Google Groups ending support for Usenet

It relies on keyboard navigation, threading, and per-message tracking of read/unread status, and on subject lines. The threaded view with one line per message allows a quick overview over which parts of a discussion one has already read or which are new, or are still unread from the last time. You usually have a split screen where one part of the screen shows that thread tree and the other shows the currently focused message. Focusing a message marks it as read. Common key bindings are pressing Tab to jump to the next unread message, and Space to page-down through the contents of messages. This makes it very efficient to catch up on a discussion (or really, to catch up on all ongoing discussion over all subscribed newsgroups) even after a few days (or longer). And if you reply some time later, you can still expect other participants to pick up your reply and easily see its context.

Replies don’t get lost because the discussion has moved on or the thread is a day old, like they do on HN and Reddit. This enables long-running, structured discussions. There are more usability aspects related to the text editor used, such as editor commands for handling quotes when replying. There are of course the usual(?) forum features of being able to ignore (filter out) specific users, and other features like automatically highlighting/ranking/filtering messages based on other criteria. But the main usability benefits come from per-message read/unread tracking, keyboard navigation, and the compact thread representation.

Note how on HN and Reddit you have threading, but because each message is displayed inline, you see less of a thread at once. You also see only one topic (thread) at once, whereas in a Usenet client you see all recent or currently ongoing threads in the same view as the intra-thread structure. This causes a more shared experience of subscribers of a newsgroup being aware of the current ongoing threads (over days and weeks) than on Reddit and HN. And most importantly, when returning to a discussion thread, on Reddit and HN you don’t see which messages you have already read and which you haven’t, and thus threads die out after a short time, and longer-form discussions are not practical. The experience is profoundly different.

I basically encountered the term only once or twice, in my distant past and have used it maybe as many times. It is not popular.

A Google n-gram comparison of "nazi" and "brownshirt" shows the latter to be vastly rare compared to the former.

I just compared several terms associated with the Nazis: brownshirt,wehrmacht,luftwaffe,hakenkreuz. Their popularity is in the same ballpark.

Luftwaffe is showing a strange resurgence, having overtaken brownshirt.

Brownshirt was on a popularity rise since 1960, but has declined recently. It is now only about 3 times more popular than hakenkreuz, though, which I would think is pretty obscure.

I think people tend to be relatively reluctant to do a dictionary lookup on a rarely heard word that is made of two everyday English words like "brown" and "shirt" and which is easily explained as a fairly obvious metaphor.

Update: I actually used Usenet a bit yesterday, mostly reading administrators explaining how the system works, and deleting spam. It's a cool system, I guess.

It should be possible to have other things built on top of the protocol. The protocol is a store-and-forward broadcast system, and is mostly agnostic to what goes in the packets, although if you want to add a group, each server operator has to agree to carry it, and they can have server-specific restrictions on things like message sizes, dropping messages outside the limits, so it isn't reliable. If you wanted to make a Usenet group simulating Reddit, you could easily pass votes through the system. Clients would have to interpret them, so you'd have to write your own client.

It's tolerant of spam as long as it isn't extremely excessive. There was talk of de-peering Google due to a large volume of spam, before Google made the decision itself, but most groups are about half spam besides that. The low volume of actual users contributes to this.

There's a group, I think news.admin.peering, for requesting your own server to be connected to the network. I see many successful requests from various people in the group's history. The network is fully decentralized, so being connected is reliant on at least one other person being willing to connect to you.

Correction: there are several other servers and the text part is less dead than I thought.