
Usenet – A worldwide distributed discussion system - TekMol
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Usenet
======
smacktoward
Ah, Usenet, where we were grappling with all the problems that today's big
community unicorns like Facebook and Twitter are struggling with 20 years ago.

Those problems ended up strangling Usenet to death, which is too bad; there
were a lot of things to like about that system. Certainly there are things we
had back then that I wish we had today, like killfiles (see
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kill_file](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kill_file)).

It says a lot about our industry's persistent lack of institutional memory
that each generation ends up struggling with these problems _de novo_ ,
without reference to similar systems that came before. So we end up in an
endless circle, fruitlessly trying the same things people tried and failed to
do in the past and then scratching our heads in puzzlement when they don't
work.

~~~
chongli
The root problem has never been addressed:

 _How do we manage identity and reputation on the internet?_

Usenet had no answer and so it withered. Facebook and Twitter are throwing
large amounts of cash at the problem and enjoying moderate (but far from
ideal) success. What we need is a real, decentralized solution. I'm not sure
how that will be achieved, though I suspect the crypto folks have a lot of
ideas. I would like to see a demonstration of one that is simple for ordinary
users and that works well at scale.

~~~
mikeash
I don’t think that’s what killed Usenet. What killed it was UI. It took
substantial effort to get set up so you could participate. It really thrived
in the era of multi-user systems where a professional could handle that for
you. Once direct connections from PCs became the norm, most people couldn’t be
bothered.

It could have been saved with a good web interface, but almost everybody
working on web-based messaging preferred to create their own platform instead,
probably because it’s a lot more fun and profitable to build your own
community than it is to build a portal to one that’s already there.

As always, but even more than usual, this is just my opinion and I could be
wrong.

~~~
pmoriarty
_" I don’t think that’s what killed Usenet. What killed it was UI."_

Nah. It wasn't the UI. It was developers and corporations chasing the new
shiny, which was the web.

Any UI could have been built on top of Usenet, but instead everyone jumped
ship and on to the web bandwagon.

Usenet also had a big spam problem, but one which was not insurmountable, as
Gmail and other web mail providers have proven. Modern anti-spam solutions
could just as easily be applied to Usenet to keep it as spam-free as most web
mail is today.

Of course, now there is the lack of historical knowledge, as another poster
alluded to elsewhere in the thread, but there's also a contempt for the
average user, and a widespread belief that UI's have to be dumbed down for the
average user. Web UIs could be just as powerful as Usenet was, but
corporations such as Google, Reddit, and Facebook choose to cater to the
lowest common denominator rather than to power users.

Also, unlike Usenet, with these corporate walled gardens, alternate UI's for
them are rare. At least Reddit has an API, so at least there there's a
potential for some powerful alternative UIs built around it, but the ones that
I know of are still a pale shadow of Usenet clients from 30 years ago.

~~~
kalleboo
Usenet was already dead by the time "corporations" like Facebook and Twitter
came on the scene.

What killed it was UBB/vBulletin/phpBB web forums. People who ran blogs with
some traffic installed them for their community, it was easy for people to
just click in and get started, and then you ended up with huge communities
like gamefaqs and Something Awful (and car forums, collector's forums, etc
etc). These then generated lots of content, which showed up in web search
results.

Then web forums in turn got killed by social media (twitter/tumblr/facebook)
and reddit and withdrew to a niche.

~~~
disconcision
something i've never been quite clear on: were web forums killed, or merely
eclipsed? social media brought many more people online; the demographics
changed, by orders of magnitude. certainly the old stalwarts you mentioned
have dwindled (though are still active), but while doing searches i will still
run into active webforums on speciality topics; perhaps ironically i feel
these are more likely for non-tech topics

~~~
kalleboo
I agree that forums aren't "dead" \- there's tones of very active forums in
all kinds of niches. I meant more in the way that they're no longer where the
largest growth is.

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pjc50
Bit strange seeing something that used to be commonplace dug up and posted to
HN like its the Rosetta Stone.

Anyway, Usenet relies on what I call "Postel Decentralization": a system is
described as lacking a central authority but has a critical dependence on a
few sysadmins doing something manually. In the case of Usenet that's things
like spam cancellation and deciding which groups appears on their servers.

Similarly ancient technology for group discussion is Fidonet, a modem-based
message forwarding system.

~~~
jwilk
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/FidoNet](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/FidoNet)

------
mwest
I recently started reading Usenet again using the free
[https://news.solani.org/](https://news.solani.org/) service.

Once I'd caught up on a.s.r, I couldn't really find any other groups other
than alt.comp.lang.* that were worth reading.

Any HN suggestions?

~~~
Latteland
What is a s r? Alt.sex.robots?

~~~
mds
An anagram of Scary Devil Monastery, the group that by tradition is not named
to avoid summoning lusers.

------
linsomniac
From the admin standpoint, Usenet was pretty good until it started being
(mis)used as a binary transfer system. Once it started using a DS-3 worth of
bandwidth to carry the full feed, it started being a battle between the users
and the admins.

~~~
secabeen
That was part of it, but there were solutions to those problems that were
implementable by smaller providers. (We had a nice split host system, where we
had all headers and bodies of text groups locally, and just called out to one
of the big providers for bodies from the binary groups.)

Unfortunately, once the web came along, usenet became a second-class service,
and slowly degraded

~~~
voltagex_
My ISP only killed Usenet a few months ago (reselling Astraweb). I don't think
it's degraded - just the purpose has changed. It's just another method of
getting high bitrate video and malware from point A to point B, now.

------
linkmotif
Crazy to see this here as a novelty item. It’s one thing to accept that Usenet
is gone, it’s another thing to see its Wikipedia on the HN home page

~~~
mattl
Where else would you link about Usenet?

~~~
disconcision
[https://everything2.com/title/usenet](https://everything2.com/title/usenet)

~~~
mattl
That page is very hard to read on a mobile device.

~~~
disconcision
the last major redesign was in the flipphone era

------
remote_phone
I firmly believe that Reddit is Usenet 2.0. It has everything that Usenet
wanted to do, but it’s more accessible by an order of magnitude.

~~~
lazyjones
But it‘s a centralized service and this is something Usenet wanted to avoid.

------
bradleyjg
Shout out to rec.arts.sf.written.robert-jordan. I spent many hours as a teen
reading their theories about the Purple Ajah and the like.

------
valeg
Fediverse is the closest thing to Usenet nowadays.

~~~
ryl00
Reddit. For me, it's reddit. And just like back in the day with Usenet, I'm
addicted to reddit...

~~~
coolso
I don’t like your post, so I’m going to downvote you. That way other people
won’t see your post and potentially be influenced or enlightened by it. That
way I don’t have to put effort into responding either.

Furthermore your post lacks both hilarious memes and funny one liners so I’m
definitely not upvoting it lol.

~~~
icanhackit
Yes, there is a bit of an issue with downvotes being handed out just because
someone disagrees. But that also happens on HN - there's an issue with voting
being used as a blunt instrument across all sites that implement it.

But in defence of Reddit, the sheer breadth of content is impressive. Like
/r/skincareaddiction over to /r/showerbeer (NSFW). And the content remains
permanently available unless it's actively deleted by the poster or a
moderator as opposed to being eventually forgotten by your chosen Usenet host.

~~~
u801e
> And the content remains permanently available unless it's actively deleted
> by the poster or a moderator as opposed to being eventually forgotten by
> your chosen Usenet host.

A lot of the commercial usenet providers have at least a decade's worth of
retention at this point for binary groups. They may have even longer retention
times for the text groups. The only thing that would keep a post from being
archived now is having the X-No-Archive: yes header in the message.

------
scarface74
While I appreciate that Google went through the trouble of preserving Usenet
posts - even those prior to the DejaNews archive, it’s scary that its the only
source of that archive.

I found some of my first posts that date back to 1993. I was active up until
around 2013.

~~~
mattl
olduse.net

------
angry_octet
If you used Usenet, you should check out Mastodon:
[https://joinmastodon.org](https://joinmastodon.org)

------
smolsky
"Discussion system", you say? What about alt.bin.* stuff?

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pandasun
What are some good providers for binaries these days?

~~~
dawnerd
Been using newsgroup.ninja for a while Without problems.

Astraweb is good but I ditched them after they had some drama a while ago.

~~~
voltagex_
Aren't there only 3 main providers, anyway? Everyone else is just a reseller?

~~~
dawnerd
Basically, there was a spreadsheet floating around that showed who was
reselling what. Really just buying on price and retention.

