Usenet worked until the demographic changed.
Some thoughts on social networking and Usenet (2018)
21–30 of 81 posts
Re: Some thoughts on social networking and Usenet (2018)
#22Anyone looking to create a new social network should certainly take cues from Usenet - of course, it was eventually over taken by forums on the web. Visiting Usenet today though will only lead to sadness, unless you're looking for something you shouldn't be or enjoy endless spam.
I just recently started looking back at one of the groups I frequently read years ago and found that there was a small community still using it. Even recognized a few of them. The trolls and spammers were gone.
Re: Some thoughts on social networking and Usenet (2018)
#23Re: Some thoughts on social networking and Usenet (2018)
#24Any of you archivers out there know whatever became of the Deja News Archive after Google bought it?
https://www.wired.com/2001/02/google-buys-deja-archive/
This was integrated into Google seearch, it worked great for many years, and then it seems Google slowly chipped away at access to the archive and now it all but gone.
I know about the various Usenet archives on archive.org (utzoo (rip), some CD usenet archive), but I want that Deja archive!
Re: Some thoughts on social networking and Usenet (2018)
#25Part of the problem with Usenet is that it isn't "free" like Twitter and Facebook are. (They're free because they host ads, and there are all sorts of problems with that, of course, but you don't pay a monthly subscription to them). Way back, it used to be you got an NNTP server bundled with your ISP which was ok, because you were the only customer who knew what that was and how to use it, so you weren't creating a l…
> My hope for Usenet back in the day was a fully decentralized implementation that would allow each Usenet client to act as a client as well as a mini-server to cut the middleman out.
Gnutella started as this, but for a lot of reasons it didn't work for what it did, with every node sending broadcast to every other mode. The network became a number of federated super-nodes, or ultra-peers, or whatever you'd call them. These would be nodes that had a decent uptime, had a steady network connection, could handle a number of connections etc.
Re: Some thoughts on social networking and Usenet (2018)
#262018
Re: Some thoughts on social networking and Usenet (2018)
#27I feel like there is way more talk now in general about the current broken state of the Internet, corporatized and designed to inflict productivity-destroying scatter brain on all of us.
I started to aggressively use newsletters and digests of all sorts, for one. Politics, technology, what to stream. It is a SUCH better experience and a time saver.
Re: Some thoughts on social networking and Usenet (2018)
#28He's spot on about the quality of clients for social feeds. Tweetbot is the only way I use Twitter. Cuts out all the algorithmic manipulation of my feed and has excellent controls to allow me to parse my feed and weed out the garbage. There are many tech people I wouldn't be able to follow if I wasn't able to strip out the political garbage.
Re: Some thoughts on social networking and Usenet (2018)
#29I so miss killfiles and scorefiles, and it's mindboggling how 30+ years after Usenet clients had them they're still virtually non-existent in any social media readers that I'm aware of. Usenet clients gave their users so much power, it's almost criminal that modern news readers have yet to catch up to them several decades later.
The analogs to killfiles do exist in some clients: https://tidbits.com/2015/09/04/how-to-mute-unwanted-tweets-i...
Re: Some thoughts on social networking and Usenet (2018)
#30I so miss killfiles and scorefiles, and it's mindboggling how 30+ years after Usenet clients had them they're still virtually non-existent in any social media readers that I'm aware of. Usenet clients gave their users so much power, it's almost criminal that modern news readers have yet to catch up to them several decades later.
> Usenet clients gave their users so much power
And there's the problem: when you give users power, it's harder to sell their eyeballs to advertisers.