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Comment by renegade-otter | Hacker News Reader

Good times. News Rover was part of my life back then.

I should note that the BINARY usenet is still on fire, if you know what that's used for, that is.

My first experience with the Internet was via WebTV, and WebTV had a gated Usenet - only the users had access to it.

It was just full of red hot, vicious flame wars. In retrospect, it was the harbinger of things to come with social media in general. Take away the barrier of entry, let the masses in without any moderation, and it will turn into a cesspool.

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I was a newsadmin back in the day. I hated the binary side of USENET. It brought nothing but trouble, and even on the technical side was a big load on the server.

I remember turning on the modem bank of an ISP I helped build back in the day, with great anticipation to learn what the newcomers to the Internet were going to be doing with that amazingly fast new T1 line I'd slaved to get installed, only to discover after 3 weeks of logging that 95% of that fast connection was just being used to download porn, from our USENET server.

Things haven't changed much since then.

Bro be acting like the motivation for getting the T1 installed in the first place wasn’t for porn… Remember what the Internet is for, after all.

The T1 was for the customers. The 128k Ricochet modems were for me. ;)

> In retrospect, it was the harbinger of things to come with social media in general.

> Take away the barrier of entry, let the masses in without any moderation, and it will turn into a cesspool.

So much this. So many brilliant forums began to die as they were flooded with arrogant and foul-mouthed 13 year olds who thought it great fun to flame everybody. Gradually each of the ancient users who had contributed so much eventually logged out, never to reappear.

That and the new breed of Moderators who actively encouraged the trolls based on "any engagement is good".

Coincidentally, i bought myself a Synology NAS this weekend with the honest intention of using it mainly as a backup device, but while browsing the built in apps, i noticed a lot of the media download and streaming apps mentioned BT and NZB... took me a couple of seconds to realize what NZB referred to, but Im not really surprised that NZB has become an active protocol again, given how many consumer services make you jump through hoops to use BT.

I ran a local NNTP relay on my home phone back in the day. I recall spending quite a bit of time filtering out a lot of the binary groups.

I get NZB but BT?

BitTorrent I assume.

in context it appears to mean BitTorrent

> I ran a local NNTP relay on my home phone back in the day. I recall spending quite a bit of time filtering out a lot of the binary groups.

There was a very nice, easy-to-use NNTP server that was intended for small sites with few users, called leafnode. It is in a mature but still-maintained state. https://www.leafnode.org/status.shtml

I ran it on a laptop so I could slurp up my newsgroups and read them on the train with tin.

> I ran a local NNTP relay on my home phone back in the day.

Another thing that was sometimes done for BBSes was setting yourself up as a 'point node':

> As the number of messages in Echomail grew over time, it became very difficult for users to keep up with the volume while logged into their local BBS. Points were introduced to address this, allowing technically-savvy users to receive the already compressed and batched Echomail (and Netmail) and read it locally on their own machines.[23]

* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/FidoNet#Points

This was obviated a bit with the creation of offline news readers (e.g., BlueWave):

* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/QWK_(file_format)

The equivalent to QWK for Usenet were SOUP files:

* https://wiki.preterhuman.net/Simple_Offline_USENET_Packet_Fo...

* http://www.faqs.org/faqs/off-line-readers/usenet/intro/

I have many fond memories of being a Point and running the Binkly Mailer.

It's all been downhill since then

I remember when the news came out that AOL was going to connect/gateway to the internet at large.

There was a concerned expectation that there would be a distinct drop in the quality of USENET posts. They did not disappoint.

It's called Eternal September. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eternal_September

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