Reddit, for example, which used upvotes and decay based algorithms (also, see HN) to make fresh subreddits discoverable on the main feed.
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Usenet faded because the UX was terrible. It was common in the early 90s because it predates the world wide web, and most people back then were highly technical and could deal with the warts. Everything moved to the web, and Usenet clients were hit or miss. Neither Windows nor Mac came packaged with a client for it, so it certainly wasn't easily discoverable for people who joined the internet later. They probably nev…
Usenet doesn't have a UX by itself, it's a protocol. The user experience is entirely dictated by the software used to access it. And Outlook supported Usenet all the way from the word go. Macs didn't even come with any email clients back in those times, but popular ones supported Usenet and there were also Usenet-exclusive programs available.
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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
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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.
Imagine Hacker News, if instead of Hacker News, you had only Gmail's interface and Gmail threading. That's what we put up with.
I spent a lot of time on Usenet. I miss it a lot, in the same way I miss, like, trip-hop. It was a thing of its time. I don't so much want to engage with it now.
It was great, at the time, because there was nothing else like it. But there's no Usenet group I can think of that doesn't have a message board equivalent today that blows it completely out of the water. I think a lot of people are nostalgic for Usenet because they miss the feeling of discovering worldwide communities; today, they're a dime a dozen.
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Even easier, no web search needed. All you needed to do was search the group list for relevant terms. All the Usenet clients supported searching the group list. Then you just tick the checkbox and the articles were downloaded. Much much easier than using a search engine, scrolling through the results which were half ads even in those days, and trying out the 12 different forums you finally found which were even activ…
> All you needed to do was search the group list for relevant terms. All the Usenet clients supported searching the group list - Group list - Usenet client Most people had no clue what that stuff was.
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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.
Your opinion is, of course, valid, but you do recognize that it's shared by only a small minority, right?
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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 ran my own news server in the 90's, receiving about a dozen groups over dialup with a UUCP feed.
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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?
Even easier, no web search needed. All you needed to do was search the group list for relevant terms. All the Usenet clients supported searching the group list. Then you just tick the checkbox and the articles were downloaded. Much much easier than using a search engine, scrolling through the results which were half ads even in those days, and trying out the 12 different forums you finally found which were even activ…