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Ask HN: What killed Usenet?

news.ycombinator.com

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Re: Ask HN: What killed Usenet?

#5

Post by mattl »

Spam.

USENET if you want to use it is still there, but the amount of spam vs active posts is low.

I'm just getting back into it after a couple years away.

Thunderbird is cross platform and handles USENET nicely.

I use Panix.com to get my feed but there's also SDF.org which lets you post for free once your account is validated (making a donation is a great way to instantly validate your account, I suggest the $36 one-time donation which will give you a full account)

Re: Ask HN: What killed Usenet?

#6

Post by iwanttocomment »

Spam and binaries. Moderated groups moved very slowly as every message needed to be approved. Unmoderated groups became cesspools of spam and flamewars. Binaries groups carried so much data that supporting them was both expensive and legally risky.

As the utility of USENET as a discussion platform diminished due to spam and moderation difficulties, and the binaries groups became an expensive liability, ISPs stopped providing USENET access included with user subscriptions.

That takes us to where we are now. Mastodon is probably the closest successor architecturally, but I'm not sure there's a good example of a platform that has ever seriously solved the problems of moderation in a decentralized environment.

Re: Ask HN: What killed Usenet?

#8

Post by dave4420 »

To add to what everyone else has said, there was also new competition from mailing lists administered via the web, and from web based forums.

I feel like Google Groups deserves a (dis)honourable mention here — it was a free web-based interface to usenet (which led some people to think that usenet itself was a Google service), which Google lost interest in, let whither, and eventually shut down. I don’t think it killed usenet, but it didn’t exactly help.

Re: Ask HN: What killed Usenet?

#9

Post by tbolt »

pvg wrote: post #4

Comes up pretty frequently, you can search HN for 'usenet' for an infinite number of takes. Couple of recent threads https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37336606 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36194941 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31681234

Good point. Not sure why I thought I was asking some novel question.

Re: Ask HN: What killed Usenet?

#10

Post by tbolt »

iwanttocomment wrote: post #6

Spam and binaries. Moderated groups moved very slowly as every message needed to be approved. Unmoderated groups became cesspools of spam and flamewars. Binaries groups carried so much data that supporting them was both expensive and legally risky. As the utility of USENET as a discussion platform diminished due to spam and moderation difficulties, and the binaries groups became an expensive liability, ISPs stopped p…

Mastodon is great and you’re probably right that it’s as close as we will get.
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