The Early History of Usenet | Hacker News Reader

The Early History of Usenet

cs.columbia.edu

59 pointsmatt_d10 comments

Check out Aether[1] and Notabug[2] for some spiritual successors btw.

[2]: https://github.com/notabugio/notabug

I knew that the decentralized structure of Usenet was born from necessity, but I didn't realize how hard it was just to get a modem back then.

Can decentralized services work on the modern Internet? Even setting aside how spam and illegal content destroyed Usenet as a discussion medium, in its late stages it became a playground for kooks and trolls at the expense of legitimate posting. Killfiles didn't work as the bad actors could easily change names and email addresses; get them thrown off one server and they'd just sign up on another one. The only way to ban someone from a newsgroup and make it stick is with a court order - and that happened at least once.

Another post from the same blog details why the troll problem was technologically impossible to solve: https://www.cs.columbia.edu/~smb/blog/2018-02/2018-02-23.htm...

Reddit has some similar troll problems, and there are a bunch of bots people have written to manipulate subreddits to nuke trolls. It's a much easier problem for them, though, because Reddit itself is centralized. So a bot action takes place immediately instead of over many hours.

The first time I can recall anyone tried widespread cancels in Usenet was Clarinet, and it didn't work very well.

I’m always a little surprised to be reminded that Usenet still exists.

It still exists, and some groups do continue to have discussions.

For access to the textual groups, you can use Eternal September (https://www.eternal-september.org/) or AIOE (https://news.aioe.org/) with a newsreader (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Usenet_newsreaders) to see what discussions are continuing to happen.

Sorry I have to chime in, because there is also my very own nntp server with also a web interface for people who don't want to download a client: https://in.memory.of.e.tern.al/comp.misc/

There are still some people there, and talking about stuff. It's very much like hacker news, but with much less people :)

It still exists primarily for binary file sharing. Overall, I think Usenet works much better than non-private torrent trackers.

Usenet has always been like the proverbial blind people and the elephant... people uninterested in binaries are unlikely to agree that Usenet works "better" for the kind of content that it was destroyed for carrying.

Your analogy also applies to those who blame binary sharing for the downfall of text-based Usenet usage, simply because search engines, specialized discussion forums, and social media contributed much more to its death.

A big reason why Usenet is still alive and kicking is thanks to piracy. The same applies to IRC (XDCC), but probably to a lesser extent.

It used to be that every ISP ran a Usenet server. The reason why they stopped is a crackdown on illegal content (piracy and obscenity) on binary groups. The reason why almost nobody complained is that text groups were already in terminal decline.

Mutually reinforcing cycles that led to the current state of Usenet as a seedy backwater where it was once an essential part of the Internet (and the UUCP network before it).

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