Where is USENET? | Hacker News Reader

Where is USENET?

21 pointsscscsc17 comments

It seems to me that USENET contained a lot of quality discussion in the past. However, if you check it out today, the quality is gone and it's full of spam. Where do intelligent discussions take place today?

EDIT: I'm mostly looking for programming, math, cs research, cryptography, security and related.

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It doesn't help that Google diluted their (and former Deja's) newsgroup search by creating "Google Groups", which are now predominantly SPAM havens.

Google should add USENET-only and NNTP-only options to their newsgroup search but probably won't. They appear to have given up on something extremely useful that achieved it's apex during Deja's tenure.

1. IRC. Thankfully, dropping into an IRC channel is still difficult for casual trolls and spammers and, even if they do, IRC channels are usually heavily moderated.

2. Reddit. Like it or not, some of those subreddits actually have useful content.

3. Lambda the Ultimate for CS news. I'm sure there are similar communities which cater to only one specific subject ares out there.

4. Mailing lists. I'm told some universities have nice mailing lists, and then there are FOSS lists. Let your mail client sort out all the spam.

Look around. Google. I'm sure there are places on the web where intelligent life still exists.

What topic of discussion are you after? It could help people point you in the right direction. It's probably spread out amongst various forums and blogs these days. Personally, besides the obvious trolling from some parts of the forum, the Something Awful forums have some excellent discussions on certain topics ranging from DIY hobbies to serious hardware/software/programming subforums.

Depending on what you mean exactly by "in the past", part of the issue is the people that had usenet available to them at a given point in time. Early on, it was the rare individual that could get access to it at all, and those that could were the geeky nerdy guys (I count myself among those, by the way, just not as smart), and the ones that even WANTED to if they could were the elite of that small group.

Too, there simply WAS no such thing as SPAM (as we know it now) then.

So what you see now is largely an artifact of the ubiquity of access.

IMO.

I think that "quality discussion" was only an occasional side-effect of USENET, but that just might be cynicism talking (or the groups that I remember best). In any event, a lot of those types of conversations can be found in the comments to various blogs, among other places.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eternal_September

The OP is not looking for an explanation of why USENET declined, he's looking for suggestions for where the new best places are.

Old USENET is just an example of what he considers 'good' to be.

Are you saying my definition of 'good' isn't?

No. I didn't say anything about the quality of USENET, old or new, in my post.

It takes place in forums where people have to meet in person once in a while and thus stand for their on-line behaviour.

Au contraire! I had many very good conversations with people in usenet who I have never met in person.

Yes, that's true and I left them, people also left and are looking for new places

For example Hacker News for general discussions and Stackoverflow for programming questions

Not in those areas, but adjacent, is rec.arts.sf.written http://groups.google.com/group/rec.arts.sf.written/topics?pl...

Still the best place for identifying stories you half-remember, and with plenty of active authors and very knowledgeable readers. It does sometimes feel like the last Viking colony in Greenland as the Little Ice Age was kicking in though, surrounded by the howling wasteland that's the rest of USENET.

I stopped using USENET in '05 or so. I was mostly interested in discussion and binaries. But it was expensive (I didn't download enough movies or warez or whatever to justify spending $150+/year for access) and hard to find a decent news reader program.

I stopped using USENET in the 90s and then only searched it on deja-news for tech questions.

I do remember when Google moved the tab I got angry but as time went on I just stop caring as it had gotten more and more useless.

It's been known for a long time that USENET is of no use anymore.

Discussion has moved to moderated forums and mail lists.

:D I figured out as much. Which ones?

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