That bit about total anonymity is just not true. Usually you would use your organization's news server (because every ISP/university had one), so you could be easily located. Plus, it was part of the netiquette to post using your real name / well known identity.
Thinking of the 90s internet makes me all sentimental.
That's funny because "Eternal September" was coined in 1994 (i.e. people were exclaiming "things were better then" in reference to the time before September 1993).
Sure, you're probably more knowledgeable about it than me. I was only observing that "things used to be better" is a constant theme and when one has nostalgia for a certain time, it's worth noting that people active then were reminiscing about an even earlier time.
I fall back on text-mode readers (usually w3m) for sites which are too broken in GUI browsers. It works rather more often than you'd expect (in large part because web crawlers need text).
As a fun project, I have created web interface to Usenet with standard 3 panes like Thunderbird. It is free and without ads, has around 15,000 newsgroups, can be used without creating an account.
This is my search engine for Usenet, currently only for the 1980s but I hope to have 2003 onwards searchable soon. I have about 2TB of news from 2003 which just needs indexing and uploading.
It's not possible to get Usenet from the 90s, as it simply isn't archived. 80s is archived via Internet Archive and you can get 10 years worth from 2003 via Usenet king GigaNews.
Google Groups has the 90s, but it's locked behind a 'Googlewall'.
Don't know if I'm being silly here, but is it worth just asking them for it? I'm sure there is some sentimental types in Google that would be cool with what you're doing.
I always felt like Usenet was slow, and the idea that you'd have to ask the server for new changes (like email) rather than getting them pushed down to you is what I believe "killed" the platform. Plus, Usenet was distributed so you had to wait until a message propagated to the server you connected on. Discussion platforms built on the Web are (were?) far less difficult to keep together than Usenet, because a company can pay a staff of people to keep the content up and there's only one place to get the content.
Say what you will about anonymity and secure communication, but Usenet died because it was hard to use...not because it was a bad idea.
I never spent any time there, but it warms my heart to hear that alt.callahans is still alive.
My impression of Usenet's death is closely related to your "hard to use" summary: it required people to install and configure a separate client, in an era when many forums were becoming available through the web browser folks already had. (Standalone email clients are far less popular today than they used to be, too. But Usenet didn't remain essential until web interfaces became usable the way that email did.)
Binary downloading seems to be increasing due to both the higher speeds and the anonymity USENET can provide in comparison to filesharing system like torrents.
Now yes, perhaps discussion groups are on the decline and being replaced by individual websites and their forums but I feel that USENET still offers a great advantage in the case of say medical conditions - were you want to be anonymous but still want to participate in a discussion.
Granted if you are uploading copyrighted content in your home country you can be tracked but otherwise USENET is anonymous
Also sites like http://usenetreviewz.com/ are advertising Black Friday specials and keep up to date news articles on their so yes, USENET may be now well known but I think USENET will be around for a long time
Some uploads just use a random file name now making it impossible for MPAA, RIAA, etc. to just simply search usenet posts for their content. If you don't have the NZB then it's unlikely you'll find it. Also if you use the european usenet providers they typically don't comply with DMCA notices and have more complex take down procedures.
They were already doing random names in early 2013 too ... but it seemed like the enforcement groups were grabbing NZBs and issuing DMCAs rather quickly, even for those. shrug
Sickbeard is faster than the takedowns by a solid 20+ hours if your computer runs 24/7. As I said its very much dependent on how connected you are - access to high grade nzb aggregator sites in particular.
it has changed, but not nearly as much as "content providers" want it to. namely, it used to provide a wonderful archive for just about any kind of copyrighted material you can think of. usenet providers have been increasing their retention (e.g. 1900+ days of binary retention). so now with the take downs, a lot of copyrighted material is gone within a day or two.
i'm a little bit unsure if this is true, but it definitely seems to be. a usenet provider has "complied" with the DMCA request when they have removed enough of the yEncoded posts to break the file on their servers, including parity repair. different providers remove different posts.
thus the emergence of "block accounts," which are usenet providers that resell amounts of data with no time limit, as opposed to your main usenet provider who chargers monthly. then nzb downloaders (e.g. SABnzbd+, NzbVortex) look to your block server for articles that are missing. well really servers, it's not uncommon to have multiple. the key is to have your block accounts all from different top-level resellers.
Usenet, or something very much like it, with a markup language (to allow for rich content), a paired messaging protocol (to allow for directly contacting individuals in chat / private message mode), and associated content distribution (images, video) could, I've felt for years, displace virtually all of existing social media.
The primary missing elements are filtering (as noted) and a distributed search capability.
That paired messaging protocol we used was called email. Filtering was pretty sophisticated using scorefiles and killfiles. You didn't have rich media because the Usenet was about exchange of thoughts and knowledge, but people were pretty opinionated about formatting to make reading your posts pleasant for everyone.
The rich media thing: it's useful. A minimal markup (such as markdown) would likely be sufficient. The ability to be able to emphasize and strongly emphasize text, create bullets and numbered lists, indicate (multiple levels) of quotes, hyperlinks. There's not much that Markdown itself doesn't provide.
A small amount of chrome for the masses would be nice. For the most part my feeling is that existing HTML markup goes too far, generally in the direction of unusability for far too many websites.
Another feature which is quite useful is indicating followups and actions. Here I find Reddit has one of the best models around, though the UI/UX lightweight nature of G+'s Notifications widget is also nice (the absolute uselessness of most of the actual notifications, and the inability to filter / set precedence / classify types of notifications is a major failure of the site). G+ also suffers from one of the largest DOMs I've seen in any major website -- I've backed off using it pretty much at all, and find my browser memory footprint is vastly more bearable.
haven't newsreaders supported highlights of stuff like _underline_ /italics/, bold, multiple level of quoted stuff, bullet points etc since about forever?
I remember forté agent and thunderbird doing it about ten years ago, and I recall being annoyed that markdown differed :)
There were conventions, and a lot of (graphical) newsreaders did support automatically presenting text according to those, but ... implementations varied.
Formalizing a basic level such as markdown would be a big win.
> You didn't have rich media because the Usenet was about exchange of thoughts and knowledge
Also most (American, anyway...) clients couldn't support such large messages, since the choice of speed for most of us was 16.6, 28.8 and 56k modems at the time.
Also the only alternative for formatting content was HTML, which invited people to use weird fonts in funny sizes. I think something like markdown would have benefited the ecosystem.
I miss Usenet too, but let's not gloss over the fact that it was most definitely a technical constraint that prevented rich media; not being able to do anything much more than ASCII text did lead to a lot of useful convention, and a disputative, textual culture, but if we could've put GIFs of IRIX machines booting (and, inevitably, crashing) faster than our VMS clusters could negotiate quorum, believe me, we would've.
That's effectively a killfile. Posts are suppressed, and you don't receive notifications.
The ability to tag users (you supply whatever text you want), or friend them (you can find their submissions more easily, but not their comments) are also pretty cool features.
Usenet isn't going to make a comeback, it's a relic of a different sort of internet than the one that exists today. Though something similar may end up existing in the future, it will likely have a lot of new features (like karma or trust networking or some such) that make the spam and trolling problems tractable.
For reference, I spent a lot of time on usenet back in the '90s, using "tin" as my newsreader. I even helped created a newsgroup in the "big 8" heirarchy. There were a lot of fantastic things about those days but I don't think we can ever get them back easily, too much was dependent on the community being small.
I kind of have to agree with you. But I also don't think this is a bad thing. I'm glad I was there to see it all happen and despite the groans I may receive I think reddit (as mentioned by other commenters) is a perfect evolution of what was. It encourages small communities to exist in the form of sub-reddits which has allowed it to survive the several massive growth phases in the last several years.
Part of the reason that places like reddit and HN are still working is because, I believe, they follow that same attitude from the usenet days. It's more about the discussions and cross-pollination of thoughts (whether you agree or not). Most importantly, it helps to break through that filter bubble that looms over us all.
While I feel privileged to have seen the world pre and post internet, I'm excited to see how we will be communicating in the next 20 years.
As I get older it seems harder to keep an open mind (yes, I can be very sentimental when it comes to old computer tech, BBS The Documentary is my ideal nerd porn) but I have to keep reminding myself that many great things aren't recognized as such until after the fact.
If I'm honest with myself, I think I've read and participated in some of the most thought provoking and hilarious on-line discussion from the early 2000's onwards.
Reddit and HN can be alright, but they are a shadow of what was normal back in usenet's glory days. Some sub-reddits can be quite good, especially with heavy moderation, but they have all of the problems of usenet except worse.
Most discussions on HN/reddit have a 48-hour time horizon, if that, whereas usenet could easily support threads lasting for weeks or months, with obvious effects on the quality of discussion. Also, web-based discussion makes it difficult to get rid of the clutter of read messages and manages threading poorly so discussions that were perfectly fine when everyone was using newsreaders would today be unwieldy.
I've always felt that Reddit is Usenet 2.0. Calling it "the frontpage of the Internet" is a way better slogan, though. (Alexis said Paul Graham used that term on the WTP book tour during his lecture.)
Oh, god, it was glorious. Or at least, a lot of parts of it were. I made good friends on the Tolkien newsgroups there, back when they were the place for discussions of his work (with multiple world-famous scholars taking part, and intense debates between many deeply knowledgeable people that could last for weeks). Nothing I've found today can compare. Heck, even the huge, high traffic groups like rec.humor had a real sense of community if you watched for a while and got to know the regulars. I still miss it (obviously).
Thinking of the 90s internet makes me all sentimental.