
Ask HN: What was Usenet's ultimate demise? - jebblue
It seems that the past 6 years or so saw most big ISP&#x27;s dropping USENET support claiming mostly piracy concerns. Was it piracy or the fact that it&#x27;s tough for the government to control what people say on USENET?
======
cstross
Old usenet-head here (on it regularly from 1991, first met it 1986) ...

First problem: there's no identity authentication mechanism in NNTP. So spam
is a problem, forged moderation headers are a problem, general abuse is a
problem. (A modern syndicated forum system with OAuth or some successor model
would be a lot easier to ride herd on.)

Second problem: storage demands expand faster than the user base. Because it's
a flood-fill store-and-forward system, each server node tries to replicate the
entire feed. Consequently news admins tended to put a short expiry on posts in
binary groups so they'd be deleted fairly promptly ... but if you do that, the
lusers can't find what they're looking for so they ask their friends to repost
the bloody things, ad nauseam.

Third problem: etiquette. Yeah, yeah, I am coming over all elitist here, but
the original usenet mindset was exactly that. These days we're used to being
overrun by everyone who can use a point-and-drool interface on their phone to
look at Facebook, but back in September 1992 it was a real shock to the system
when usenet was suddenly gatewayed onto AOL, I can tell you. Previously usenet
more or less got along because the users were university staff and students
(who could be held accountable to some extent) and computer industry folks.
Thereafter, well, a lot of the worse aspects of 4chan and Reddit were
pioneered on usenet. (Want to know why folks hero-worshipped Larry Wall
_before_ he wrote Perl? Because he wrote this thing called rn(1). Which had
_killfiles_.) Anyway, a side-effect of this was that when web browsers began
to show up, the response was to double-down on the high-powered CURSES-based
or pure command-line clients rather than to try and figure out how to put an
easy-to-use interface on top of a news spool. Upshot: usenet clients remained
rooted in the early 1990s at best.

These days much of the functionality of usenet (minus the binaries) is
provided by Reddit. Usenet itself turned into a half-assed space-hogging brain
dead file sharing network. And we know what ISPs think of space-hogging half-
assed stuff that doesn't make them money and risks getting them sued.

~~~
davidgerard
I wrote a piece thinking about why nobody ever did write a good web interface
for NNTP:
[http://reddragdiva.dreamwidth.org/566555.html](http://reddragdiva.dreamwidth.org/566555.html)

my thesis: the atom of NNTP is the message, the atom of web forums is the
thread.

(Commenters on that are mostly old BOFHnetters you may still recognise.)

~~~
Tomte
There were a few web interfaces, but apart from the hatred the old Usenet
users had for web users, there were technical difficultiers that were never
overcome.

The biggest one was probably charsets. Back then it wasn't really possible to
detect the proper charset for what the user entered into your text field, as
far as I was told.

But it was only so bad because users were unreasonable: de.*, for example,
really frowned upon UTF-8 and demanded Latin-1 or Latin-15. Minimal coding, of
course, so if you used the Euro sign you had to use Latin-15, if there was no
Euro sign in your posting, you had to use Latin-1.

And there were even extremists who declared everything apart from 7 bit ASCII
illegal...

~~~
DanBC
> There were a few web interfaces, but apart from the hatred the old Usenet
> users had for web users, there were technical difficultiers that were never
> overcome.

To expand upon this a bit it wasn't all just knee jerk elitism. Some web
clients were terrible and did terrible things.

WebTV in particular would add animated gif backgrounds and MIDI music. Since
Usenet was a text medium those messages would have the gif and midi encoded as
text (UUENCODEd?) and added to the post, with a bunch of raw HTML as well.
Other users got huge amounts of HTML and uuencoded "stuff" or they got
animated backgrounds and MIDI music - either one was pretty awful.

------
avifreedman
(Background: I'm a Usenet user from the late 80's to early naughties, did
outsourcing at netaxs as newsread.com, then ran readnews.com from 2004-1024).

Usenet is still around but mostly for binaries. The market's of pretty stable
size, dominated by a few large wholesale players.

My take on what happened with text groups is that the S/N ratio just went to
hell. In the 90s the problem was spam, but in the 2000s the problem was too
many loudmouths who wanted to hear themselves talk drowning out the useful
experts.

Like some of the other folks commenting, I've been pissed as hell at the
PHPBB/vbulleting monstrosities. My original plan with readnews was to try to
build a great web UI for discussion, but we got distracted by wholesale
customers wanting service - and front-end is not my area of expertise.

For folks looking for something modern with promise, the news is good with
discourse and a few others coming up. Would love to see something distributed,
but if really distributed I suspect we'd see binaries and/or commercial spam
and/or people with nothing interesting to say dominate - just like Usenet...

~~~
codinghorror
Wow a shout out for our Discourse project from Avi. This made my day, thank
you!

And yeah, distributed discussions are moon-shot hard, unfortunately.

~~~
avifreedman
We'll loop detect to end the mutual admiration society, but thanks from you
makes my day :) I just tweeted a pointer to "Doing Terrible Things" and
suggested people read all of the "Falsehoods Programmers Believe". I want
"Falsehoods as a Service" \- outsourced paranoia.

And yes, distributed discussions that preserve free speech and allow
eliminating crap is definitely moon-shot hard.

~~~
PopeOfNope
_distributed discussions that preserve free speech and allow eliminating crap
is definitely moon-shot hard._

The way you just defined the problem, it's not moon shot hard; it's a logical
impossibility. "Free speech" and "eliminating crap" are complete opposites.
You can't have one with the other. If you want a high quality of discussions,
some people are going to have to be deprived of their voice to make that
happen, either through moderation or selective membership.

------
david-given
Here is a more interesting question:

How would you _reinvent_ Usenet?

What Usenet did well was that it was completely decentralised, had zero cost
of engagement (despite 'hundreds, if not thousands of dollars'), and was
everywhere.

What Usenet did badly was that there was a complete absence of identity
management or access controls, which meant no accountability, which meant
widespread abuse; and no intelligence about transmitting messages, which meant
that every server had to have a copy of the entire distributed database, which
meant it wouldn't scale.

It's a tough problem. You need some way to propagate good messages while
penalising bad messages in an environment where you cannot algorithmically
determine what good or bad is, or have a single unified view of all messages,
all users, or even all servers. And how do you deal with bad actor servers?
You _know_ that somewhere, there's a Santor and Ciegel who are trying to game
the system in order to spam everyone with the next Green Card Lottery...

~~~
stevewepay
I think reddit is the reinvention of USENET. It is mod-heavy and has enough
critical mass of users to provide excellent results from its upvoting system.
And many subreddits are extremely well maintained with a very high signal to
noise ratio.

It even has its equivalent of alt.binaries.pics.* if one is so inclined.

~~~
codinghorror
Sort of, voting rearranging the chronological stream of conversation makes it
significantly different IMO. There is also the phenomenon of funniest image
tending to win the votes, too. (Barring excellent moderation, but Reddit does
very little to make moderation easy, or even set goals for moderation.)

That's not great for discussion, but then Reddit was always designed as more
of a system of briefly commenting on URLs than actual discussion.

~~~
stevewepay
This is only true for the front page and for things like /r/AdviceAnimals. The
front page is in and of itself a separate phenomenon than the rest of the
subreddits, in my opinion.

For many subreddits, there are truly fantastic discussions that are very
relevant to the subreddit topic. /r/askHistorians or /r/askScience, for
example, has an extremely high signal to noise ratio.

------
DanBC
Binary groups were huge and users expected them for free. And users would
download huge amounts of stuff. So it's pretty much a cost sink, and ISPs who
tried to start charging (for this service that had dramatically increased
costs) were faced with vigorous campaigns. At some point it's easier to just
cancel and tell disattisfied customers to get a new ISP if they're unhappy.

The amount of groups distributing images of child sexual abuse created some
risk (not every ISP is in the US) and things like stealth binary groups
distributing porn put a bunch of people in oppressive regimes in tricky
situations.

[http://www.exit109.com/~jeremy/news/misplacedbin.html](http://www.exit109.com/~jeremy/news/misplacedbin.html)

ISPs could have dropped binaries and only carried text groups. But this means
putting up with groups of people who strongly held but conflicting opinions:

1) be a dumb pipe and provide everything

2) be a dumb pipe but filter spam with a Breidbart index of something or
other.

3) make the news server operate to rules laid out in the ISP's ToS. (Young
people may not realise but a lot of effort on the early Internet was spent on
"what do we do if our users go on the Internet and start swearing?" Many ISPs
had rules forbidding swearing. (At least, they did in europe))

Then www forums sprung up and they had some advantages: avatars, mods, etc.

~~~
xorcist
I don't recognize the bit about "dumb pipes". News is a service, not a pipe.
Very few servers carry _all_ groups. Some didn't even carry the alt groups,
_that_ wasn't fun.

The ISPs I worked at in the late 90s did not carry the binaries groups,
becuase of the outrageous storage requirements. I think that was quite common.

~~~
DanBC
No provider would carry all groups, and when you looked at particular groups
most providers would not carry all posts.

But you still had some people saying that providers should do zero filtering
at all, ever, and that doing so was evil censorship of the worst North Korean
kind. Filtering was strictly something for users to do.

That's impossible for providers to do when people are using groups to
distribute images of child sexual abuse.

Many customers were happy that sporge was filtered. Most customers wanted some
kind of spam filtering, even using the very tight definition of Breidbart
Index.

So there were conflicts in the userbase, which got pushed onto ISP support.
Since ISPs were already paying for huge storage requirements I can totally
understand this being part of the consideration to cut usenet.

~~~
xorcist
Not carrying all groups is not the same as filtering. I'm sure the reasoning
you describe exists, but it wasn't a very mainstream view. As a tiny data
point, none of the ISPs I worked at saw this as a support problem.

------
inyourtenement
I skimmed the comments here, and never saw the real answer (to what I
understand the question to be). Even though it was public knowledge, I had
some extra insight from working for a large Usenet provider.

The New York Attorney General started a campaign against child porn groups on
Usenet. In the end, his office identified a small number of groups they said
were used for child porn -- I think it was less than 100 groups. Many ISP's
jumped on the opportunity to stop paying for Usenet service.

In the 90's it was just assumed that an ISP service would include Usenet. With
the growth of binaries groups, the quality of service declined. I remember
retention would be a day or two, with about 50% completion. So, for most
ISP's, the service was unusable, and only a small number of subscribers knew
or cared about it. The others paid quite a bit for service from a third party,
like my employer. I don't know why they didn't shut down service earlier, but
once the NYAG campaign started, they could cancel Usenet, saving themselves
money, and getting good press for fighting child porn.

~~~
thret
100 groups does not sound like a small number.

~~~
DanBC
Out of fifty thousand?

And we don't know the numbers of people posting to those groups, nor how often
they posted, nor how many people were downloading from those groups.

Mechanisms were around for providers to filter out groups used to distribute
images of child sexual abuse, so that was one option.

I think (bicbw) that the legal situation for providers was unclear in the 90s
and they weren't sure if they were responsible or not.

~~~
thret
I would intuitively expect murder to be more common than child sexual abuse,
but perhaps I am being naive.

~~~
DanBC
I don't know what you mean.

Do you mean "more people are murdered than are sexually abused"? That's
trivially disproved, although the numbers are tricky.

One in twenty children are sexually abused. [http://www.nspcc.org.uk/services-
and-resources/research-and-...](http://www.nspcc.org.uk/services-and-
resources/research-and-resources/child-abuse-and-neglect-in-the-uk-today/)

Or 27% of women and 16% of men were sexually abused as children. (Abstract
doesn't give a country).
[http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/01452134909...](http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/0145213490900777)

In 2013/2014 there were less than 600 homicides recorded.

In a population of 60m 1 in 20 is 3,000,000

------
jivardo_nucci
"User interface woes" is my guess.

I found USENET and associated newsgroups to be better than the WWW, especially
for discussions of software. I once even promoted the use of internal
newsgroups w/in a corporate environment, where a history of topics
(discussions, problems, and decisions) would have IMO proven extremely useful.

But the idea never got traction: people were unwilling to participate because
newsreaders were too different from the browser and they'd had enough trouble
learning to navigate the WWW. Once blogs and browser-based "newsgroups" and
forums began showing up, the handwriting was on the wall. In the end, the WWW
browser's low bar to entry ate USENET.

I still value the treasure trove of information stored in the archives. And
some people still actively participate in USENET and other newsgroups, just as
some still participate in IRC (Internet Relay Chat, which also is fading). I
think these are valuable tools with a lot of greybeard expertise held in
reserve.

There's a sort of Gresham's law of the Internet: "The browser drives out every
other interface."

~~~
giancarlostoro
I have to mention, the D Programming language has forums that can be accessed
both by a newsreader and from a web browser[1]. It is coded in a framework
called Vibe.d[2] for the NNTP protocol and HTTP[3], which I think is
fascinating. My only complaint is that due to the somewhat dying out of USENET
for discussion reasons, and mostly it just being used for piracy (if you do a
bit of research it's still just about as active as torrenting, except it's a
lot more automated, used to use USENET, I rather stick to legal alternatives
and avoid the paranoia), the old clients while they still work, could still
use some touching up which probably wont happen.

I enjoy the idea that if all discussions in a support forum are on the NNTP
protocol, I can archive them all, so I hardly have to open up a browser to
search through years (decades?) of threads to see if anyone else has had the
same issues as me. Imagine something like Stack Overflow all of a sudden at
your finger tips without any internet access. It's a really nice thing,
sometimes the internet just dies on you when you need it most.

As for IRC, people are willing to use it, if you put something useful on there
(support for a project, or a community that people are interested in). If you
want adoption from users who are just browsing the internet, maybe a web
client / desktop client combination that makes IRC a lot less seamless to the
average "I don't know" type of user.

[1]: [http://forum.dlang.org/](http://forum.dlang.org/) [2]:
[http://vibed.org/](http://vibed.org/) [3]:
[https://github.com/rejectedsoftware/vibenews](https://github.com/rejectedsoftware/vibenews)

~~~
fsiefken
Yes a webforum with an NNTP gateway would be very nice. I remember vBulletin
had some functionality like this and I hope Discourse will implement it. NNTP
is very nice for archiving and it's distributed. Maybe we should do twitter
and discussions over blockchains... when NNTP servers get out of vogue. There
is a stackoverflow dump for local use by the way.

------
stevewepay
USENET has always been used for porn and piracy, since at least the early 90s.
Of course, most of the great newsgroups were discussions-based, but probably
most of the bandwidth was porn and piracy.

When I was in college, I remember someone on my floor had written a program in
Pascal that automatically downloaded porn off USENET. He would leave his
computer running all the time, connected to the college's internet connection
via modem, and we would occasionally see a flash of a porn pic on his screen
and ask "What was that?". This was before the days of integrated TCP/IP stacks
in the OS, so if I remember correctly he had to dial in via modem and then use
something called Slurp or something like that, I can't remember exactly now.

This continued all through the 90s. A bunch of my friends had Airnews accounts
and downloaded mp3s and porn 24x7, during what we called the "Golden Age" of
piracy, when Napster was starting up in 97 up until the early 2000s, when the
bust hit.

At some point, the medium for discussions moved off of USENET and went to more
user friendly places like email mailing lists, google groups, yahoo groups,
reddit, etc. This left only piracy and porn on USENET, and I'm actually
surprised that some ISPs still support USENET at this point.

~~~
PopeOfNope
In the age of bittorrent, I'm surprised people still use USENET for piracy and
porn.

------
mwfunk
It felt like Usenet died as a meaningful place for discussion in the mid-to-
late '90s, for all the same reasons that most (or all?) electronic communities
eventually die. Bad posters drive away good posters and encourage even worse
posters, which eventually results in something akin to YouTube. Forum entropy
for lack of a better term.

By the time most ISPs started dropping it, a vanishingly small percentage of
most ISPs' users even knew what it was, and the binaries groups had turned it
into a source of both cost and legal risk. The heavy users were people who
incurred that cost and risk to the ISPs because they were using it for
pirating software and porn. The icing on the cake would've been the fact that
it's a terribly inefficient way to distribute those things and the ISPs have
to store all that stuff locally on servers they own.

From an ISP's perspective, maintaining Usenet feeds became all downside and no
upside.

Regarding government control, I would think that Usenet would've been far
easier to monitor and censor than the web.

~~~
TeMPOraL
> _Bad posters drive away good posters and encourage even worse posters, which
> eventually results in something akin to YouTube. Forum entropy for lack of a
> better term._

I've heard it labeled "evaporative cooling", per [0].

[0] -
[http://lesswrong.com/lw/lr/evaporative_cooling_of_group_beli...](http://lesswrong.com/lw/lr/evaporative_cooling_of_group_beliefs/)

~~~
david-given
A little while back I went back to some of the newsgroups that I was a regular
on, back in the 2000s. It was... a bit disturbing. I recognised a lot of the
names, but the people and attitudes behind them had changed a lot: insular,
cliquey, a bit xenophobic, a bit crazy.

I've seen the same attitude before in tiny SIGs: go take a look the what's
left of the classic 16-bit micro (or early 32-bit micro) userbases and you'll
see a lot of it. But it was very sad to see happen to people I knew and used
to interact with on a daily basis.

~~~
marktangotango
I noticed that too, my hypothesis is one must be a little off to stay in those
small, shrinking echo chamber communities for decades. In the instance I'm
thinking of, some of the members did indeed have mental health issues.

------
JoshTriplett
> It seems that the past 6 years or so saw most big ISP's dropping USENET
> support claiming mostly piracy concerns. Was it piracy or the fact that it's
> tough for the government to control what people say on USENET?

No conspiracy theories needed here.

Copyright infringement is one angle; the other is that it costs ISPs a huge
amount of resources for something few people use.

Once upon a time, a single server could easily mirror all of USENET for all
users of an ISP, and almost every user expected it, so they'd treat it as an
essential part of the service. Now, it would take far more storage to do so,
and almost nobody expects it, so why should an ISP provide it? It's easier to
let people get USENET from a third-party service, and it'd be a better
experience for the people who actually want it, too.

If an ISP has resources to burn and wants to make their technical users happy,
they'd get far better results for more users if they provided things like
local Linux distribution mirrors instead. Far more users would make use of
that than USENET.

And if they want to make the vast majority of users happy, and _save_
resources on their end in the process, they can provide local CDN nodes for
YouTube, Netflix, and similar.

------
Animats
Usenet isn't dead. I still use several Usenet groups via Thunderbird. Google
Groups is a Usenet host/client, and many groups belong to both the Google and
Usenet spaces. The Usenet interface is easier to use, has no ads, and doesn't
require a Google account.

~~~
brobdingnagian
This. All these people commenting on the premise that usenet is dead, don't
realize it is alive and kicking. As is IRC:)

~~~
mrbill
I ran one of the biggest EFNet IRC hubs at Texas.Net up until we pulled the
plug in '98 due to smurfing attacks. :)

Since then a bunch of friends and I have run a tiny multi-server network after
we all moved off the public networks.

Started a new job this past February, and I asked my boss during the interview
how we handled inter-person communication since we're scattered all over the
country. "We have our own internal IRC server if you know what that is..." I
said "THANK YOU JESUS!" and he cracked up.

IRC is definitely still out there and heavily used.

~~~
TeMPOraL
> _" We have our own internal IRC server if you know what that is..." I said
> "THANK YOU JESUS!"_

That would be _exactly_ my own reaction if it would ever happen to me. But so
far, unfortunately, it was always either Hipchat or Skype.

~~~
mrbill
I had a 2-week temporary gig at another place (was going perm, but I got a
much better offer from the current gig at the last minute).

They used Hipchat, and it was neat - my coworkers there greeted me with inline
memes. Having to use a proprietary client sucked, though.

~~~
nickysielicki
Actually just went through this exact situation last week. Temporary gig
seeing if I made a good fit, didn't like the contract they wanted me to sign.

I just set up bitlbee to do XMPP in irssi. Hipchat is accessible via XMPP.
Lots of little annoying quirks but it was better than nothing.

------
captainmuon
Ont thing that hasn't been mentioned yet is that it is essentially closed now.
You can't just set up your own USENET server easily, because you have to pay
someone $$$ to get federation (if at all possible). They will try to keep
competitors out, because they sell access to newsgroups for a lot of money so
people can download warez.

I _think_ it should be possible to get replicas of non-binary newsgroups, but
a quick search hasn't found any free option.

------
NoPiece
The single biggest issue was spam. Being largely unmoderated, it became
flooded with garbage as the reach of the Internet expanded. Conversation moved
to web based forums, which IMO had worse UI in il the early days, because
there was more ability to moderate.

~~~
DanBC
And not just traditional spam. There were active campaigns to "sporge"
thousands of news groups with thousands of junk posts. Hipcrime is probably
something that would return ghits.

~~~
Steuard
Oh, man. This was pretty much the final straw for the couple of newsgroups
that I loved dearly back in the day (rec.arts.books.tolkien and
alt.fan.tolkien). The once-vibrant community was already atrophying (due
largely to a lack of newcomers and the usual gradual attrition of old
regulars), and then somewhere around 2006 or 2007 there was a massive sporge
flood that got past spam filters and made the groups unusable for about half a
year. Once that ended, very few people were left.

------
JoshTriplett
Related: check out olduse.net for a real-time USENET feed on a 30-year delay
(so it's currently showing the news of the day in 1985).

------
mrbill
I wonder just how big a non-binaries feed is these days. A tiny engineering
company I worked for in '98-99 had its own Usenet server with a no-bin feed
going into a SPARCstation 2 (think 386-486-class x86, equivalent) and it kept
up just fine.

A couple years earlier I'd been one of the senior admins at Texas.Net (now
DataFoundry) and helped build out what eventually turned into GigaNews, which
used multiple dual-proc Sun E450s.. I think they're still one of the "biggest"
Usenet providers these days.

------
gioele
USENET (the network) may be dying but NNTP is still going strong as a better
interface to mailing lists. See for example
[http://gmane.org/](http://gmane.org/) or the new GNU Mailman 3 gateway.

I am now subscribed to maybe 2 mailing lists, the rest (two dozens) I read via
gmane.

------
nickysielicki
I still use usenet every day. There are, admittedly, only a few good groups
left. But where there's a high barrier to entry there's a high reward. The
discussion is of high quality. Higher than most mailing lists and reddit/HN,
at least.

    
    
      sci.math, comp.misc, sci.electronics.*, comp.lang.*

~~~
rjsw
I still read some comp.* newsgroups every day, in particular comp.arch.

------
ised
There is a lot of history and useful knowledge archived in Usenet. A lot of
that content (e.g., the early UNIX newsgroups) puts today's forums and blogs
to shame.

Google acquired Deja News (if Usenet is wortheless, why?) and now all the
archived Usenet messages are web-access only and fronted by Java and
Javascript nonsense.

If the Usenet archives are no longer important or if everyone thinks Usenet is
"dead", then why put these messages behind Javascript and try to prevent bulk
downloads (which is how NNTP was designed to work)?

~~~
codinghorror
déjà news acquisition was in 2001, lifetimes ago in web time. And it does fit
with Google's stated mission of putting everything online, in easily
searchable format.

The "let's put a thin web veneer over X" approach has never been a great one,
perhaps sufficient for Web 1.0, but not these days.

------
tmpusenet
When DejaNews made USENET searchable. You could actually nuke messages from
DejaNews, but then Google bought DejaNews and suddenly every nuked message
were made available again forever. Google killed USENET.

------
batou
It's expensive to keep binary groups online (bandwidth) and the text groups
are all SPAM these days.

Edit: Forgot to say that the tech is fine; a member of my family operates a
usenet server over in Switzerland for our family. Works well for that sort of
thing and avoids facebook etc.

------
randcraw
N.Y. attorney general forces ISPs to curb Usenet access (2008)

[http://www.cnet.com/news/n-y-attorney-general-forces-isps-
to...](http://www.cnet.com/news/n-y-attorney-general-forces-isps-to-curb-
usenet-access/)

Thank Andrew Cuomo.

------
T-A
I thought it was just limited interest. First web hosting prices came down so
much that anyone could run a forum, then WordPress made free blogging with
ancillary comments accessible to anyone with a browser. So the masses went to
forums and blogs (and then Twitter and Instagram and YouTube and whatever chat
app is popular this week) and only geeks who cared enough to find and install
a newsreader were left.

------
jsz0
For ISPs there simply wasn't enough customer usage of NNTP servers to justify
their continued existance. 5 years ago when I was working at a mid-sized ISP
only about 2% of our customers used our NNTP servers. We carried binary groups
and offered pretty good retention/completion but by then even the pirates had
mostly ditched NNTP for torrents. At the time we estimated that we had maybe
about a dozen customers accessing the server for non-binary / piracy use.

Going back further to why NNTP became irrelevant for discussion I'd say it was
a combination of difficult setup for the average user and the lack of good
free NNTP clients. Early web forums could offer discussion for free without
the difficulty / expense of a NNTP client. As NNTP groups became more insular
the miserable trolls were able to take over and ruin it for everyone. Almost
every group I was active in during the late 90s deteriorated in this way. Just
one mentally ill and/or very lonely person posting 50+ times per day could
very effectively destroy a group.

------
Sami_Lehtinen
No good clients? I loved Forte Agent, it was awesome. As well as it was one of
the most bug free programs I've ever encountered. It just worked.
[http://www.forteinc.com/agent/index.php](http://www.forteinc.com/agent/index.php)

------
cpach
'tptacek gave an interesting answer some weeks ago:
[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9874525](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9874525)

------
ArkyBeagle
Usenet still runs. It's just much less traffic than it used to be.

ISPs could not necessarily tell that NNTP service made them money, it's rather
arcane and binaries really were a piracy sink.

I have dozens of old Usenet contacts on Facebook, and none of them really know
why they left, other than possibly their ISP dropping the service.

------
Marazan
I imagine Binary groups being a great big cost sink would be the main thing.

It's sad, because the most barebones mid 1990's 3-panel Usenet client is still
an infinitely better reading experience for discussion than all current web
forums.

------
sergiotapia
I wish I was old enough to use USENET when it was popular. The closest I got
was using XDCC on IRC but even then, USENET sounds like such an interesting
thing to use. I miss anonymity.

------
mattkrea
I would definitely believe the reason being piracy. That's a massive portion
of the bandwidth I'd almost guarantee it. It was a safe haven for a long
while.

------
tenfingers
USENET, was in my opinion, one of the best features/protocol of the initial
internet. I loved USENET ever since I discovered it (91/92) and I still use
today a news reader through gmane, looking down at forums (just like this one)
like a _sad_ evolution.

Having an USENET server provided by your ISP used to be a _standard_ part of
the package. They would probably not carry alt.bin, but in the end it didn't
matter.

A truly P2P, _open_ , messaging network, of the likes that you'll never see
developed again due to commercial exploitation. USENET had "flaws", but
honestly they're minor.

The store and forward protocol required quite some disk space at the time.
This resulted in several nodes to drop bin/alt.bin from the network (which in
my opinion was always a hack providing nothing really useful, with
yencoding/par and the like). But by today standards, you could probably run a
node carrying the entire network with just maybe a bit more than regular
consumer hardware, since it's just text in the end, and the server is _very_
simple: I used to run one server locally just for me.

How big a today's network could be? See for yourself:
[http://gmane.org/stats.php](http://gmane.org/stats.php) Or: not big for any
ISP to carry in full with just one sysadmin.

The network relied on "control" messages to create/delete groups automatically
(as opposed to manual subscription), which due to the lack of
authentication/encryption in the protocol, were very easy to spoof. A gpg-
signing mechanism was later put into place, so that nodes peering with each
other could establish a chain of trust by themselves. This was pretty nice in
retrospect (and awesome by today standards), but the main problem is that
creating new groups was a slow and painful approval-based process: people
often wanted small groups just for themselves, and mailing lists offered the
"same" without any approval required.

Having a large open network started to become a big attractor for SPAM, and
managing SPAM in a P2P network without authentication is a harder problem to
solve than a locally managed mailing list. For the same reason, trolls could
be a nuisance at time.

 _Some_ people claim that USENET became 1) too big 2) a receptacle for
copyright infringement. Both claims are bullshit: by excluding binary groups
(which was _ubiquitous_ by 91/92 when I joined already), the network started
in a consistent volume decline already in the late 90ies, so it _cannot_ be
that hosting a node in 1998 became impossible in 2005.

Here's what happened: running a local server became so easy and cheap, that
running mailing list offered local control and almost zero overhead. People
that had niche groups started to create mailing lists with open access, and
people migrated in flock. Why share your discussions in
comp.programming.functional where you could create a mailing list just for
your new fancy language? (it's pretty sad, because I _loved_ the breadth of
the discussions).

Discussions on general groups became less frequent as most of the interesting
ones were on dedicated mailing lists. The trend worsened significantly as
forums started to appear, which lowered the barrier to entry to people that
didn't know how to use a mail client properly.

The sad truth is that now most of the general discussions aren't openly shared
anymore, and happen either on local websites (like this) or local mailing
lists.

I've been using gmane.org to subscribe all open-access lists that I ever
participated into. Most of the time, the list I'm looking for is already
there.

In a certain sense, gmane.org offers the best of NNTP with the best of mailing
lists: you can create your own lists without approval processes, and you can
read any other list without having 1) to subscribe directly 2) having to store
messages locally 3) see instantly the archive [as far as retention goes]. The
mailing list administrator has still ultimate veto on what goes on the list,
so that local authority is never undermined. On the other hand, NNTP clients
are _built_ to read massive volumes of messages, that would make reading
reddit a breeze.

What gmane.org lacks though is the peering. One of the central NNTP features
of the time was definitely killed.

------
octatoan
Hijacking: how do I read Usenet for free, if there is such a thing? I'm only
interested in non-binary content.

------
rm445
USENET still exists, so 'ultimate demise' is premature.

Still I think OP is closer than many other posts here, most of which are about
its long decline rather than demise. When ISPs have stopped stop carrying
USENET, it will just be a niche service with a very few providers, or only
Google Groups will be left.

------
erikb
I think people create too many fables around old tools. It's just that 20-25
years younger people than you will think your tools are uncool. So they make
their own tools, that basically do the same as your tools, then everybody uses
the new tools. That's all.

------
dfbrown
How is it more difficult to control what people say on USENET than on the
internet at large?

~~~
hollerith
Although I don't think the decline of USENET was caused by worries about the
inability of governments to control it, I can answer your question.

USENET has no central point of control (or at least it had none 15 years ago
when I lost interest in USENET). The basic infrastructure is designed so that
any news server can get a copy of all the USENET articles being stored by any
other news server, and anyone with sufficient bandwidth and sysadmin skills
can set up a news server. Consequently, there's no single organization that
has the power to remove an article from USENET unless perhaps it is an
organization that has arisen since I lost interest in USENET 15 years ago that
is central to the control of USENET spam. (I mention spam because 15 years
ago, spam was the only potential reason or problem an effective alliance of
server owners might recognize as a legitimate reason to remove a message from
USENET.) It would have to be an organization that every significant news
server relies on for telling spam from non-spam. But I get the impression that
spam is out of control on USENET, which is a strong sign that such a
universally-consulted spam-control organization does not exist.

Anyway, I hope that you get the idea of what the OP was on about with his
implication that pro-censorship forces killed USENET because government could
not control speech on USENET (which, again, probably does not have any basis
in reality because IMHO USENET was never popular enough with readers to worry
pro-censorship forces).

------
api
Spam mostly, and other forms of abuse. But mostly spam.

------
davidgerard
But hey, slrn finally reached version 1.0!

------
obrero
Usenet is a way for the ordinary person to be able to talk unfettered to other
ordinary people - without a need for a central authority, without the approval
and shilling of advertisers etc. So, after decades of the taxpayer funding R&D
to create the Internet, when the Internet was handed over to corporations in
the early 1990s, the question is not if such a resource was going to go away,
but when.

News stories like this marked Usenet going away -
[http://www.cnet.com/news/riaa-tries-to-pull-plug-on-
usenet-s...](http://www.cnet.com/news/riaa-tries-to-pull-plug-on-usenet-
seriously)

It's a confluence of forces. The old Bell monopolies get a stranglehold on the
last mile, and then wireless transmissions as well. They become so bold as to
lobby to end net neutrality so they can pump more money from content providers
with their monopoly. A vast infrastructure is being built to monitor what
people say on the network (like the NSA's Utah Data Center) which makes the
Stasi look like Inspector Clouseau, in a country quite different than the one
whose Secretary of State said in the 1920's "Gentlemen do not read each
other's mail". The RIAA/MPAA oligopolies are not busy yet trying to extend
their 95 year copyright lease which is kicking in again in 2019, so they can
try to shut Usenet down as well. After all, it's one of the rare mediums of
distribution of content they don't control. I'm surprised the powers that be
haven't cracked down on Internet Relay Chat yet, it's one of the last remnants
of the old, distributed, decentralized, noncommerical Internet.

~~~
tyho
It makes me sad that federated protocols are on their way out.

