Usenet, authentication, and engineering: early design decisions for Usenet

Killfiles didn’t seem to work. Even if you blocked a crackpot, one of the non-crackpots would still stupidly respond to him – a lot of people never understood “Don’t feed the trolls”. So you’d click on a post only to find out the discussion was people pointlessly trying to argue with the crackpot. The crackpot’s own posts might have been hidden, but everyone just quoted his posts in their own replies anyway.

A few years ago, after someone somewhere claimed, like you, that Usenet is still healthy, I had a look back at the group to see what it was like: still dominated by those same crackpots.

The most novel thing about usenet is that is effectively an overlay network and completely agnostic to transport. That mattered a lot in the old days, you could run a modem pool at night for instance and download the spools. It need not be a network transport even, you could use bag files and sneaker net.

It would be kind of cool to see a blockchain integration with existing usenet. For instance a header that clients could optionally verify like a Basic Attention Token or other reputation system. That would cut down on spam significantly. Maybe even implement up and down votes and revenue sharing in the fashion of Steemit.

I think this is a big part of the reason why centralization is always censorship and, in turn, why organizations desire that power when setting up yet another discussion site.

Joke aside, in the German parts of the internet there was a widespread culture of using real names, especially on usenet - at least by the late 90s.

Tried to register with x@x.invalid and got "Too bad, we won't be able to send the password to that address." Am I missing something? Do you first have to register with a valid email and then change it to a .invalid address?

Sarcasm aside, HN could have worked well as private newsgroups. I really do think there is a lot to be said for store and forward, especially when you want to file something away for reference.

We lost something worthwhile with the rise of the newsfeed model. Especially now search engines give extra marks for recency.

Since universities and ISPs began dropping Usenet service, the most popular free gateway is Google Groups, but I filtered out most Google Groups posts years ago when they became the primary gateway for abusers. Maybe things are better now, but I wouldn't know as I usually only see replies. Anyhow, the way that Google Groups formats posts is borderline abusive itself.

HN is great but on the scale of decades I can't imagine HN outlasting Usenet. There's been a very slow changing of the guard in the technical groups I read, but except for a lull a couple of years ago there's still strong technical discourse and occasional new blood. (Newcomers always chafe when regulars rebuke off-topic discussion, but eventually they see the light, or at least become less reactionary.) The big exception among the groups I read is sci.crypt, which never survived a series of flooding campaigns. After one campaign, posters like DJB disappeared completely. There were still regulars from the professional and academic communities. (Not me; I was always a lurker incapable of adding substance.) IIRC, subsequent to another flooding campaign (circa 2010-2013?) most of those people drifted away, and sci.crypt was never the same. There are still knowledgeable posters there, but there's some threshold below which strong, challenging discourse can't be sustained. You need enough collective intelligence in a group to keep everybody honest and engaged, otherwise the uninformed dominate discussion.

Some people would argue that Stack Overflow has replaced Usenet. But I disagree. Stack Overflow simply doesn't have the consistency and collective intelligence that Usenet groups had and, in many cases, still have. Which isn't to say there aren't amazing contributors on Stack Overflow, but the signal to noise ratio, on the one hand, and absolute substance on the other, just isn't comparable. I've rarely come across a Stack Overflow thread where an answer was better than what a less lazy person could have found by reading primary sources (specifications, easily discovered technical papers, etc). Whereas Usenet discourse often provides insights you couldn't easily find anywhere else, if at all. This was especially true in its heyday when some Usenet posts might rightfully be considered the primary, definitive source of truth on some matter.

I suppose part of the reason is because of the rules for discourse on Stack Overflow, which prevent it from becoming a forum where people can bounce ideas off each other, and explore and develop them. The rules and structure of HN similarly prevent it from consistently harboring the same kind of discourse that happens Usenet, though I think it does to a greater extent than Stack Overflow.

In any event, please return. Some of your favorite groups may be lost causes, but probably others are worth your while and surely could benefit from greater participation. Unless and until a real replacement comes along, one might say its a civic responsibility. Even though for many individual subjects there are better forums (e.g. web bulletin boards), fragmented and proprietary forums have real costs.

Personally, I feel a lot was lost in terms of capability of online discussion by moving it to web forums that lack actual message threading and closed source platforms. Even people who prefer email lists seem to not consider NNTP as a viable solution to online discussions.

So, everyone who says they're using usenet for pirating stuff is in at least one of those as well? Wouldn't the fact that you have to, essentially, join "a conspiracy to commit copyright infringement in an organized manner" make the legal situation of even a passive consumer much worse compared to someone who goes to public sites?

To be fair, this was true even in the mid-90s. A lot of my college peers knew of Usenet only as a source for porn JPGs & GIFs.

Couldn't the university provide you a copy of the certificate chain it uses such that you can import it into your browser (or other client) certificate authority store? Then you personally have verified the university's identity and can tell your client to trust them as an authority.

Alice can tell you, "Here's a message from Bob. His public key is 0x1234," when Bob's public key is actually 0x5678. This opens a new avenue for trolling: publish a fake key for someone else and watch all their messages get dropped.