It was fine when forums were still a big thing, that wasn't a bad transition.
What I find now is that there is less community. Even "social networks" like TikTok aren't really social, in that nobody is doing much socializing. We're all just throwing out witty little comments and leaving.
Yeah that sounds right to me. Even though use of the internet has expanded a lot since I was a kid, I remember making more genuine friends in the earlier days.
My theory is that it has to do with the ubiquity of feedback mechanisms. Likes, followers, upvotes, etc. It's a never-ending popularity contest. We're now living this Onion satire from 14 years ago: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uFpK_r-jEXg
The ubiquity of the "news feed" concept could also play a role -- long-running discussions are now fairly impossible. People who disagree just take potshots at each other, instead of getting to the root of the disagreement.
It's a shame there's so much homogeneity across different social sites. Wish people would experiment more.
> I remember making more genuine friends in the earlier days.
I used to have friends I would meet in a random video game or chat room and then communicate with them for _years_ over AIM or IRQ or mIRC. In a lot of cases not even knowing their real names.
Reminds me of this old 1997 MMO released by Sony Online Entertainment (and later reimplemented by KaZaA and Skype co-author Priit Kasesalu) named Subspace (renamed Continuum) I grew up playing. So anyways...
10 years ago or so everyone got added to a FB group and suddenly everyone knew each others real names and faces. It was a very strange feeling.
You do know it was revitalized by the community after it was shutdown? I played primarily from 2000-2009ish and then fell off after college.
Why think about it when you can play right now? [0]
It was this game that got me into technology and programming. Implementing bots to run king of the hill or elimination style games.
A bit of history..
One of the original programmers (Jeff P? maybe) included the server software along with the client with the CD. After SOE (Sony Online Entertainment) ended the game, the community ressurected the game by using the included server software.
After many years of cheats due to the stagnating closed-source client, PriitK (of KaZaA and later Skype fame) reimplmented the client from scratch with better encryption, and named it Continuum. It still communicated with the original server software.
Years later, someone would reimplement the server side software named ASSS (a small subspace server) giving complete freedom to implement certain gamemodes and features wanted by the community for decades. For awhile you could only connect to "third party" servers which was a lot scarier and used a different chat/name/etc service than the main zones. It took a few years, but eventually PriitK give access to the encryption code and now most servers and zones are hosted by ASSS.
It was still limited by the original Subspace/Continuum client features though.
Maybe 5 or so years ago the community got the game on Steam Greenlight and we expected a bunch of new users. It didn't really plan out that way but it was fun while it lasted. It didn't happen earlier because while the entire game at this point had been re-implemented by the community - it still used original graphics which were stilled owned by SOE. Somehow, it got done though.
I did not know any of that, that's amazing! I remember the beta coming to an end, but don't remember whether I bought the game or not. My friend group moved on to other things, and I never bothered to look it up.
Bizarrely I find a certain notorious imageboard to be much more sociable than anything that calls itself 'social media'. Even though everyone is anonymous, I come away feeling like it was more like a conversation with randomers in a pub, only with more success than I'd have in the namesake situation.
I think the lack of any 'news feed' or forced revealing of your identity makes it a much more social experience. We're behind a screen talking nonsense and sometimes saying horrible things to each other, but it is fun.
Heartily agree. I don't visit much anymore as I have a tendency to overuse, but some of the most interesting, real, and oddly respectful, conversations I've had in a long time were on said board.
I love the Reddit format, I think for the most part it works well in terms of commenting (same as HN), but the problem is the "news feed" concept, like you say. A Reddit post is only alive for a few hours before it drops away never to return.
At least on forums whenever there is a reply it bounces back to the top and keeps topics alive.
Along similar lines, Season 1 Episode 7 of The Orville, "Majority Rule", had a similar theme.
Also Black Mirror Season 3 Episode 1, "Nosedive" and Community Season 3 Episode 1, "Biology 101" apparently have similar topics (but I haven't seen them).
Hat tip to ChatGPT for helping me track these down, since I couldn't remember at first what show I'd seen related to this:
social media consumers is the a better description. influencers peddle shite, and it is dutifully consumed by the followers. we've all been co-opted into eating bowls of shit and enjoying it without asking any questions. i say all, but there's a few hold outs.
"Trolling" used to be about seeing which comments could generate the most number of responses or comments. Now it just means making fun of, or pranking.
> fully-asm coded polyfill (flat shaded) and it uses NO variables, only registers
As someone who writes small hobby OpenGL 4 games with zig for fun and because I'm not using a game engine I think I'm doing low level stuff, but this really appropriately puts what I'm doing into perspective. This quote is pretty awesome. I love how we got to where we are these days. Early game developers were true pioneers and we owe you so much!
LOL. I was still in secondary school back then. It'd be another 3 or 4 years before I became a game dev for real. The same 3D engine I'm talking about there, I ported it to DirectX and used its poly-fill for this game:
Around 1994/5 I was doing perspective-correct texture mapping on a Sun SPARC (with real-time dithering too), an Atari Jaguar and a 486 DX4/100. 16k/sec polys on the DX4 (which is only ~500 at 30fps) sounds modest to me. (We had technically more texture-mapped polys than that, but they had geometric constraints with each other so they weren't all independent polys and shouldn't be counted the same way.)
I was surprised, coming from earlier processors including the 386, to find floating-point was sometimes faster for calculations for things like texture UV interpolation, instead of integers (fixed-point), x86 sub-register tricks and hyperbolic-Bresenham or line-at-infinity techniques to avoid division for perspective.
These are the sorts of questions I would like to solve. Were we mistaken in using fixed point for everything? Are there actually faster ways of doing most of these tasks.
That recent Mario 64 rewrite has me questioning everything. At least Nintendo's first party developers made the same mistake, and they had the hardware guys right there.
We will never know. I think I was probably 16 at the time there. With a lot of hindsight and watching some videos lately about hacking the Mario 64 3D routines I wonder if the techniques we thought were fast back then are outdated now?
There are better profiling tools available now. I might be able to do it much better. Plus, not all registers are equal on the 486. Using FS and GS to hold data might be slower than pulling it from RAM. How much on chip cache does a 486 have? I don't know.
Was there not a huge archeological effort by people all over the place to resurrect old backups and older servers so that the news archive could be complete? Lovingly retrieved, curated and donated because DejaNews was going to be "forever".
I realize that breathless reviews of "Small Wonder" and 40 line Boba Fett .sigs may not be the wisdom of the ages, but it's still an important part of the history of the Internet.
Yes, the UTZOO Wiseman Usenet Archive. It was on IA for a while but has been forced underground for legal reasons. You can still find copies pretty easily.
I'm fascinated by the idea that you could try to take down your own Usenet posts based on the idea that you have copyright over them.
Surely there must be some law or legal precedent that in the act of posting to a public forum, you inherently "license" that content to be freely reproduced, at a minimum for non-commercial purposes as part of distribution in the context of the forum? (But nobody can correct your posts and sell them as a book though.)
I'm wondering if IA gave up because they thought they would lose, or it would be too expensive to go to court in the first place.
I actually gave this advice to a woman recently who was trying to get her images removed from Reddit. They weren't sexual enough for Reddit to remove the images her ex was posting, so I told her to just DMCA them all. Not ideal, but there you have it.
> I'm fascinated by the idea that you could try to take down your own Usenet posts based on the idea that you have copyright over them.
One does not simply walk into the Poetry newsgroups. Their strophes are guarded by more than just X-No-Archive message headers. There is evil there that does not sleep, and the grey-locked troll hunters are ever watchful ...
"""
In 2020 after sustained legal demands requesting a set of messages within the Usenet Archive be redacted, and to avoid further costs and accusations of manipulation should those demands be met, the archive has been removed from this URL and is not currently accessible to the public.
Included in this item is a file listing and the md5 sums of the removed files, for the use of others in verifying they have original materials.
"""
I’m a bit confused. According to the Wayback Machine, dejanews.com already redirected to groups.google.com for many years, similar to how www.dejanews.com still does. So they just dropped the redirect from the plain domain without “www.”?
The domain apex has always been a problem for hosting companies. Since the apex domain is usually overloaded (TXT SPF MX records etc) it’s very easy for the A record to be modified or lost unintentionally. It’s almost a breath of fresh air to see such an old solved problem (you do run a cmdb right?) appear again even if temporarily
Only mildly related but I'm using Eternal September to follow a handful of newsgroups and the spam I see in those come from Gmail accounts via Google Groups.
I wonder of it would be better if Google was out of Usenet completely instead of not completely caring.
My conspiracy theory is that they bought it to kill Usenet. Search is their business, and users going to Usenet (which you can't exactly search without an archive) instead of a forum on the web hurts business.
So they bought DejaNews and slapped a deliberately bad UI onto it. And as every ISP dropped Usenet, people were told "Go to Google Groups to keep talking."
And because the UX was outright worse than the newsreaders they had been using (no killfiles, no moderation for spam, etc), people left for forums.
The ISPs all dropped USENET when NY AG Coumo strong armed several ISPs to drop Usenet Binaries for the made up reason of Child Porn. The tell was he wanted them to drop all binaries not just the 'adult' ones. He was running for Governor, which is why I felt it was a publicity stunt and a favor to big media, who didn't want to litigate about Usenet due to the complexity and the existing case law.
The worst part about the whole thing is they could have just dropped the binary groups and kept the text groups. By dropping all of Usenet, they killed most of the discussion and effectively handed it to the binaries users. In doing so, they created an environment where most people using Usenet were doing it to pirate stuff, and those users had already moved to private providers who could afford the bandwidth.
Nowadays all you get when you search for Usenet providers are folks dedicated to binaries. Piracy won and smothered out discussion in the process. Even the Usenet sub on Reddit is just discussions that toe the line on Reddit's piracy rules.
The only text-only provider I'm still aware of is Eternal-September. I've heard of SDF offering newsgroups as well but I haven't looked into it.
There are lots of small text-only providers, but they're not widely known because they're small. ES is special because they allow low-friction signups; others you will mostly need to know the admin to get an account.
NNTP still survives. The D language forums are based on NNTP. It's nice to have forums that are text only (no emojis), no signatures, no ads, no fat borders, etc. I also wrote an archiver for it that creates static web pages out of the threads.
Did something get announced? The search interface at groups.google.com still seems to work.
(Well, it works as well as its modern incarnation ever did. It’s been some time since there was a way to cleanly browse a newsgroup using Google Groups).
> The requested URL / was not found on this server. That’s all we know.
This is the part people are talking about.
This all could just be a weekend glitch that's fixed on Monday or Tuesday this week. I wouldn't leap to the conclusion of this title without an announcement from Google.
What I miss from those early days is the complete lack of profiles. People really were just screen names, there were no user profiles. Often one didn’t learn more about one’s fellows unless one arranged to meet up in real life (which was a thing back then). When people could not insist on a particular demographic identity or political wing, no one was looking for personal validation and discussion remained limited to the subject of the fora. Consequently, ideological battle was limited, and while flame wars were common, they usually involved nerd minutiae instead of society-wide polemics.
Compare this to later social media, where it has been taken to extremes: I’ve seen Mastodon users whose profiles are a long list of their gender identity, sexual preference, furriness, autism or mental afflictions (officially diagnosed or self-diagnosed), favored political party, and COVID masking status, and in discussion of any topic we are supposed to consider all this.
And it can go on from there to some rather elaborate ones ( https://www.joereiss.net/geek/geek.html ) - depends on how much you're interested in putting in there.
The permanence of forum account names was important. You developed an identity and a reputation that stuck with you. The long profiles you mention could be seen as an attempt to build identity in a more ephemeral environment.
People always were looking for some sort of profile to signal who they were. With Usenet it was the signature block. Intended as short contact blocks, they were often repurposed into oversized sword wielding manifestos.
> When people could not insist on a particular demographic identity or political wing
I’m not sure if your memory is playing tricks on you or what, but politics has basically always been a part of these forums once the internet shed its “nerd” status.
Heck, extremist politics found a safe place for itself in many of internets early forums.
The politics I remember from the early internet was idealism about alternative approaches, like libertarianism or communism of whatever stripe. Such internet-nerd politics were usually divorced from what was actually going on in mainstream politics, and therefore there wasn’t the exhausting, unescapable partisan squabble as found on social media today.
The heaviest posted (non-binary) newsgroups with the in the late 90s were political, if I remember some analysis I did back then correctly. Something.politics, alt.fan.rush-limbaugh, etc
Yes, by the late 1990s there was partisan American political battle, but only if you went looking for it, on the dedicated newsgroups you mention. If you did not expressly subscribe to them, you generally did not see those politics on sci.whatever, comp.lang.whatever, or alt.music.yourfavoriteband. And you had no way of knowing if your interlocutors held strident views about politics or posted elsewhere on Usenet about politics.
I think you could argue that mainstream politics has borrowed more from internet politics than vice versa. I don't see Trump or Bernie getting nearly as much traction without the internet.
I'm very idealistic about alternative approaches, but in a "let's experiment on a small scale" sense as opposed to a "burn it all down" sense. I do wonder if widespread discussion of radical alternatives contributed to a "burn it all down" attitude. Yes, most real modern political systems are a mess of historical contingencies, but maybe democracy functions better if we ignore that and encourage everyone to buy into the system anyways. I miss the "Don't ask what your country can do for you, ask what you can do for your country" attitude.
Yes and no. Yes in the sense that such fora are out there. But a person becoming fascinated by computers and getting on the internet, will no longer encounter those fora as the default experience, unlike in the days of Usenet or BBSs. Moreover, post-2005, the software running phpBB-type fora usually borrowed features from social media.
(And “No” in the sense that, as one still reading various fora offering pre-social-media interfaces, there is no escaping that the participants are dwindling and graying. Moreover, the very thing driving people to hang around on unfashionable fora is an eccentricity that is often full-blown mental illness. Once forum activity has become dominated by a few outright cranks, you can’t expect quality discussion.)
Regarding Usenet, I was convinced to never trust Google anymore the day they removed the discussion search filter from the search engine, which happened roughly 10 years ago. Before that date one could search for people discussing products or services, while after that day one would be inundated by a pile of pages selling those products or services. They first removed the filter from the main page, but kept it reachable through the search URL, then completely removed the functionality, although people were already complaining. It wouldn't cost them a dime to keep it; that was a deliberate move to direct users searches from community forums to commercial pages.
In the last year or so they sold Domains from underneath without warning. They also apparently changed the settings on two older Gmail accounts to make them inaccessible.
I kept those accounts around because they had a maiden name and other services tied to them, I know for a fact at least one of them has an alternative contact email. There's no information on recovery and no way to contact anybody.
Maybe it's just timing, but, it feels like in the last year or so, things have especially been going downhill with them and there have been more Google related fires to fight.
As a result, I've moved my team off Workspaces and I'm winding down that Google org. And no, Google, I'm not signing up for YouTube Premium. I previously thought things were decoupled decently from Google and enough fallbacks were in place, but now I see the company as a clear risk and am doing everything I can to avoid it.
Out of curiosity what are you moving to? Ended up moving to gsuite because it was relatively stable some years ago until the domains thing but hasn't boiled over into a problem I needed to deal with imminently.
Because, you know, this page had been nothing but a redirect to Google Groups for 22 years. That seems plenty of time for people to update their bookmarks.
If you weren't affected, this doesn't really sound like an argument made in good faith.
Fortunately, the person you were responding to wasn't making a bad faith argument, or even arguing at all, but was rather expressing a common opinion based on anticipating entirely predictable behavior.
Why would that be any better? You still seem to be saying that comment had nothing to do with the submission, and is something commonly on HN. In fact so often that one can easily predict that it'll be spammed to any post about Google. Something predictable and boring is not the good kind of HN comment.
It's an even worse comment when nothing was killed in this instance as far as I can tell. The headline is just a total fabrication. Nothing had been hosted on that URL for 22 years except a 302 redirect. The archive is just as functional (or non-functional) as it had been for the last two decades. But maybe I'm wrong about that. Maybe something did use to work for the OP and was broken recently.
I can't imagine being a historian in 100 trying to piece together history from a largely forgotten internet. Whole forums that shaped me as a person have been lost to time. Archive.org helps, and there are individuals with site rips on aging hard drives, but I'd bet more information has been lost in the past 10 years than all of human history has created before it.
Every single conversation before 1859 between any 2 individuals who were not literate has been lost.
While I decry the unnecessary loss of this record (which Google maliciously chose not to offer to archivists, knowing full well that archivists would choose to preserve them if given the opportunity), we are actually living in the BEST recorded era of history, because only now have certain kinds of preservation become possible.
Could you expand some more on this? Short of active curation of small segments of online, deemed important, snapshots kept alive by constant maintenance (I wonder what the internet archives drive failure rates look like), there isn't a digital medium readily available (to the masses) yet that can survive 100+ years while also storing a meaningful amount of information. There are research efforts like Microsofts crystal thing. But so far no real winners.
Not the person you replied to, but: Documents rarely survive just by being physically durable. They survive first by people making an effort to preserve them. Deja News might be the most complete archive, but it's not the only effort to preserve Usenet.
It's a roundabout way to do it, but probably includes enough context on what's missing for a historian to dig into other archives to find it. History is like RAID: given enough parity information, you can reconstruct much of what's missing. That's how we know so many lost texts exist, and occasionally find them: stuff we do have references them and sometimes offers clues on where to find it.
Digital information in particular benefits from getting smaller relative to available storage size. Running a Usenet server used to be a huge financial burden. Now I could hold most of it on a keychain. This makes replicating it across the planet to resist the chaos of human nature easier. It might die in one place, but it's also somewhere else. It would take a world-ending event to wipe out anything you might find in /r/DataHoarder.
this is why i disagree with mcherm. we live in an anti-intellectual age where people seek to destroy information. Aaron Swartz and Alexandra Elbakyan are treated like criminals, while billionaires who abuse the legal system to silence critics are treated like intellectual heroes.
Active curation IS an excellent way to maintain information. Drive failure rates are the kind of thing that archivists can easily measure (and appropriate amounts of redundant storage can nearly eliminate data loss).
It was in response to the parent comment stating this:
> I'd bet more information has been lost in the past 10 years than all of human history has created before it
I believe that more information is being preserved for historians now than ever before, and yet even so we should decry senseless destruction of early internet history.
Imagine trying to figure out whether the 2047-earliest-reliably-attested-timestamp-date gigabytes-of-text-large newsgroup backup you have is genuine, or has been subtly AI-altered to change history to be more favorable to [some group]
This gave me a sudden panic, but no - it's all still there in Google Groups, enough teenage angst and purple prose to roll my eyes back in my head with such force that I temporarily tumbled back in time. I don't know if Usenet or IRC were really significant, compared to the social media of today. Certainly there were more nooks and crannies in which to hide, more corners you could call your own. But that's also what growing up feels like. That park bench where maybe you had your first kiss and it was once the entire universe, that's really just a place for people to sit, it means nothing. That small place you loved can't exist anymore because you're bigger, you see a broader horizon, you admit others. You can never fit yourself back down into that little, sheltered place, and you blame the places you inhabit now for being too open and noisy. Growing up is being messy, incoherent, disappointed. There's no medium that can take you back to the clarity of youth.
USENET did, obviously, have a lot of garbage but it was manageable, contained boggling amounts of valuable info and nobody (yet) "owned" it. Now, with The Great Enshittification of the Internet nearly complete, USENET's loss is just that much more painful because it could have been prevented.
The terrible irony is now nobody reads Usenet because of the spam. But people continue to endlessly automatically spam because Usenet is picked up by web indexers like Google who read the spam links. So Google dejanews has killed the very thing it valued. The machines have taken over and pushed out the humans.
I still recall trying to recruit one of the dejanews SREs to come work at my then employer (VA Linux) to now avail. A couple of months later he was a Googler.
Usenet was all about longform text. People posting to it were seated comfortably at a chair and typing on a keyboard. Reddit is today mainly browsed by people on their phones, a medium that discourages longform text no matter how much people claim to be just as proficient on a touchscreen keyboard as a real one. Moreover, Reddit’s redesign discourages substantial discussion, and even if one chooses to use old.reddit.com, you still suffer from the overall culture of the site being set by the new interface.
Nothing to stop a subreddit running a bot to enforce minimum post length and detect obvious attempts at padding to bypass it, I guess? The effects of the UI are still a problem though as you say.
I view reddit less as a site, more a collection of lots of subs that vary a lot in how they feel.
How about forum software that enforces that top-level comments must be at least 500 characters, and replies need to be at least 140 characters? Also, enforce a max thread depth of 7. Anything past that is usually bickering.
Mods on any decently popular subreddits will tell you that they feel limited in what rules they can enforce. Reddit users get used to the sitewide culture, so if they come onto a subreddit and run up against strange rules, they hassle the mods. I’ve seen whole mobs, drawing in even the sub’s regulars, harangue mods as “gatekeepers”, with few or none standing up for the traditional rules.
Also, I’m not sure if it was true or a conspiracy theory, but I recall once hearing that mods of the most popular subs cannot institute any rules that would reduce “engagement” (and thereby profit), as Reddit would then replace them.
It's not only time-consuming, it is dispiriting. Moderating is an unpaid job, and it sucks to be the target of abuse, and then to watch all the regulars on your sub attack you as the bad guy, when they side with the newbies that you are "gatekeeping".
