I am thrilled to announce that none of my old UseNet stuff seems to be there.
I found a few of my posts from 1997, am glad none of them were too cringe.
Usenet Archives
61–70 of 74 posts
Re: Usenet Archives
#62Fuck I sounded so fucking pompous in 1984. I mean fuck.
We all did.
Re: Usenet Archives
#63Earlier quoted context omitted.
I ran the tech side of the most popular independent ISP in Chicago (I guess they were mostly all independent back then) in the mid-late 1990s, and Usenet was the biggest nightmare we had to deal with. We were solid at it, too (Freenix-ranked, independently worked out the INN history cache, &c). Nothing we did had more fussy hardware associated with it. The problem for us wasn't spammers; it was binaries. That's what…
it was binaries. That's what killed Usenet. Which is why most of us stopped carrying the binary hierarchy[1] way, way before Usenet 'died'.
My experience in the 1990s was that that was a very excellent way to get all the Usenet users in your userbase to switch to some other ISP, which in turn meant there was little reason to waste all the energy on Usenet if you were going to do that, which contributed to the centralization of Usenet, a system that did not make sense once centralized and that subsequently collapsed into a shitty P2P piracy network.
Re: Usenet Archives
#64Earlier quoted context omitted.
What we have today is drastically, unquestionably better that what Usenet offered. The very fact that we're conversing in real time in a coherent thread where everyone sees the same messages is a basic task Usenet was not fit to provide.
In the early days Usenet propagation was slow and haphazard because the communication links available were very limited. Nowadays I can post a message on one Usenet server and it appears on other servers in a few seconds. So coherent real-time conversations are no problem. On the other hand, with a long-running discussion, HN, Reddit, etc. still have no way to see what messages are new since you last looked at a thre…
Usenet is a system so bad that "posting a message on a Usenet server and having it appear on other servers in a few seconds" sounds like an achievement. And: both those other systems have reliable ways to see all the new messages on a thread, unlike Usenet, which couldn't even guarantee that you'd see all the messages, let alone in order.
I was a Usenet systems engineer (regional ISP operator, INN hacker) during the heyday of Usenet, and a dedicated user in that time as well. These rose-tinted views of how well Usenet worked don't fly for me at all. Reddit is actively, materially, multifariously better than Usenet, and Reddit is not the state of the art.
Re: Usenet Archives
#65It's always fun to realize that USENET is still out there humming along. I still remember the thrill of working on my ancient Delphi/Object Pascal projects, and posting questions... waiting a few hours and checking back for responses. There was no "instant gratification" in those days. (I wasn't really using IRC). Opening this, and just searching "Delphi" I see that USENET never did get that "censorship" that I alway…
the alt.devilbunnies vs alt.pave.the.earth "wars" kept me sane as a teenager. I miss the old internet.
Devilbunnies? Man, I haven't heard that name in a long long time. I used to be obsessed with reading all the stories in that universe. Never contributed anything though.
Re: Usenet Archives
#66I spent over a decade posting so much to comp.lang.c. I've run into a few regulars there in my work since then. I suppose it's still ticking along but I haven't visited in almost 20 years.
Re: Usenet Archives
#67Earlier quoted context omitted.
spam murdered it. It got ridiculous pretty quickly. The overhead to spam was so low as the protocol was designed to be low friction for posting. The system then took care of carrying the payload everywhere in a reasonable time. People fought back with filters and kill lists. But was not really enough. Once the ISPs decided they did not want the added cost of running the servers usenet tanked pretty quick. Still alive…
Binaries killed Usenet, not spam.
[dead]
Re: Usenet Archives
#68Huh, where is alt.2600?
sadly the alts were a bit of a mixed bag. the root problem was that anyone could issue a control message to create a new alt group. which I verified personally. because of that intermediate nodes would choose not to download updates. partially because it was a cesspool, and largely because because bandwidth was quite limited and that's where all binaries were distributed. so alt groups had spotty distribution, which…
Dang. I had previously gone back and found some old posts I remember, I believe it was through Dejanews, so theoretically they exist out there. What's your data source?
Re: Usenet Archives
#69Earlier quoted context omitted.
it was binaries. That's what killed Usenet. Which is why most of us stopped carrying the binary hierarchy[1] way, way before Usenet 'died'.
My experience in the 1990s was that that was a very excellent way to get all the Usenet users in your userbase to switch to some other ISP, which in turn meant there was little reason to waste all the energy on Usenet if you were going to do that, which contributed to the centralization of Usenet, a system that did not make sense once centralized and that subsequently collapsed into a shitty P2P piracy network.
I suppose I should be happy you didn't make out like we caused cancer and premature hair loss.
Re: Usenet Archives
#70Earlier quoted context omitted.
Binaries killed Usenet, not spam.
Little bit of both. From my own anecdata, most people I knew left usenet due to spam problems. Most of the people who did not were primarily the ones using it for binaries. And then yes, the binary angle started the trend where ISPs stopped offering it altogether, which even further reduced the likelihood that people would use it. And then there were weirdos (sickos?) such as myself who hung on for an absurd amount o…
I had to selectively stop carrying parts of USENET (I ran what was briefly a fairly important node globally) because of the volume of the binaries, and various sex and bestiality groups (probably still including some badly-scanned ASCII-rendered images!