

How to Get Started with Usenet in Three Steps - rsamvit
http://lifehacker.com/5601586/how-to-get-started-with-usenet-in-three-simple-steps

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mhd
_"Usenet is a wonderful service for finding and downloading digital media"_

This sentence alone makes me feel old and sad.

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cico71
I agree, especially sad.

The most productive and efficient mean for discussions is now pretty much just
a binary deposit for porn and copyrighted material.

I still can't believe everyone got away with non-threaded forums vs.
newsgroups when the Internets became mainstream.

Also, Google had its own share when they acquired Dejanews and broke the
search.

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mhd
I think the two major factors that brought down Usenet are the focus on the
web (i.e. most users not knowing that the WWW _isn't_ the whole of the
internet) and spam, loads of spam.

The weird thing is that mail actually managed to survive both.

I always wished that at least the NNTP protocol would prove to be more
resilient. It would be a great secondary entry point for basically any online
forum, similar to what RSS does for news feeds. Give me
nntp://news.ycombinator.com, so that I could read and post via
GNUS/Thunderbird/tin…

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coroxout
Occasionally I browse HN in lynx, and pressing g followed by entering
news.ycombinator.com (or any other hostname beginning with "news." and not
prefixed with a protocol type) results in lynx trying to do exactly that:
looking for nntp://news.ycombinator.com...

But yes, having it for real and being able to browse in a properly-threaded
netnews client, hide subthreads you don't care for, and never have to click on
"More" only to see "Unknown or expired link" because you took too long to read
the first n messages - these would all be great, plus extra geek cred.

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mxxx
I wish articles like this wouldn't ruin it for everybody else.

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mxxx
They even mention the first rule! And then go on to ignore it.

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sasoon
Does anyone still uses Usenet for discussions? I guess I was too late with
creating website for reading Usenet (just text, no binaries), something like
Thunderbird Usenet reader in your browser. <http://www.newswebreader.com>

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tallanvor
Why post an article from 2010 that is significantly out of date?

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TheGateKeeper
I remember back in the 90s time warner's news servers were only nntp://news-
server/ and we could see our neighbor's computers via Windos 95/98's "Network
Neighborhood".

Good times.

