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As a programmer of over 30 years I still have never used Usenet and the reason is the barrier to entry. There is way too much friction.You need a paid (!) subscription to a provider, potentially a subscription to an indexer, plus client software. All of this to access what is essentially a pure text forum. Frankly I am not interested in jumping through hoops to access something which an "average person" would have no hope in hell of figuring out. Maybe that's part of the attraction, that only dedicated geeks will use it? |  | |
The article links to a free Usenet provider. I'm sure there are others also.The purpose for a PAID Usenet provider is for hosting binaries (i.e. piracy). You're paying someone for the bandwidth, and ignore or deal with the DMCA takedown notices. There is little to no reason to have a paid Usenet account just to read or post on pure text forums, and NOT download p*rn or other pirated content. That was really one of the two things that killed Usenet in the 2000's. One was the rise of phpBB forums, and then Reddit. The other was the seediness of the Usenet binaries scene. As the "legit" users migrated to web-based forums, the pirates made up a larger and larger portion of those staying behind, and eventually the network effort flowed in reverse until critical mass was lost. I deeply miss that old Usenet culture of the 1990's. In comparison to HN and especially Reddit, Usenet was far less reverent, frumpy, and up-its-own-ass politically and socially. At the same time, it's impossible to try to recreate that on a forum today, without it breaking down into nothing but alt-right hate speech. The 1990's was a fun and quirky little period of Internet sanity, made possible only by how small and outside the mainstream the Internet still was. | | | |
> The purpose for a PAID Usenet provider is for hosting binaries (i.e. piracy). You're paying someone for the bandwidth, and ignore or deal with the DMCA takedown notices. There is little to no reason to have a paid Usenet account just to read or post on pure text forums, and NOT download p*rn or other pirated content.This may reflect the state today, but back in the late 90's and early 00's, it was not. Even for the pure text forums, you had to pay someone. In the earlier days it was included in the ISP package, so you wouldn't see the costs. Or via your university. But I distinctly remember when my university dropped USENET lots of people complained because they couldn't get free access elsewhere. For me: I used BBS's before I used USENET. BBS groups ("conferences") were much more civil, and had much better discourse. The moderation was very effective. When I moved to USENET, it was quite chaotic by comparison. And then with the onset of spam, I went elsewhere. | | | |
> But I distinctly remember when my university dropped USENET lots of people complained because they couldn't get free access elsewhere.Unless they dropped it _really_ early, there was dejanews/google groups, surely? | | | |
Was dejanews free? And could you access it with a proper news reader?Google Groups's interface sucks by comparison. | | | |
You could post to it for free, but it was extremely clunky. | | | |
If you want to live those good old BBS days again - https://www.telnet.org/htm/places.htmI played a few games of Tradewars on one of these a while ago. It sure brought back the days of being a sysop of my local BBS growing up. | | | |
telnet cavebbs.homeip.netEveryone is playing LORD (Legend Of the Red Dragon) there. | | | |
Binaries also forced the centralization of Usenet, so that regional ISPs had no incentive to do anything but outsource it. It was unbelievably annoying to host a full-feed Usenet server in the late 1990s, and if you hosted anything less than one, people would arrange boycotts; better not to host Usenet at all.Reddit is, I think, a better version of Usenet culture than the original. | | | |
> Reddit is, I think, a better version of Usenet culture than the original.Reddit is slow, censored, and for-profit. How could that possibly be better than what we used to have? You still get spam, bots, and flame wars, but you also have a needless popularity contest with votes and mods. | | | |
Usenet was also censored. Like Reddit, much of it was a free-for-all, but not all of it.But also: message boards don't exist on a simple spectrum of "free" to "censored". There are lots of other considerations. I gave one downthread to someone who suggested newsreaders had a better UX than Reddit: that's taking for granted really basic things, like search, that were space alien tech on Usenet. Another thing people who never used Usenet but idealize it are missing as a feature is "all the messages showing up for everybody", which is not nearly as straightforward a feature as Reddit and HN make it seem. This is something Mastodon users are discovering right now, and however annoying it is to run a single-user Mastodon server and deal with message threading, it was 10x worse on Usenet. | | | |
Usenet was definitely slow (very, very slow, even), in the sense that posts made in the US might take up to 18 hours (or whenever dial-up got "cheap") to show up in the rest of the world, or vice versa. Even posts between locally-adjacent sites might take a few hours to propagate. This may, incidentally, help to explain why discourse on Usenet was generally considered to be superior to that, say, on Twitter. But YMMV.Also, Usenet was very much censored, in the sense that most sites would not even think about carrying most groups. In particular, alt.* and *.binaries.* would be unavailable pretty much anywhere that had "cost of bandwidth" or "reputation" concerns. And if you repeatedly posted abusive content to any Usenet group, you can bet that your account and/or entire site would be "cancelled" from the network pretty quickly by the infamous "Usenet cabal" (see https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Backbone_cabal). Not to mention that Usenet was the entire origin for the concept of the "killfile". Finally, the most popular Usenet hubs (say, UUnet) were very much for-profit... | | | |
When Australia joined Usenet in 1983, connections were via airmailed data tapes, updated weekly:<http://article.olduse.net/467@sdchema.UUCP> This would mean that part of the bang path for Bob Kummerfeld's email address was in fact a 747: "!sdchema!sydney!bob" | | | |
> (or whenever dial-up got "cheap")Right, but that was not due to nntp, it was due to the bandwidth economics of the times. I ran a small site that only connected once a day when the phone call was cheaper. But if you have a permanent connection largely unconstrained on bandwidth, it'll be faster. > This may, incidentally, help to explain why discourse on Usenet was generally considered to be superior to that, say, on Twitter. But yes, that as well. When a response takes at least 2 days, there is an incentive to write well and thoroughly. The instant response chat-type forums of today encourage meaningless ping-pong responses. > Also, Usenet was very much censored, in the sense that most sites would not even think about carrying most groups This is a very fundamental difference between a distributed ecosystem like usenet and a centralized walled garden. A specific usenet site, as you say, might choose to not carry certain newsgroups. That is local control, not usenet censorship. Usenet as a whole still distributes it. If you want access you can just switch to a different usenet provider. You can also run your own provider! That's what makes it so wonderful. You are in control, not some single central site. There is no central site. | | | |
> Right, but that was not due to nntpNo, but that's mostly because NNTP yet had to be invented (RFC977 is from 1986, a good 6 years after Usenet started, and was mostly used for client access, not backbone propagation, which was usually 'whatever cnews does' over UUCP). > This is a very fundamental difference between a distributed ecosystem like usenet and a centralized walled garden. Yet much closer to 'censorship' than whatever goes on at your typical walled garden today. The whole idea that Usenet was some sort of egalitarian free-for-all is just wrong: if you stepped out of line, you would lose your soapbox fast, often by an entire group/hierarchy/site being cut off. But even if it did not get that far, the last response you would ever get on a group being plonk (the sound of being added to a killfile, often side-wide) was common. Besides that, *.moderated groups were also a thing, where messages would only be published upon manual approval from the group owners. | | | |
> No, but that's mostly because NNTP yet had to be invented (RFC977 is from 1986I started on usenet in the late 80s, so my worldview always had NNTP. > Yet much closer to 'censorship' than whatever goes on at your typical walled garden today. This is not true at any level. Again, in a walled garden there is only one master, it's in or out, you are in or out. Usenet is completely distributed, there is no center. Each site and each person can choose to not distribute or see certain things, but that has no influence outside their sphere of control. My site might no carry a given group, but many others do so I have choices. I might plonk you, but everyone else in the world sees your posts. | | | |
The internet used to have a barrier to entry. That barrier is what helped ensure quality.If the only people who can join are those who are passionate enough to read a lot of documentation and jump through a lot of hoops, yeah, the quality of discourse will be better. Heck even /. Had better trolls in the day than what reddit has now. | | | |
A paid subscription is not required for the pure text aspect of Usenet. [1] It is required however to make use of the binary groups which makes sense as those servers use a tremendous amount of bandwidth even by today's standards.[1] - https://www.eternal-september.org/ | | | |
> There is way too much frictionA lot of the early ISPs, 1993-early 2000s, had free nntp/usenet services. The "friction" of using usenet was not any greater that the friction of launching an email client, an ftp or gopher session, or launching Mosaic. At the time there were many easy-to-use featureful nntp clients across most computing platforms. I remember liking MT-Newswatcher quite a bit as well as Nuntius. The UI of Newswatcher was not too different from an email client or perhaps directory browser. Screenshots from MT-Newswatcher https://smfr.org/mtnw/screenshots.html
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It's arguable that today the "friction" might be a feature. | | | |
The "high" barrier to entry does act as a filter today, but I should add that in the 1990s, it was considered relatively easy, not so different from using email; it's only with the existence of modern social networks that the access steps seem relatively difficult.P.S. For many Usenet groups, you don't need to pay anything to get access. | | | |
It's still as easy as setting up email. You have a username, a password, and a hostname for the server. Then you're off to the races. | | | |
Having been in the IT industry since 1992 - I did use a free Usenet server, probably provided by my ISP.Used the "comp.*" heirarchy mostly, discussing technical topics and answering questions - in 1996, a publisher (Wiley!) sent me a box of books - apparently I had helped one of their authors and they wanted to thank me. On-one-hand, I would like to try it again - OTOH, I think spam and/or bots would overwhelm it to the point of uselessness. | | | |
As a 51 year old programmer, you really missed out on some cool discussion back in the day. But yes, honestly, I haven't done anything Usenet in years save for the occasional Google result that lands on a Google Groups URL.Honestly it might be worth resurrecting the protocol to run your own Usenet web UI just for weekend funsies. | | | |
As someone who's spent many thousands of hours on Usenet (in the 1990s), my advice is not to waste your time. | | | |
> As a programmer of over 30 years I still have never used Usenet and the reason is the barrier to entry. There is way too much friction.Really? I'm old enough to remember when Google bought Deja, and with it suddenly came the ability to search the entire Usenet archive going back to its inception, through the Google Groups interface. Being able to search the archives of comp.lang.whatever was a great educational and productivity booster, like Stackoverflow before SO. | | | |
You need a paid (!) subscription to a provider, potentially a subscription to an indexer, plus client software.When Usenet was big, you didn't need a paid subscription. Almost every ISP included it for free. I never heard of an indexer. Client software came with your operating system, or it was built in to your e-mail client, or you could download for free. As for today — yes, how awful that you might have to pay for something. Completely terrible. It might even be half the price of a cup of coffee. Completely unacceptable to have to give someone money for something of value. Terrible. Much better to lock oneself inside the mink-lined, free, censored, AI-curated cages of the big data corps. Not thinking is always so much easier and more comfortable than thinking. | | | |
The article pointed out that Eternal September offers free subscriptions.I'm not sure what an "indexer" is, such that you'd need to subscribe to it; is that some kind of online service like Deja News? I used to just download everything that appeared on the handful of groups that interested me, and store it locally. Then I could do local searches. That "store locally" capability wasn't some bag of bash scripts I cobbled together; I thought all newsreaders could do that natively. | | | |
I haven't looked in a long time, but the last time I did look, there were any number of places you could connect to gratis, but which do not carry binaries groups. A non-binary usenet server is lightweight enough to run on the 80s Internet so the costs of operation without all that storage and retention is pretty minimal. | | | |
Back In The Day, the barrier to entry was low. Most Unix boxes had the "rn" or "trn" newsreaders installed, and VMS also had one (though I don't recall its name). It was as easy to get into as email. | | | | |
~30 years ago, the barrier to entry was minimal. There were many free news servers out there, and it was common for your ISP to offer one. Good client software was easy to find (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fort%C3%A9_Agent)And yeah, the best part about usenet was that there were fewer "average people" on there. The Internet was great before AoL connected everybody else to it ;) | | | | |
> As a programmer of over 30 years...> You need a paid (!) subscription 30 years ago (and I'd say even 20 years ago) every ISP had their own usenet feed just like they had their own email server. It's only fairly recently this has become a bit of a barrier (although as many have noted in this discussion, free ones exist so not much of a barrier). My ISP discontinued their usenet server in 2016, fairly recently. Installing a client is one package-install command away, not exactly a barrier. | | | |
I remember that setting up a server was not too much of a big deal in the late 80s /early 90s. We did it for our university. I can't remember how we federated (the word was different back then). We definitely didn't have to pay anything to the server (or servers?) we were getting news from and sending our messages to.Anyway, this is probably an even higher hoop to jump through. | | | |
Sounds like you’re misinformed.Text-only newsgroup servers are free. You only need to use/pay for indexers if you’re scouring many groups for specific keywords. If you’re subscribing to specific text groups you don’t need to search an index for the whole net. You can just scroll to the top and read what you missed since last session The barrier of entry is learning how to use a piece of software like Thunderbird. It’s no larger than email. If you figured that one out, you can figure out newsgroups too. I remember when everyone was deriding “the internet” and “email” as being too cumbersome for an “average person” to figure out, having too many “hoops” to jump through to use it. Thanks for the nostalgia, wackget | | | | |
> You need a paid (!) subscription to a providerTell us that you didn't RTFA without saying that you didn't RTFA. By the way, I wrote the article. If you've been around since before Google as you claim, you should know to RTFM and RTFA. | | | 
