Usenet thrived in a time where most of us trusted each other, traffic was an order of magnitude lighter, trolls were few, spam was unheard of, and moderation - if any - was cheap and painless.
I honestly believe those times are past us. And I say that as someone that loved Usenet back in the day.
I think a major component of the difference between contributing then and contributing now is friction/skill/interest. Back then, you had to be specifically interested in learning how to get connected, which was a niche endeavor, while the masses were oblivious or too cool for school. Now, you can simply join almost any online community using baseline skills that an enormous fraction of Earth's population already has.
Artificially constructing a similar level of friction/gatekeeping would have major downsides that might not be worth it, but it could theoretically achieve a community that behaves as that past one did, if that's the goal. Sort of a CAPTCHA to prove you're not just a human, but a leet one. As others have said, HN achieves this in a way. Perhaps non-tech communities can do a similar thing. But educational materials to slowly penetrate the barrier must exist.
I love this idea, but at the same time I think it is not feasible. Back then, there were no economic or even political benefits of being able to join an online community. These days, economic and political reasons are major driving factors of either controlling or infiltrating communities, so there will always be a cat-and-mouse game between insincere actors and moderators. This would be especially true on non-technical communities, although I have seen some pop up over Signal through word of mouth.
On the technical side, it’s probably a lot easier to gatekeep, but even HN has degraded significantly since its early days. Lobster.rs is the only truly technical one that has kept that spirit (to this day I am still not a member, which kind of proves its gatekeeping abilities hah).
Yeah, it's not a technical thing. It's that the unwashed didn't have access/weren't even aware. Sure, you can do the same thing today given explicit gatekeeping and moderation.
I guess that aspect can't really be replicated anymore. Back when information moved slowly (in person, telephone, print) and broadcasts only included things with mass appeal (TV/radio ads, etc.) knowledge of a small but high quality community would remain tight for a long time, growing slowly. But the cat's out of the bag now: even the most obscure thing only needs to be posted in some place with tons of eyeballs (which simply could not occur at scale back in the day), if it's good it's upvoted to the top, and immediately it's no longer obscure.
I remember having to resort to submitting a post to alt.tech-support.recovery using a text editor and a raw telnet session due to the "lay-an-egg" requirement for posts to be accepted there and I didn't have software that would let me fiddle with headers in a sane fashion. HN most certainly does not achieve this level of filtration.
I am very curious but my search-fu has failed me. What was the requirement? Is there a link or jargon file or something I could read? I love this kind of stuff.
To post to a moderated group, you would add an "Approved" header to your post before submitting. The content of the header was not important, just the presence.
Equally fun, your "From" address (just another header) was also under your control.
So it was fairly trivial to post articles From: anyone, Approved: yes.
In this way, it was pretty similar to SMTP email in the same era. Before EHLO and reverse lookups and server identification and SPF and DKIM and DMARC and spam filters and universal skepticism, email was simple to spoof.
Now, the readers of USENET at the time were also pretty savvy, and there were other noneditable headers attached to your message that might betray your malfeasance. If you were posting to a newsgroup that didn't permit such activity (there were some that encouraged/required it!), you might earn an angry email sent to your news administrator, who was generally connected to the authority structure (university or employer) and had little patience for your juvenile behaviour.
It worked really well.
...until it didn't! But I don't think this "problem" was a meaningful contributor to the decline of USENET.
Interesting that the content off the Approved header didn't matter. I'm only familiar with Mailman's use of same, where the content has to be the moderator's password: incorrect is equivalent to not providing the header, and correct bypasses the moderation queue. Either way, it gets scrubbed immediately, for secrecy. Essentially, it's just to let listserv moderators send to a list without having to spend time using the queue for their own messages, or automation of any sort such as custom smtp client apps.
Ah, I'd forgotten about the similarity to Mailman's moderation. Right, that works because there's a centralized approval gateway (the mailman code on the mail server) which can also strip out the secret before distributing the message to the list members.
Since NetNews had no central authority, every news server had to judge the validity of posts for themselves. And obviously they couldn't all know the moderator secret without it leaking immediately. Nowadays we'd have a moderator cryptographically sign the message contents. Actually this should have been possible back then too (RSA in 1977 plus a public key published in the newsgroup definition which already held the moderator email address?), but it was not used.
Newsreaders did not show the Approved header. People often stuck fun or funny stuff in there, like easter eggs for those who knew to look.
I know alt.hackers had a similar rule, and even had a testbed group (alt.hackers.test?) you could use to see if you had figured it out without polluting the main feed with test posts.
The FAQ hint was "it's moderated with no moderator". Everything else was up to you.
Man you're asking a lot here. I've had at least three concussions and the tail end of my drug use between when this was a thing and now. I cannot recall the exact specifics but what I do remember was that to get a post accepted to the group you had to include a custom x-header (name escapes me). The contents of that header could be anything, it didn't matter, the presence of the non-standard extra header was what was checked. The best part of it all was nobody, literally no one, would tell aspiring new members how to post to the group. There was the vaguest of hints dropped in the group FAQ and that was it. You could post if you could figure out how to post.
Except whoever made Google Groups (and bought out and shut down DejaNews for it) got their promotion and lost interest and so Usenet For The Unwashed Masses got nixed like so many other Google products.
The costs of transporting Usenet weren't zero, they were simply borne by your ISP because it was understood as a necessary part of internet access.
I think that's what we're missing here. If we simply paid for this stuff as part of our regular internet bill again, we could solve a lot of the "nothing works for free" problems.
Then we would be subject to the moderation policy’s of our ISPs. No thanks.
It is way easier for me to create and delete an account at any number of websites than it is for me to change ISPs; and I don’t need any bill on my internet bill when I can just Apple Pay for whatever.
> Then we would be subject to the moderation policy’s of our ISPs.
ISPs are a common carrier and never really moderated the content of newsgroups on usenet.
> I don’t need any bill on my internet bill
I'm billed monthly for internet access and have had this arrangement with multiple companies over the last 30 years. That bill used to include a ISP email account and usenet access. Now it doesn't.
> ISPs are a common carrier and never really moderated the content of newsgroups on usenet.
Strictly speaking that’s not entirely true.
1. They could choose which newsgroups to provide access to as part of their USENET access service.
2. USENET or a modern-day like-service as a separate billable item would not necessarily be subject to the same common carrier provisions that broadband service providers were subject to when they were regulated under Title II of the 1934 Communications Act.
3. This rule was also repealed under the Trump administration and broadband service providers are once again regulated under Title I, which is to say they are not classified as common carriers. Even if it hadn’t been or if they were to be reclassified under Title II, see point 2. I did try to see if this did change under the Biden administration but I have not heard of such a change nor could I find one.
4. ISPs previously did not have the same incentive structure, and were dealing with a different market and legal environment prior to 2002. The truth is, USENET at the scale of Reddit could not exist without good moderation. It would be untenable for all the reasons unmoderated forums are untenable, and also too unappealing to develop a Reddit-sized mass. The mods, for all the issues with Reddit’s mod community, are what make Reddit possible to continue to exist. You would need similar for any Internet social forum of a similar size, scope and user base and if that’s not the goal, plenty of niche forums already exist that you don’t need to get through your ISP.
> I'm billed monthly for internet access and have had this arrangement with multiple companies over the last 30 years. That bill used to include a ISP email account and usenet access. Now it doesn't.
Perhaps you misunderstood me. I don’t have an issue with the billing arrangements I have with my ISP. I have an issue with the idea of getting billed for non-internet access services (read: content) through my ISP as a means of paying for them. In an age of pervasive payment tech like Apple Pay, I want a direct billing relationship with my service providers, not a stack of line items on my internet bill. Put another way, I’m saying it is simply an unappealing arrangement when there are superior alternatives.
I do still have the ISP-provided email address though, completely unused for the last 15 years and if they ever billed me separately for it, it would be terminated instantly.
> 1. [ISPs] could choose which newsgroups to provide access to as part of their USENET access service.
Just as they could decide which websites you can visit, but, outside of government intervention, they normally don't. Similarly, they could limit which MX servers could connect to the ISP's MTA server, but they don't (not counting SPF, DKIM, and DMARC). Why would that be different for usenet?
> 2. USENET or a modern-day like-service as a separate billable item would not necessarily be subject to the same common carrier provisions that broadband service providers were subject to when they were regulated under Title II of the 1934 Communications Act.
Reddit was a defendant in a lawsuit[1] case that the SCOTUS decided not to consider. The 9th US Circuit court ruled in favor of Reddit. Both Google and Twitter went through similar cases[2] and both prevailed.
Would usenet fare any differently?
> 3. This rule was also repealed under the Trump administration and broadband service providers are once again regulated under Title I, which is to say they are not classified as common carriers. Even if it hadn’t been or if they were to be reclassified under Title II, see point 2. I did try to see if this did change under the Biden administration but I have not heard of such a change nor could I find one.
I don't believe ISPs were ever considered common carriers[3] and this includes the period where usenet and email were commonly included with ISP internet access.
> 4. ISPs previously did not have the same incentive structure, and were dealing with a different market and legal environment prior to 2002. The truth is, USENET at the scale of Reddit could not exist without good moderation.
After Eternal September, usenet continued to function relatively well up till the time the attorney general of New York threatened to sue[4] a number of major ISPs over child pornography on usenet (which would be like a user's ISP being sued over the fact that they have child pornographic images stored in their ISP email account's inbox folder). This lead to many ISPs discontinuing their bundled usenet service which led to a significant reduction in the number of people connecting to usenet.
> I have an issue with the idea of getting billed for non-internet access services (read: content) through my ISP as a means of paying for them.
Your ISP provides DNS services you can use to allow your computer to determine what server to connect to when you initiate a HTTP request with your web browser. You could choose not to use them and have your computer connect to an external DNS provider. Similarly, you could choose to use your ISPs MTA and have your mail client connect to it and issue SMTP requests to send your email to whomever you wish. So, if your ISP provided a NNTP server for your NNTP client to connect to, you can still choose to use another provider to connect to usenet.
> I want a direct billing relationship with my service providers, not a stack of line items on my internet bill.
ISPs so far have never had separate line items for bundled services in their bill. Not for usenet, not for email, not for DNS. I don't see that changing in the foreseeable future.
> Put another way, I’m saying it is simply an unappealing arrangement when there are superior alternatives.
I don't really see having to use third party service providers for every single service as a superior alternative.
1. Except some ISPs did eventually cutoff access to the alt.* hierarchy. Some terminated their NNTP service entirely.
2. That case is not related to the 1934 Communications Act and neither are the other two cases you cited. You’re thinking of the Communications Decency Act which is a separate law with the famous Section 230 clause, but Title I and Title II are different parts of the 1934 statute passed by Congress under which the FCC claims its legal authority, and who they regulate and how they may do so.
3. Briefly under the Obama administration until they were reclassified again under the Trump administration, but I addressed it because of what you said here:
> ISPs are a common carrier and never really moderated the content of newsgroups on usenet.
Re: DNS
DNS is probably a core service. Yes there are third parties but if I had to supply my own DNS service, an Internet service provider would not be a very good Internet service provider seeing as how their core function is access to the Internet. I’d like to see how long an ISP would last without providing customers with a DNS resolver though, that could be fun.
> ISPs so far have never had separate line items for bundled services in their bill. Not for usenet, not for email, not for DNS. I don't see that changing in the foreseeable future.
Telephone, cable, home security and various streaming services they either own or have relationships with. Comcast even has an MVNO. We don’t live in a world where most ISPs are merely ISPs and a lot of them repurpose that infrastructure to provide other services. We don’t have to talk about ISPs in a vacuum.
Also remember the original context of my first comment in this chain. I was responding to this:
> I think that's what we're missing here. If we simply paid for this stuff as part of our regular internet bill again, we could solve a lot of the "nothing works for free" problems.
I’ve re-read that a few times and wondered if I misread the spirit of this text and whether I should have replied the way I did or not, but independent of whether I have or not, please read what I wrote with the appropriate context when you respond. I wasn’t addressing whether ISPs did something, I was addressing the appeal of being billed this way vs on my credit card without the additional layer of obfuscation.
Put another way: ISPs trying to do anything but give me Internet for money = bad; so a USENET or USENET-like service but at a much larger scale as a service provided by ISPs = unappealing. We have a million social networks and even communities with paid memberships. When AT&T cut off USENET access in 2008, it wasn’t just because they were being threatened with legal action over hosting child pornography on their NNTP servers, USENET had in their estimation declined past the point of return and it was no longer worth providing to their customers, particularly with a changing legal landscape that put them further at risk for continuing to provide it.
There will never be a sequel to or rebirth of USENET at social media scale without moderation.
> Except some ISPs did eventually cutoff access to the alt.* hierarchy. Some terminated their NNTP service entirely.
That happened after the attorney general of New York threatened to sue them, not because the ISP didn't like certain opinions or viewpoints.
> That case is not related to the 1934 Communications Act and neither are the other two cases you cited. You’re thinking of the Communications Decency Act which is a separate law with the famous Section 230 clause
That was a misunderstanding on my part. Regarding net neutrality, I'm not sure whether its repeal made a practical difference in terms of how people are able to connect to services over the internet. Given the widespread use of encryption, ISPs wouldn't be able to tell whether someone is using a service over HTTPS on port 443 or some other application level protocol using the same port.
Though if ISPs did place substantial limits in their bundled usenet service, then people would choose other ISPs or 3rd party services and/or complain. Just as they would if their ISPcs SMTP server wouldn't send messages to certain domains or if their web browser was blocked from accessing certain websites.
> DNS is probably a core service.
The ability to establish a connection to a remote server using an IP address is a core service. DNS isn't required. Discounting TLS certificate validation, I could connect to a remote server using their IP address instead of their hostname.
ISPs used to provide documentation instructing the end user how to connect to email, usenet, and how to set up their router or computer to access the internet. This could involve access credentials, DNS settings, etc.
> ISPs trying to do anything but give me Internet for money = bad; so a USENET or USENET-like service but at a much larger scale as a service provided by ISPs = unappealing.
Personally, I don't see the issue. If I can get a service bundled in with my existing service, then why not? If the service is significantly inferior compared to third party offering, then I still have the choice to sign up and use it.
> When AT&T cut off USENET access in 2008, it wasn’t just because they were being threatened with legal action over hosting child pornography on their NNTP servers, USENET had in their estimation declined past the point of return and it was no longer worth providing to their customers, particularly with a changing legal landscape that put them further at risk for continuing to provide it.
That doesn't really explain why a lot of major ISPs made the same decision within a short timeframe. The threat of a lawsuit does.
> There will never be a sequel to or rebirth of USENET at social media scale without moderation
Unfortunately, people prefer to use third party services and complain about their free speech rights when those services make arbitrary decisions about what's allowed and what's not. Usenet didn't have that problem.
> That happened after the attorney general of New York threatened to sue them, not because the ISP didn't like certain opinions or viewpoints.
I am not disputing the reason. You are correct about that. This is still an example of an enforcement action, or moderation, on the part of the ISPs. Just as an aside, that prosecutor was Andrew Cuomo.
> That was a misunderstanding on my part. Regarding net neutrality, I'm not sure whether its repeal made a practical difference in terms of how people are able to connect to services over the internet.
No worries. And no, its repeal didn’t make much of a difference. If I’m remembering correctly, the Title II classification came in 2015 and this was undone in 2017, so not much time for the FCC to settle in and really do anything with their newly claimed powers over broadband service providers under Title II although it’s worth noting the drum beat of the pro-net neutrality crowd has been noticeably absent these past 5 years even with the change back which is certainly a change from prior to the Title II classification in 2015.
> The ability to establish a connection to a remote server using an IP address is a core service. DNS isn't required.
I was making a business observation, not a technological observation. An ISP could try to run their business like that. It would also not be a good idea if they intend to stay in business. Nobody signs up for an ISP expecting to BYODNS even though 3rd party DNS resolvers do exist (and I use one myself).
> Personally, I don't see the issue. If I can get a service bundled in with my existing service, then why not? If the service is significantly inferior compared to third party offering, then I still have the choice to sign up and use it.
That’s a personal choice. You can prefer that, but my argument against why I don’t is because I prefer as direct a billing relationship with my service providers as I can get. This offers me two things: direct insight into what every single line item on my CC statements is buying me and for what price, and also staves off the middlemen businesses that when they get too big for their britches more often than not try to exploit that status as the middlemen.
Often times middlemen are unavoidable or nearly so from an economic perspective in other contexts: a supermarket for example stands between me and the farmers. That relationship often gives them power over the farmers that can assist me in getting a known quantity in terms of item quality but may actually force producers to operate or behave a certain way. That’s meatspace though, literally and figuratively, but even in cyberspace given a choice, I prefer the direct relationship over the indirect one.
> That doesn't really explain why a lot of major ISPs made the same decision within a short timeframe. The threat of a lawsuit does.
As I stated above, I am not disputing the threat of a lawsuit. But if USENET was growing and a potential profit center for ISPs at that time, it would have been easier to make the choice to fight for it in court. A lawsuit isn’t a guaranteed victory for the one who brings it, but it wasn’t even worth defending to them, and in fact it had become a liability.
> Unfortunately, people prefer to use third party services and complain about their free speech rights when those services make arbitrary decisions about what's allowed and what's not. Usenet didn't have that problem.
As long as you are using someone else’s hosted service whether it’s AT&T’s pre-2008 NNTP services or Reddit in 2017 or Hacker News in 2023, your free speech rights are subject to the hosted service’s owners free speech and property interests. In a direct conflict on the service itself, yours loses. If it’s your server, then yours wins.
USENET in its heyday existed in a very different culture, legal environment and economy than today. USENET at only 1993’s scale can do just fine cultivating that same culture as before, but if all you want is the size of 1993’s user base that isn’t very ambitious, and it’s not like NNTP is a particularly nice experience compared to Instagram, Snapchat, Discord or really just name any social media service since 2004.
If you took 1993’s USENET and scaled it to 500 million users today, the same largely hands-off moderation policies of the cabal of hosts that provided users access to the service could not stand and they would have to change from that time, not because of specifically former New York prosecutor Andrew Cuomo, but because of pretty much all prosecutors everywhere they operate. Section 230 is a nice liability shield, but it can still be pierced with a good case.
I mean, expensive by the standards of 1994, but -- inevitable comparison inbound -- a Raspberry Pi 4 has more CPU, more IOPS, more storage, and more RAM than many a 1994 small-ISP Usenet server. And modern Linux is a heck of a lot nicer to work with than any of the OS back then. A T1 is 1.5Mb/s, and if you don't take binaries, you would not quite fill that pipe back then.
These days, a $10/month VPS is not merely adequate, but luxurious for a non-binaries feed.
It's an almost irrelevant question because as soon as most nodes would stop carrying alt.binaries, posters would no longer respect the convention that binaries should go there, because users would want the data regardless of what their provider wants. Them it's a cat and mouse game like everything else, where binaries would just be split up more and obfuscated more.
When the cost of storage and compute isn't really borne by the users, content limits are just challenges to overcome.
Maybe if there was a total messages or bytes limit per user it might prevent using it for binary distribution, but those are painful for users to the degree it might kill usage enough to kill any hope of it continuing.
These days I think that isn't true anymore. There are a lot more ways to share files now, so if you threw up enough barriers people who want to do it would just go find another platform.
I'd be completely fine with a Usenet type of protocol that disallows file attachments altogether, adoption might not be huge, but maybe that's fine - projects like Gemini and Mastodon are valuable for me even if they're not replacing the WWW and Twitter.
I agree with this. Why go to all the trouble of getting around barriers when I could just post a DHT address of a trackerless BitTorrent swarm in a post?
I meant per user monthly or weekly byte limits by the people running servers and allowing access, not message byte limits. I'm well aware of how usenet worked, and the fact they can just split into an arbitrary number of payload messages was the point I was making earlier in that comment.
The only way you can stop binary usage is if you limit the demand, as if there's demand the supply will find a way.
You can't limit what people want, but you can make them choose other avenues of getting it.
If you charge for transit on news server connections, people will naturally gravitate towards using it for lower size messages, which means they will go to unmetered connections for large downloads. Then not including alt.binaries in our server is less likely to have people looking for and utilizing methods to still get binaries through your service in different ways.
Theres huge differences in outcome based on how you attempt to limit demand. None are perfect, but just opting out of carrying binaries is the equivalent of the drug war, where they make the materials and transfer of them illegal. I'm not even sure how to stretch the metaphor to what I'm talking about, because the national policy on drugs and the drug war seems like a very poor fit.
A good metaphor might be the postal system. The old news system was like if the post office didn't charge per message or weight, just a flat monthly fee. Removing alt.binaries is like the post office then said they don't want you shopping g anything over 50 lbs because it's clogging all the delivery vehicles shipping large things. What I'm proposing is them giving you a total cumulative weight allotment per month you can't go over (or you get charges a lot). Demand will obviously respond to that, and people will opt for other methods to ship heavy things.
Well, not necessarily your ISP. I've never had an ISP that supplied Usenet feeds. But yes, the cost was borne by somebody that wasn't you. (Probably -- if you didn't have access to someone else's Usenet feeds, there were services that would provide one to you for a fee.)
They did up till around 2010 IIRC. The smaller ISPs had their own feeds, but eventually outsourced them. I remember the Path header containing the server name of the ISPs own NNTP server, but later it changed to supernews.
ISPs also provided email accounts and I believe some provided a server directory for you to host your own website.
Eh, not exactly ;) There was (and probably still is where needed) an elaborate system of killfiles being exchanged among trusted nntp servers. Also, you might want to look up the origin of the word spam:
> The first time that the word ‘spam’ was used in this sense actually arose from an innocent-enough affair. In 1993, Usenet administrator Richard Depew was responding to a discussion group, but he accidentally posted 200 duplicate responses to the board.
In my .edu world the most annoying part of email was “chain mail” in which each recipient was threatened with bad luck or similar if they didn’t forward it on to three others. Email loops caused by .forward files were fun too.
There was spam, for sure. There were also "kill files" for readers, which were immensely helpful in removing trolls from your stream. And there were some epic trolls, back in the day. Xah Lee comes to mind. He actually has an interesting website ( http://xahlee.info/ ), which I found recently when searching for a solution to an elisp problem. Yes, he was a troll on comp.lang.lisp.
Xah Lee falls into the "kook" rather than "troll" category. He was (is?) interested and engaged in the topics. I don't have the impression that he aimed to disrupt, or yank people's chains.
Right when the commercialization of the internet was permitted.
The fact that we did that in the heydays of neoliberalism so we fumbled the ball into this current trainwreck will probably be part of the history in books written 200 years from now
It's part of the history books now. Ben Tarnoff's Internet for the People is a bracing but very accessible history of this and the potential futures we let slide off the table. Highly recommended reading.
Let slide my ass, they were intentionally yanked off the table by monied interests. I distinctly remember my reaction the first time I encountered an actual honest-to-fuck ad campaign in an online space. Shock, followed my a grudging smirk at the novelty of it, followed by months of concerned chatter among the "netizens" I interacted with about what it would mean for the web if advertising or any other form of money scheme were permitted online, followed by dire (and entirely prescient) predictions of what the internet might devolve into if the floodgates were opened to the idle masses through mass commodification of connectivity coupled with a flood of bullshit zero quality content laid as bait.
By "we let slide" I don't just mean the initial privatisation of the internet or the web, which I agree -- it's hard to imagine any citizen was in a position to change that against the interests motivating it. Instead I mean the ensuing 30 years in which we've constantly ignored the warnings and analysis of e.g. civil society about the dangers of surveillance and data acquisition, devaluation and diminishing of trust in the fourth estate, labour exploitation and consolidation around platform capitalism, etc. because the toys those privatising forces offered were too shiny. At every point we've had a chance to say: no thank you. Or to build slowly and with consideration instead of aligned to the profit motive. Well, you can see it in this thread: we're at one of those points now but ostensibly well-informed people are begging for more software-companies-as-benevolent-dictators. We have a chance to channel the current energy of frustration into a new generation of the web guided by a focus on values like community ownership. Unfortunately the responses of many of my fellow technologists don't inspire much hope! But I still believe we can yank a few of those things back.
If the internet didn't permit commercial use, then it would lose another inter-network that did. People want to do buy things online and people want to sell things online and someone would step up to fill that need.
At the time the restriction was on who was allowed to operate and for what purpose.
These types of restrictions in the real world are common. We don't permit say, people to set up shop running gambling tables inside of library reading rooms.
We have restrictions all around us like this. No picnicking on freeways, or say, hookers picking up Johns next to the paintings in the city art gallery. You can't just say, wheel in dirt to city hall and start tending a garden in the council chamber.
We decided to blow away all such equivalent restrictions on the web in the early 90s, being antithetical to any conventions. Maybe continuing to adhere to that, 30 years in, is not the best idea. Obvious guardrails, equivalent to no picnicking on the freeway, can be set up.
It's time to build more of a rules based online society
You make it socially unacceptable to run a server that emits spam. You make it socially unacceptable to work for a company that emits spam.
At an interview: "OK, I see you worked for an oil company, right, and then a porn company, fine -- oh, you worked for a spammer. Sorry, we're done. I don't know how this happened, I'll need to talk to HR about their filters."
socially where? where ever you set those social norms, someone will set up a server not there. like russia or any of the other internet bogeymen countries
Neoliberalism, also neo-liberalism,[1] is a term used to signify the late-20th century political reappearance of 19th-century ideas associated with free-market capitalism after it fell into decline following the Second World War.[2][3] A prominent factor in the rise of conservative and right-libertarian organizations, political parties, and think tanks, and predominantly advocated by them,[4][5] it is generally associated with policies of economic liberalization, including privatization, deregulation, globalization, free trade, monetarism, austerity, and reductions in government spending in order to increase the role of the private sector in the economy and society.
Also this was during the real halcyon days of the third way and DLC right after the end of the cold war.
The libertarian fanboys on HN really don't like it because this is what they furtively shake their pom-poms for and it's clearly trending towards a socially net negative
These hands off approaches will get a thousand flowers to bloom but they'll mostly be weeds
It's fine in luxury industries. Yachts, jets, jewelry, cruises, etc.
But things that people with limited capital need? That obviously doesn't work. Look at the Cochabamba Water War or the California electricity crisis for good examples.
An unspoken rule of their models is all consumers value money the same and have an unlimited supply.
These assumptions fall flat on >99.5% of people.
But ruby and sapphire encrusted watches? fine! Game on.
Except Reddit moderators deal with these spam issues all the time.
Hacker News is run by herculean efforts by the moderation team here, and I appreciate it. I'm ignorant of what their tools are, but I don't think that scales either. Its good for our community, but Hacker News will never be Reddit or Twitter scale.
Reddit's model is that moderators basically complain to the Admins that tools are insufficient, then admins mostly ignore those complaints. Moderators write bots that automatically surf traffic and try to automate... then the Admins come back and increase the price of API-access by 1000%, and then change the API and overall become hostile to this behavior. This cannot work either.
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At least in Usenet days, we could run our own programs in an open source model for these moderation issues.
I don't think Usenet would work. We need a way to rewind time (Usenet: once you post or once something passes moderation, it is forever more sent to everyone else's inbox). USENET was POP model, to put into email terms... while Reddit is IMAP/JMAP model, where the true state of the information is centralized to the server.
So yes, I agree with you that USENET will fail today. But the nuances of why it will fail are important to understand.
In particular: Reddit was never very good about these moderation issues. But with enough work and grit, the community came together anyway. That's good enough. I expect that USENET's moderation model is sufficient, albeit decades old. Its all the other USENET crap that won't work today (being a "POP"-like message distribution platform without any "takebacks", so no editing posts, no deleting porn that got past the spam filter, etc. etc.)
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Or maybe... USENET works with regards to API access. The *ARCHIVE* (ie: Google Groups, or Deja News if you're old enough to remember that) is where takebacks / edits can live instead.
So maybe Usenet can work, but with changes to our workflow to be more akin to 2023-level of features. By separating concerns over USENET (ie: how messages are distributed among a decentralized list of servers), and "The Archive" (which needs to be run by a trusted set of administrators), and a system where moderators will have access to "The Archive" for their own moderation purposes, we can rebuild Reddit through USENET??
Hmmm... it could work. Though I'm curious if it has much benefits over Mastodon or other solutions available today.
The reason Usenet can't work today is not for the reasons you surmise.
I used Usenet before the Eternal September.
The reason it worked back then, is because to a certain extent, it was a relatively homogeneous group of users, meaning, people of comparable education, interests, etc.
I'm not really interested in sharing a newsfeed with a kitchen cabinets spammer or a Russian troll or some MAGA trumpet endlessly gazing upon Hillary's emails, etc.
Also, the legal landscape is different today, we're a long way from a pre-DCMA world. Usenet servers act as common carriers but they are not legally common carriers (in my opinion) which means if I am right, the experiment will end as soon as someone decides to litigate against a server operator for passing on material that someone felt offended by. Not even copyright violations, just something they were offended by. For example, it is illegal to insult Ergodan (really) and while that law isn't enforceable here, it was elsewhere until recently in places like Germany which still had laws on the books saying it wasn't legal to insult foreign heads of state, etc. So it's just a big litigious mess now. You may have noticed the other year how the right-wing wanted to sue/shut-down the tech companies for being too woke and suppressing their free speech rights, etc.
Usenet was a lovely time and I miss it, but that ship sailed long ago and isn't coming back.
> Usenet servers act as common carriers but they are not legally common carriers (in my opinion) which means if I am right, the experiment will end as soon as someone decides to litigate against a server operator for passing on material that someone felt offended by. Not even copyright violations, just something they were offended by. For example, it is illegal to insult Ergodan (really) and while that law isn't enforceable here, it was elsewhere until recently in places like Germany which still had laws on the books saying it wasn't legal to insult foreign heads of state, etc. So it's just a big litigious mess now.
Reddit was a defendant in a lawsuit[1] of a similar vein that the USSC declined to hear.
Re: homogenous user base and MAGA trumpets... in 1998 or so, when I did an informal analysis of USENET centralized moderation vs Slashdot distributed moderation and number-of-posts/day counts across both platforms, alt.fan.rush-limbaugh was one of the highest trafficked USENET groups. The proto-MAGA crowd was there.
USENET was not perhaps as homogeneous as you remember?
> USENET was not perhaps as homogeneous as you remember?
My Usenet was fairly homogenous, because I only subscribed to a handful of groups. You simply couldn't read the traffic on 100,000 groups! But the full list of groups was extremely diverse.
The list of groups also depended on which server you were using as your feed. Many servers carried groups dealing with some product the operator sold; those groups weren't always relayed by other servers. In fact I guess that's still the case.
We can't just assume that hackers around the world have 80GB NVidia GPUs laying around to run high-end, usable LLMs. And we certainly can't expect people to pay Amazon Web Services for a rented GPU, those things cost significant amounts of money.
Sticking to basic automation tools we have for spam filtering and automated reading of messages and the like, lets start with Reddit-level tools of just banning, blocking, users. And a global effort that helps kill spam accounts and sockpuppets.
It's not a bad start, but it's missing "trolling/shitposting".
(I'm hardly advocating that people start relying on openai for moderation, rather it would be great if people started figuring out how to do this locally with the tools we have. Their bias against chess players is pretty despicable)
A lot of the tech/approaches are already used elsewhere. Some ideas
1. Require university or employer emails to register (Blind uses this). Still post via alias but have a verified root email tied to a person IRL, would really cut down on the trolling and spam and nonsense.. NEETs might be out of luck but, well, their domain is the imageboard and that's not exactly what you want on usenet most of the time..
2. Require some hashcash style calculation to prove the value of a post via computation. Use an algorithm which is ASIC resistant - maybe Ethereum's old PoW?
3. as you mentioned AI - Moderation endpoints, it would be interesting to see if that can be created from LLaMA or such (OpenAI has this available but no reason to become dependent on them). People have mostly been looking at them for generation but as a classifier they also may fit the bill
I think the "trust" back then was really just because only people with a certain amount of money could afford a computer and internet access. Most people on the internet at that time were middle class folk with proper day jobs, or in my case, a child of the aforementioned.
A "usenet 2.0" that only does (short) text and links/embeddings for media (to youtube etc) would already be a very useful thing, notwithstanding the risk of take-down of controversial media (freeloading on Big Tech infra for the 99.9% that isn't).
>And the average person also doesn't know the website exists.
Taking the larger number of people outside of the US that only use mobile devices and only use apps like FB, WhatsApp, or others I'm not familiar with, I'd go so far as saying that the average person doesn't know websites exist. If it's not present to them via an app, could they find an actual website (or at least would they even attempt to)?
HN has shadowbanning, sockpuppets, etc... all the goodies that have been privately demonstrated to work, and work well; and most of those work even better when combined with a pretense of 'not having that here'
IMO the key adavantage HN/Reddit has over Usenet is the upvoting/downvoting, which is a clever form of self-moderation. Doesn't work in all cases but the less useful comments and posts never rise to the top.
Even within Usenet, this was readily acknowledged [0]. The forums and social media that followed were, in part, trying to solve exactly these problems.
I genuinely think that the current inheritors of Usenet are private group chats; trust based, relatively small groups.
Usenet had moderation schemes that weren't widely used, but that worked well in the groups that used them. I remember a system called STUMP though I don't remember what it stood for. Basically posts had to be approved by moderators using PGP signatures, and I think there might have been a CA-like scheme for moderators to delegate moderation authority. It seemed well designed and generalizeable, but it was near the tail end of Usenet's heyday, so it didn't catch on much.
Added: to expand, Usenet was and is mostly unmoderated. There were a few groups that wanted or needed moderation, and for those, workable methods came into existence.
This. I loved usenet, but when the spam started, that was the harbinger of doom. Maintaining communities costs time and effort as well as servers and bandwidth. Given the thankless task of fighting the onslaught of spam, trolls, raids, organized information ops etc it's not viable as a volunteer exercise in general. It can be done by mutual cooperation and self-policing on a small scale in isolated groups of like-minded folks but en mass the incentive to ruin the commons for everyone else will always be too strong for some folks.
Nothing was ever free. Even Usenet. Universities and Internet savvy corporations ran Usenet servers. That’s why it was free to the rest of us. I tried running a Usenet node in 1995 or so on a 486/33 getting a feed from UC Berkeley. Had to learn quickly about expiring posts and groups. Could not buy enough disk to keep up but it was fun and exciting in a stressful way for the few months it lasted.
Server<->Server communication requires technical chops to manage attacks at different levels of the protocol stack. So very few or no individuals today can run “news” servers. But organizations - that is entirely still possible. Most likely universities and companies that you might see represented at IETF meetings and protocol working groups.
Other than recreating the old Usenet, there is also the possibility of localized wireless (including LoRaWAN) communications networks. These could optional gateway to a global backbone even a UUCP-like store and forward one.
IMHO, the challenges are at least two fold - how to marshal the resources to sustain such a network and how to make it resilient against hostile attacks/deliberate blockage by gatekeeping
The internet is a lot like our planet. Humans are actively working to destroy it for their own short term gains. The only way to defend against that kind of behaviour requires energy, time, and inevitably the abstraction that represents those things - money.
I think it can be possible, but only as a closed community of people who have all been vetted first and who, most importantly, can be can be banned for bad behaviour.
Setting up such a network might be profitabel (lots of people spend quite a bit of money networking), but it is also going to be very expensive and you are going to get a lot of negative press from people whom you didn't accept and from people who will point out that you are discriminating against certain groups because your user demographics over or underrepresents certain groups.
It is never a nice job to be the one who has to man the walls, and it is not glamorous, but no Constantinople without the Theodosian Walls.
Usenet worked fairly well when you could really only get there by knowing someone. No commercial ISPs, so if you got banned, you really could face penalties at your university (I know because I was a witness at a student trial involving doing things they shouldn't on the Internet - not Usenet specifically - and while it was in no way criminal, the students were sanctioned). And you couldn't just open up a new email account with a new provider and ISP five minutes later.
Wasn't that sort of included in your Internet subscription?
Even if not, why not use the same model as Internet subscription, where the payment comes from the fee you pay to your ISP? This would also make it easy for governments / donors to sponsor participation in such groups as they wouldn't have to hunt down individuals to provide them with a tiny amount of money, rather they could compensate ISPs directly.
A lot of ISPs are trying to make some extra $ by selling all sorts of junk, like anti-virus or w/e. Sure they wouldn't be opposed to sell an extra service, should it become popular enough.
I think I agree. There has to be a cost. I cuts down spam and raises a cost for mildly the mildly annoying.
What if, and this is based on the principle of making it cost something, crypto got incorporated into the idea effectively forcing one to pay to send a message on a given forum.
Hardly perfect, but with one of the anonymous coins it might not be a bad balance ( assuming we can get past the current slew of news that battered crypto ).
I am not a crypto fanboy but I fully agree that crypto is as close a solution as we have today. Some degree of elitism is needed to keep the community safe and self-moderating. How about a crypto platform where you pay to post but also pay to subscribe? The economics of it need to be worked out but it can’t really be a one way street or only advertisers will send messages. If my post helps you then you should pay me, but if my post wants you to help me then I should pay you.
I wonder. In a sense, it would be a replication of the current follower system, but with money following it more directly ( the bigger the forum, the more admin would be paid; and each member would have some skin in the game and a cost associated with each post likely reducing unnecessary behavior ). Like you said, the economic details need to be hammered out, but maybe it does not sound as ridiculous as it did not that long ago.
The Green Card spam was considered the start of Usenet spam, and that was 1994. I was on Usenet for a good 7-8 years before that. Things were different back then.
I think this is the elephant in the room that most "resurrect usenet" proposals ignore. Usenet hosting has coalesced around huge providers because the volume of binaries traffic presents a significant challenge, namely that you need beefy, expensive server infra to manage the traffic and retention.
The "next big thing" after Reddit won't be a plain text-only service. HN and Tildes already serve this niche. So any proposal for USENET 2.0 must provide a treatment of the bandwidth/data retention issue.
Perhaps, but HN only satiates the desire for a text-only forum for a pretty niche community. There are plenty of subreddits that don't really touch on anything tech related. Insofar as binary content goes, Supernews is still around and charges about $12/mo (they're currently running a half off promo).
Sonic's ditched their NNTP servers as they move from being an ISP to a web provider, but back in the day they provided their own NNTP servers and included a Supernews subscription.
I've been trying to remember Supernews all day since talking about it in another thread, but too busy to stop to look it up. Honestly, I'm shocked they have remained a thing.
I honestly believe those times are past us. And I say that as someone that loved Usenet back in the day.
What you're asking for, for free, isn't possible.