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Comment by zafiro17 | Hacker News Reader

I'm so happy to see a post about Usenet. In some ways, Usenet is doing just fine, thank you very much. It's been forgotten by most of the world, and even as a method of sharing illegal binaries it was surpassed by bittorrent years ago. But there's a small core of users that still participate on Usenet the way it was intended: anonymous conversation with like-minded individuals, each armed with a kill file to weed out the abusers. In fact, I just posted a link to this article to comp.misc. If you're nostalgic for the old experience, go get yourself a free Usenet account at http://news.solani.org (there are other free portals, but because they are more popular they suffer bandwidth issues and struggle to support their users) and fire up Thunderbird, slrn, Xnews, tin, alpine, pan, knode, or other client. Have fun!

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Meh. In the 1990s I was active on a Usenet newsgroup for a science field. Initially, it was mainly academics who participated (and a few interested laymen like myself). But then the group began to attract cranks – and obviously mentally ill people – who claimed that they had all the answers and mainstream scientists were wrong. These cranks would post all day, every day, poking their nose into every thread, and eventually they drowned out most other discussions in the group.

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.

> These cranks would post all day, every day, poking their nose into every thread, and eventually they drowned out most other discussions in the group.

> Killfiles didn’t seem to work.

What I used to do was to killfile crossposts to certain groups, the trolls themselves, and subthreads started by the trolls. It worked reasonably well at the time.

Yeah, I figured that there might be more power to killfiles than I knew about. Still, even if you block the cranks, all those non-killfile-using good people continue to pointlessly argue with the crank, and that poisons the group spirit and it drives people away. As a member of the community, you eventually suffer from the crank’s activity even if you don’t see his posts directly.

That happens, but it doesn't always happen. Some groups persevere while others succumb to the abuse. Usenet is still so huge that it's really not fair to write it off completely.

Usenet, much like SMTP (but arguably unlike XMPP) built enough momentum before the abuse exploded that there's no reason it can't continue in perpetuity, even if individual groups might come and go. But unlike SMTP it's much more at risk of collapse if good people walk away unnecessarily.

> 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.

Usenet's not really a single entity. I used it fairly heavily from about 1997-2005; most of the groups I read then are now either tumbleweed or overrun by spam. But a couple of them are still running along happily (if a little smaller than they were). So I think 'still healthy' is pretty contextually dependent.

I run a public server, http://csiph.com. There's a salt formula linked there if anyone is interested in starting their own feeder. I'd be happy to provide initial peerage.

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.

Any netnews set of servers not owned by cooperative entities is more supportive of free speech than any single-point-of-censorship/chokepoint like a website. If a website's owners don't want to carry one's posts, or if a sufficiently organized set of readers don't want others to read that post it's easy to score the post low and effectively keep others from reading it by default. Not so easy to do with netnews where servers share posts with each other; servers that share posts will typically spread that post to another server. There are multiple points at which one can upload the post and wait for the normal store-and-forward mechanism to work. That post can be scored low or marked read by an individual, but such action won't keep others from reading the post.

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.

Usenet always struck me as having come the closest to the centralized/decentralized happy medium.

Tin! That brings back memories. I read some magnificent flamewars with tin.

Wait, it was supposed to be anonymous? :)

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.

"If you do not wan't to publish your e-mail address, you can use pseudo.address@example.invalid or any other address ending with the top level domain .invalid. This namespace has been reserved for this purpose."

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?

I bit the bullet and registered with my real email address. The email from solani reiterates "If you don't want to use your real E-Mail-address, please use an address from the top-level-domain ".invalid""

Where/how do I do that now that I've registered? They don't seem to understand that, to me, giving them my real email address just to sign up is the same as "publishing" it.

Here's one you don't need to register/sign up to use:

https://news.aioe.org/

As for Solani:

> The email from solani reiterates "If you don't want to use your real E-Mail-address, please use an address from the top-level-domain ".invalid""

They mean on posts you make to Usenet. Put that ".invalid" address in the From field on your Newsreader.

You should probably check with Solani if they display your IP address on posts though (NNTP-Posting-Host), because some news servers do.

Hmmm, I wonder if the Scary Devil Monastery still exists...

It still is getting posts, though few and far between. https://groups.google.com/forum/#!forum/alt.sysadmin.recover... . Thats an aspect of the "if no one is there, new people don't stick around when they show up."

As that one slowly became luserish, the both hierarchy was created that had a restricted feed http://bofh.taronga.com/bofh.html - that one is harder to find and as I've been out of sysadmin for some time where I could ask the right person for either a feed or access to their server... I can't say anymore.

I recovered many years ago ( https://groups.google.com/forum/#!searchin/alt.sysadmin.reco... )... crap... thats two decades.

Hmmm, some familiar names there, but yeah - quiet...

I wonder if I've still got working credentials to The Other Place?

I tried using solani, but I keep getting "connection refused". Is it down right now?

you have to sign up for an account! :)

Never mind, I tried connecting from school WiFi not realizing most ports are blocked.

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