How to Get Started with Usenet in Three Steps | Hacker News Reader

How to Get Started with Usenet in Three Steps

lifehacker.com

16 pointsrsamvit11 comments

"Usenet is a wonderful service for finding and downloading digital media"

This sentence alone makes me feel old and sad.

I agree, especially sad.

The most productive and efficient mean for discussions is now pretty much just a binary deposit for porn and copyrighted material.

I still can't believe everyone got away with non-threaded forums vs. newsgroups when the Internets became mainstream.

Also, Google had its own share when they acquired Dejanews and broke the search.

I think the two major factors that brought down Usenet are the focus on the web (i.e. most users not knowing that the WWW isn't the whole of the internet) and spam, loads of spam.

The weird thing is that mail actually managed to survive both.

I always wished that at least the NNTP protocol would prove to be more resilient. It would be a great secondary entry point for basically any online forum, similar to what RSS does for news feeds. Give me nntp://news.ycombinator.com, so that I could read and post via GNUS/Thunderbird/tin…

Occasionally I browse HN in lynx, and pressing g followed by entering news.ycombinator.com (or any other hostname beginning with "news." and not prefixed with a protocol type) results in lynx trying to do exactly that: looking for nntp://news.ycombinator.com...

But yes, having it for real and being able to browse in a properly-threaded netnews client, hide subthreads you don't care for, and never have to click on "More" only to see "Unknown or expired link" because you took too long to read the first n messages - these would all be great, plus extra geek cred.

"The most productive and efficient mean for discussions is now pretty much just a binary deposit for porn and copyrighted material."

Agreed, and definitely sad.

Last time I looked, even the binaries groups seemed to be mainly full of bots posting identical executable binaries (presumably malware) under thousands of different names per group, per day.

Although most text groups are now so dead that even the spammers have left. Maybe it could be reclaimed, if anyone could be bothered?

Once people get in there again, spamming will resume. Never mind that a lot of them are mostly in there for spamming the Google archive, not aiming at Usenet itself. Might even get them a better pagerank… I think you're actually seeing more spam in Google Groups archives than when you're getting it from real NNTP servers, as they should respond to canceling messages (and collaborate spam filtering should be pretty effective).

But few people are interested in making Usenet a better space to live in. Follow the money and look at how many sites are essentially proprietary discussion groups.

I wish articles like this wouldn't ruin it for everybody else.

They even mention the first rule! And then go on to ignore it.

Does anyone still uses Usenet for discussions? I guess I was too late with creating website for reading Usenet (just text, no binaries), something like Thunderbird Usenet reader in your browser. http://www.newswebreader.com

Why post an article from 2010 that is significantly out of date?

I remember back in the 90s time warner's news servers were only nntp://news-server/ and we could see our neighbor's computers via Windos 95/98's "Network Neighborhood".

Good times.

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