The Early History of Usenet (2019) | Hacker News Reader

The Early History of Usenet (2019)

cs.columbia.edu

76 pointsogurechny24 comments

My first introduction to the Internet, in 1990 before commercial Internet was available, was at university.

In those days FTP was common (mostly for sharing games, but also for technical docs. I adjusted an MFM drive to my controller, using assembly, thanks to various spec sheets.)

But Usenet was the killer app. There were newsgroups for everything and I consumed it voraciously. And I still remember getting a reply from someone at JPL to one of my questions. To 20 year-old me that was simply mind blowing.

Usenet fell out of favor later on, partly driven by the www,and partly because once the Internet became open to everyone, it didn't scale well with lots of users who didn't understand the conventions and social contract.

I guess Facebook is the modern alternative, but the dross overwhelms the grain.

Interestingly though I still use NNTP (News) daily. One community I participate in still makes use of a (private) NNTP server as the forum of choice. Only the lightest amount of moderation is needed, and trolls are swiftly booted.

I've come to understand that the tech matters little - for an effective online community it's the people that matter, and excluding those who would ruin it for everyone else.

> Usenet fell out of favor later on, partly driven by the www,and partly because once the Internet became open to everyone, it didn't scale well with lots of users who didn't understand the conventions and social contract.

This sounds like Eternal September [0]. I'd argue that the same thing has happened to the web. The number of people online now versus say 15 years ago is immense. The quality of discussion seems to get worse and worse.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eternal_September

That's honestly why I love hacker news. There are so many talented and intelligent people here and the site drives for high quality posts.

I'd argue yes overall the Internet has devolved into what reddit is now which is low quality discussion, Though sites like this are what makes it as awesome to me as Usenet or IRC did to me in the 90s.

Usenet wasn't an app. It was a protocol. The programs we used were, as I recall, readnews (the official program), and rn - written by Larry Wall who later created perl. Rn was a wonderful interface. Besides blocking and filtering, it has threaded conversations - much like reddit.

Im not sure I don't define Usenet specifically. It wasn't the program (I've no memory of what it was, News or something like that.) The protocol is NNTP. Usenet wasn't a term we used a lot but when we did it kinda referred to the whole News eco system. So encompassing the software, protocol, forums and so on.

Kinda like we'd use yhe term "web" today to encompass HTTPS, browsers, servers and so on.

> Interestingly though I still use NNTP (News) daily. One community I participate in still makes use of a (private) NNTP server as the forum of choice. Only the lightest amount of moderation is needed, and trolls are swiftly booted.

I really wish that more places would just set up a private NNTP server without any peering as a forum. Do people just use NNTP readers, or is there a web frontend?

I believe you can set up Web fronted, but ours is accessed via a news reader program. (I use Thunderbird.)

I've found that the people who want to exclude others kill communities just as well as those who spam them. The more virtuous they want to feel the worse the problem.

I'm sure that can happen, but it hasn't been my experience.

I’ll take spam over moderators any day.

Speaking personally, I feel like Usenet Newsgroups (quite a bit after the subject of this piece) were one of the peaks of "useful information density" on public networks. At least it was for me. Another was the heydey of RSS, when everyone published available feeds. Perhaps - if we are lucky - we are on the cusp of a third, with personal autonomous software agents[1] spidering out and retrieving dense information for us.

[1] "Boxed" for each user, instead of a gimmicked model that just feeds you crap.

I wasn't around then, but I have read some usenet stuff, and the theory of peak "useful information density" does check out.

But then my thought is - how could this be re-created?

We have the technology. And there's definitely still a lot of smart & interesting people who talk about things online.

The barrier to entry meant those who got access were likely already invested in keeping it a valuable space.

I think there must be some potential for a usenet revival. The infrastructure is all still there. The binary groups are still flowing with gigabytes of piracy and porn. With some exceptions, most of the text groups are wastelands inhabited only by a few spammers and cranks. There are a few operators who try to preserve the original vision, e.g. eternal-september.org .

It's still a potentially useful discussion system, based on open and documented standards, with no greedy corporation or psychopathic billionaire in charge to run it into the ground. I really think it could be worth doing some brainstorming to try to figure out how to bring it back to life.

Yes. If I could have one thing back from old internet, Usenet might be it. Loved the discussions and sense of community.

The closest thing I've found to USENET, unsurprinsgly, has been Reddit. But it's still a poor facsimile. I spent hours a day, every day, on USENET in the 90s. I'd scroll around the feed of group names and see things like alt.sex.bald.captains or alt.wesley.crusher.die.die.die and have to go check it out.

I haven't spent much time on Reddit, but for me, Hacker News is close to USENET in terms of signal/noise. It doesn't have the subgroups covering every topic, but for what it does cover, it's a great source of interesting information with minimal noise. The karma system seems to help a lot in that respect.

The reason I find Reddit more similar is there are near infinite subreddits and they vary wildly in quality. That was exactly my experience with newsgroups

I remember connecting in 1983/84. It was a trial by fire. I started learning Unix by using the Eunice emulator on VMS. I was doing such a good job on documentation (using nroff), that I convinced my company to buy a Sun workstation. I poured through the manual, especially the section on UUCP, and first con a connection to a local college using a modem. I was able to use UUCP to copy the mail and news software. In those days, the standard response to a question was RTFM - in other words, read the source code and follow the instructions. If you can't do that - you shouldn't try to connect to the 'Net.

So you had to slowly bootstrap yourself in technology. Once you were able to read and post news, you next needed to send email to people. And that meant you had to master UUCP mail. Unlike domains, it was a route. You had to specify each step in the relay. So you might need to specify 5 or 6 specific systems by name to reach the desired person. And hope they could find a route back to you.

Most of all - the great part of the early days was respect, and the ration of information to noise. Inaccurate information didn't remain unchallenged. If you asked a question, it was very likely the author of the technology or program would answer you. Often others would pipe in answering simple questions, so that the program creator wouldn't have to be distracted from important work.

It was a humbling experience, especially when you said something that was factually inaccurate, or technically naive. One learned to think and research before responding to anything.

Until the freshmen classes came to college in September......

Normally there was a very formal process to creating newsgroups, but the alt.* distribution was uncontrolled, and a system that had a well regulated and automated process for the creation of newsgroups evolved into newsgroup creation/deletion wars.

And then we had the first spam. And then we had trolls. And anti-spam filters cause anti-anti-spam generators to be created. And then the web was implemented.

The main thing I miss about the tech of usenet ( as opposed to the communities I've found and lost along the way) is that the most basic 3-panel usenet client is vastly superior to any web based forum or discussion system.

The splitting of the message hierarchy and message content into separate views is so obviously superior to hacker news style indenting or flat linear lists that it blows my mind no one recreates this in the modern age.

The thing I miss most is that usenet clients will track exactly which messages you have read, so when you come back to a long-running discussion you can immediately see what is new since you last caught-up with it, something which none of the newer online forums seem able to manage.

You can keep track of which posts you have read with RSS but not comments.

https://youtu.be/0W_k7WW6cdA

Whenever I think of Usenet I remember this old scene from Mission Impossible 1

I’ve missed the BBSes per se and have mostly used them to download the software to bootstrap a FidoNet node. I’ve made many long-time friends on FidoNet IRL. Hearing the sound of a connecting modem always causes a rush of nostalgia. Things were much simpler back then, and indeed personal.

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