This isn't trolling, genuine question from someone who joined the internet after Usenet was already gone:
I keep seeing people wanting to build distributed this and distributed that. According to Wikipedia, usenet was already distributed. Why did it die?
Edit: follow-up question, what about freenet? Are they the same thing? Are they different, compatible, implementations of the same protocol? Are they incompatible but share some properties? Etc
2. It lost control over its culture, and that culture was crucial to its functioning.
3. It was too problematic for ISPs (or others) to provide ready access to it: spam, harassment, child pornography, and copyright violations all posed massive concerns.
4. There was no viable business model for providing the service.
This is the correct answer. Since it was a "permissionless publish" system, with no authentication, anyone could post anything. This was a disaster in the way that pure free speech systems always are.
(To some extent, there was a natural response in that anyone could cancel anything, although those ended up adding authentication. At one point people estimated that a third of traffic was spam and another third was "spam cancels".)
It was always "permissionless publish", but it is worth remembering that it wasn't a free speech system (until alt.*) Each group had a manifest of rules.
I think that the issue was that the enforcement mechanisms were largely social, so they broke down when it grew too large, especially when ISPs and others started running servers without engaging in the community.
I would add another important point: earlier, there was nothing like NNTP. So when someone showed you "the Internet", they showed you email, gopher (later the web), IRC and so on. These were separate services with unique features. The appearance of CGI and dynamically generated content was a big revolution at that time. Then, everything converged in the web, and when Google took over the newsgroups, there was practically zero incentive for new Internet users even learn what NNTP was.
1. The clients were kind of a pain for anyone but comp.sci nerds
2. It was butt ugly. Web forums killed it, because you could make them pretty
3. Not only spam, but the troll bots just destroyed everything. I can't remember why exactly this started happening, but there were a dedicated pool of assholes spamming Usenet groups they didn't like with garbage or vile crap posing as regular contributors of the groups. When you searched for posts by someone, the first 100 pages were from these troll bots
> The clients were kind of a pain for anyone but comp.sci nerds
News clients were built into most email clients and were pretty user friendly. I dont think you needed to be a nerd to use it. Web forums were also pretty ugly in the late 90s.
I agree. Windows 9x included Outlook Express which had a built in news reader in addition to mail. If you could setup your mail you could also setup the news reader.
I think most of the ISPs that I used either had a setup program that configured it automatically along with mail/dns, or provided clear instructions on how to set it up manually.
I may be in the minority, but I actually liked Outlook Express.
Netscape Navigator, the GNOME Pan newsreader, KDE's KNode newsreader, Forte Agent for MS Windows, and of course Emacs's Gnus, along with compatibility tools for a bunch of email clients (mutt, Sylpheed, Alpine, etc.).
Most ISPs had some sort of bundled software package which included a rudimentary Usenet client as well.
> 2. It lost control over its culture, and that culture was crucial to its functioning.
This might strongly depend on the corner of usenet you were in, but there were large and important groups where elitism was absolutely cancerous, and a culture I don't miss. I frequented German end English groups, and can say that it was much worse in the German ones. Absolutely condescending attitude towards newcomers if they "misbehaved" even in the slightest; you'd have the "n00bs" post and then a dozen replies by the regulars circle-jerking by dissecting the OP down to every little detail they did wrong and trying to one-up each other in sarcasm. A typical flex was the length of your killfile.
Web-Based bulletin-boards (phpBB, vBulletin, WBB, ...) quickly took over in the early 2000s, which had the advantage of having superior moderation tools (e.g. being able to remove spam after the fact), giving a more consistent experience to users. Bulletin boards still tended to have the elitist group of regulars compared to usenet, albeit less pronounced. Some/Much of this can probably also be attributed to the users of those boards being a new generation of Internet users, which just had a different approach and attitude, much like we see today with facebook vs. Instagram, YouTube vs. TikTok etc.
What managed to mostly kill Internet forums was probably reddit, which improved SNR a lot by having the up/downvote system, and while technically being even more centralized than bulletin boards, managed to grow so much by basically allowing their users to create subreddits, which would equal the sub-forums in bulletin boards, which only the board's administrator could create.
A significant part of the culture was that Usenet was tied, almost exclusively, to selective-admission universities (and largely CompSci / EE students and faculty), a few high-tech companies (infotech and defence, largely), and a few government departments. Those institutions could exert reasonable disciplinary control over Usenet participants ... enough to avoid the grosser harms.
Yes, it was highly exclusive and exclusionary, and there were definitely toxic elements to the culture, but it wasn't entirely lacking in control or discipline as occurred later.
Note that Usenet did have some effective spam controls ("Cancelmoose", the Lumber Cabal, etc.), but overall effectiveness was limited by virtue of the distributed and noncentralised nature of the protocol, as well as the lack of any true participant authentication.
Slashdot was harshing on Usenet long before Reddit was, and various online forums (as you mention) before that.
> 2. It lost control over its culture, and that culture was crucial to its functioning.
Precisely. Usenet's "regulars" back in those days were generally IT staffers, with perhaps a professor or three, at any given school, or were IT staffers running news servers at their companies. The regular September flood of new kids discovering Usenet at school was annoying, but manageable.
Then the gates were thrown open wide, and netiquette got crushed under the weight of the general public. Once the crooks and con artists discovered it, it was the beginning of the end.
If you were to ask Usenet at the time, they would chiefly cite the eternal September (which you do mention in your article), although, clearly, it kept going for longer than that. Perhaps the eternal September is just one of the contributing factors to losing control of its shared culture and values?
Usenet as the principle locus of online group discussion phased out ... within a few years of the Eternal September. I'd argue that the shine was clearly off somewhere in the 1997--1999 timeline, which is roughly when the first discussion sites such as Slashdot emerged.
Transitions aren't instantaneous, and aren't always clearly visible at the time. (Look at, say, the present ... evolution ... of Birdsite, The Front Page of the Internet, and the StackExchange empire.) But in retrospect inflection points become more clear.
(This is pretty much a constant in all of history, with eras, transitions, and labeling of these coming years, occasionally centuries, after the events themselves.)
The Eternal September was one of a growing onslaught of insults to Usenet which it ultimately succumbed to. Not instantly, but in time, and inevitably.
Google offered to uplift the groups, and somewhat choked the model to death. I think Brad Templeton and others gave them tapes. (A good thing at the time) or maybe an early crate of disc drives got shared.
A bunch of pre 90s data caches got uplifted and then silently seemed to vanish. I was a box admin in the UK in the early 80s and my honey-danber database records were online for a while in the maps Usenet group. They're not responding to search any more.
In my unqualified opinion the usability of e.g. phpBB forums (discussing through the browser) was much better than calling up a local BBS on telnet. Multilevel prompt menus in telnet can be quite maze-like.
Web crawlers indexed online forums too, so you could find the content right away through the same search engine instead of having to search the BBS discussions for hours or post a request on the local BBS and wait (days) for replies. Your technically illiterate aunt could browse the search results for posts containing the recipes she wanted from a number of disparate forums, and choose to read anonymously (and print out) or login and contribute. All you need is an email address.
This accessibility and semi-transparency created a major shift in where you go for content, effectively forcing the tech literate to follow suit as well. It fits in the general trend of democratizing the internet, and IMO was a good thing for tech. (I blame the monetizing and large commercial entities for the current state of fragmentation.)
I still login to a local BBS about once a year to say hello. Although I have a shell account now so I don't need to telnet over the net. It's still very alternative and hacker friendly.
It feels silly to say this since it sounds like you’ve been using Usenet since the dawn of time, but you can get GUI-based news readers that fetch articles from your Usenet over the internet, no dialing up or using Telnet required.
Properly configured, these news readers feel just like email clients, with threading and signatures and all that. Yes, the configuration part is some work but you only have to do it once and then you’re set up for all of Usenet. With forums you have to find and create an account separately for each one.
Usenet could (and still can) be operated via telnet using the NNTP protocol [1]. The whole protocol is ASCII-based, just like HTTP, and works via simple text commands. The most common way to access Usenet back in the day was over dialup.
Sure, but the most common way to access Usenet/NNTP servers was through graphical GUI software or "TUI" for those that preferred terminals. Most people didn't write NNTP commands directly, although I did that because I wanted to learn the protocols (same with POP/SMTP/HTTP that are surprisingly easy to get started with)
NNTP worked great with dialup. You could connect and download all the new content since the last time you were online and catch-up offline without blocking the phone line. The clients were designed to work both in both online and offline mode
It lived as long as people who used it were select technical elite. You know, people with genuine interests, using it to meet other, like minded people.
But whenever people meet in unmoderated digital world, all sorts of other toxic people follow -- spammers, trolls, etc. People who don't care about the community or personal exchanges.
This makes the place toxic and unpalatable to the ones who started it and so the real people just leave and the place dies.
As someone else said, usenet was replaced by phpBB forums, which kept the similar structure but were easier to moderate and easier to use too.
The real question would be why did those forums mostly died nowadays? I don't have a definite answer, but from the user viewpoints:
- Centralised services had the benefit of only creating one account (remember password managers were uncommon! People were advised only to create accounts of websites they would trust, to avoid leaking their passwords they often re-used)
- More modern UI and the "new factor"/hype definitely helped people moving
Let's not forget the move was also sometimes initiated by the webmasters, who did not want to pay and administrate it forever (Canonical example being a teenager spawning a forum about one of your hobby, then still maintaining it a decade later while having lost all interest)
Freenet is very different, it's a free-speech oriented protocol/server which provides a way to publish anonymously/untraceably and have the network host arbitrary content in such a way as you aren't supposed to even be able to tell what data is stored on your own node. Effectively a censorship-resistant and deniable publishing model. I haven't looked into it for nearly two decades now, but when I did it was full of CSAM and I decided I couldn't run a node in good faith.
Usenet was great while it was a niche thing and before the advent of spam. It was distributed in the sense that most ISPs would run a server and they would mirror messages between them. You'd use your mail client to talk to your ISP's server, and messages would be like emails, but threaded somewhat like a forum. Binary files were usually uuencoded and often split across multiple chunks.
Unlike solutions run by centralised entities, it really did feel like a public square, but your ISP could and often did decide which groups they would carry. On the flip-side your ISP or university could carry its own groups which weren't replicated out to the wider internet, for local discussion.
It died for a few reasons but there were a few main reasons and mainest of those (lol) was that spammers realised they could flood it with their tripe for almost no cost, all actual conversation just got drowned out pretty fast.
It had an undeath (maybe still does?) as a way to distribute pirated material, mostly because 'normies' didn't know about it and it would fly under the radar. All the movies on torrent sites would come from groups releasing them on usenet. I guess these particular users weren't affected by spam, and weren't a target for spam because no human was trying to read the groups...
> spammers realised they could flood it with their tripe for almost no cost
Usenet readers supported plonkfiles; spam management on usenet was easier on Usenet than with email. A GUI Usenet reader let you plonk someone with a single click. Granted, in those days, spammers were less resourceful...
Anything that depends on an ISP is not truly distributed or decentralized. You'd need a way to route ad-hoc networks deterministically. You'd have to replace BGP with something like DHT.
USENET very much depended on ISPs in practice, they ran most of the servers!
However, yes it was theoretically possible to have a route between two NNTP servers that wasn't over a BGP-routed chunk of internet but was "something else". Including posting a tape.
The last uucp service shutdown in 2012 according to wikipedia. So not just theoretically possible but was happening in actual pracitise much later than you would expect.
In the original architecture yes it was closer to an ideal. If only Usenet became Xanadu. Unfortunately people gave way to the centralization of servers and thus lost control to the direction of the 'net. At least that's one take.
Each instance could also choose which groups to distribute. Many ISPs didn't carry all groups (such as binary groups and groups in other languages) to save money, or due to the content itself (porn, warez, MP3). Sometimes they would have delays because some groups were only synced a few times a day.
This created a market for NNTP servers that provided full content for a monthly fee and sometimes even with a spam filter
> I keep seeing people wanting to build distributed this and distributed that. According to Wikipedia, usenet was already distributed. Why did it die?
People like distributed things ideologically but practically speaking they have a ton of drawbacks. It failed because it was outcompeted by centralized solutions that could leverage their centralized power to make a better product (e.g. handle spam among other things). The decentralized aspect also means incentives can become misaligned where people who are paying for it aren't really benefiting or controlling it (i imaging alt.bibaries was not cheap to syndicate)
> follow-up question, what about freenet? Are they the same thing?
imo of course,but usenet had a hard time existing in a post-corporate internet exactly because it was difficult to wall off your users into your niche community, which became big in the early 90s and remains that way now.
AOL/compuserve/prodigy/whatever offered easy to use and understand UXs which drew a large crowd, and their large crowd was in a fairly walled off portion of the internet using foreign protocols and systems -- so they drew in their friends and so on.
same kinda thing fb does, among others, now.
when the crowd/discussion moved elsewhere that was that.
I think usenet saw a bit of a resurgence in popularity due to piracy, but the discussion has never really came back.
usenet needs a hosting provider. And providers would usually mirror a subset of feeds so yeah you could think of it as distributed but it is a much simpler protocol. Freenet is more complicated, p2p, encrypted, anonymous medium and also the main difference is in the way the data is distributed on all participants computers instead of one central server.
How do you add new features to a distributed system? Anti spam was the most needed tool, and it never arrived.
Even if you just offer the ability to have 3rd party clients to your closed system you still have the problem of distributing new features, that's why there's only 1.2 browsers now
I keep seeing people wanting to build distributed this and distributed that. According to Wikipedia, usenet was already distributed. Why did it die?
Edit: follow-up question, what about freenet? Are they the same thing? Are they different, compatible, implementations of the same protocol? Are they incompatible but share some properties? Etc