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Is Usenet Dying?
TNLNYC writes "The Washington Post has this interesting article about the status of Usenet. It talks about the decreasing number of people using it and at the same time, the increasing amount of traffic. Overall, an interesting quick overview of the current state of Usenet." I'll note for the record that slashdot doesn't have a "Usenet" topic - thus the Spam can. My personal experience is that almost no one coming online these days even knows Usenet exists.
Death of USENET predicted! Film at 11.
Usenet doesn't have the eyecandy, or the moderated control of Slashdot. I'd rather be here in the safe confines of a page-based community.
insignificant sig
usewhat?
As more people come online, it becomes obvious that this new group of people must be either a subset or superset of the group of "non-hardcore" computer users. ie normal people. (imho). For the media, and the vast majority of the public, the Web IS the Internet. They've formed an unmistakable mental connection between the web browser, and the Internet. Most people i know don't even use traditional email with the profliteration of free Web Based email services. As a result, Usenet newsgroups get left out, which is a shame. But one must admit that web based forums, and subscriber based mailing lists have overlapping roles with the Usenet newsgroups. I hope that Usenet never gets forgotten: it would be a shame, for despite the increasing amounts of noise and spam, they remain one of the best places for help and answers to questions anyone might have in any field. (IRC being also a good place to look. Then again, for lotsa windows users, mIRC = IRC. *sigh*
We can't forget that in some cases, such clearcut technical perspectives on what is the Internet hardly matters to the rest of the world just discovering it. Indeed, i would be more concerned whether these new people coming online understand how to be polite, patient and humble when using what ever resource that involves other human beings.
Be kind. There are too many mean people out there already.
Remember "Biff posts", every September?
What about Kibo, and the world's longest .SIG file? I'm afraid he's just one more loon on the web, now.
I'm afraid that I have been a USENET lurker for almost 20 years now, myself!
My few posts were replies to pleas for help, and the occasional, well-lobbed troll posting.
I suppose that that's no different than my posting history on Slashdot, really.
"Flyin' in just a sweet place,
Never been known to fail..."
Hi, Ive been on the Net since early 97 and havent really used Usenet to get answers. If I have a question about my Mac, I go to a Mac forum, if I want to know something about webdesign, I also know where to go. Its simply quicker and easier to get into web forums. If there are not many people around, others wont get anwers. Thus, nobody is interested in posting in Usenet. Theres also too much spam around. Do those Spammers really think anybody cares about their crap? However, I think deja.com makes a good approach since it integrates Usenet into the Web. Matt
This is really sad. It kind of reminds me of how the local BBS slowly died and fizzled out with the internet becoming larger and larger. I don't know how it is around you, but the BBS scene is basically dead in my area. Most kids getting "online" have no clue that they can even dial anything but the internet. It's inevitable for this to happen to usenet too though. Spammers have detered would be posters and lurkers, as well as killing bandwidth. I don't know what can replace it.
Much better than the Spam, sounds offensive!
The maturing of the www in general, and the wealth of moderated, intelligent discussion forums available through HTML (looking at nowhere in particular *cough*), combined with the Spam that covers Usenet, means that it looks like a pretty messy medium to work with, for the bulk of people who want information. The lowest common denominator do seems do drive where the focus of net traffic is...
Usenet is much nicer to browse through than nasty web based things like slashdot. You can use a variety of clients, instead of being stuck with a web browser - the lowest common denominator.
http://www.welton.it/davidw/
Perhaps it will eventually be replaced by a system that is less prone to the problems described. Or the dead parts will need to be amputated to restore the balance. I don't think we're going to find ourselves entirely without some sort of distributed/non-centralized discussion system, however.
========
<sig>Guvf vf abg n frperg zrffntr
But you have to know where to look. There are particular newsgroups where world-class experts congregate, where the latest news breaks, etc.
comp.arch
comp.lang.c++.moderated
sci.space
rec.running
misc.fitness.weights
etc..
So all the newcomers to the 'net aren't using Usenet. This doesn't worry me in the least! The web-based chat boards are, frankly, tiresome. The SNR on IRC is near zero.
So. Us oldtimers are quite happy commincating with NNTP, thanks.
People are using browsers, and when they are through the struggle of getting a connecting running they stop doing more.
Secondly the mistake browsers with 'the net' even though it's so much more.
Im running a channel on IRC for people with depression and angst. The main obstacle is getting people to use those 5 mins it takes dwl. and setting up a client. Apparently they prefer webchats flashing 10-15 linies limited history. Go figure....
And my dad, have set up a nice mailreader..... but he's using Netscape and calls me up quite often (how do I do this or that....)...
Lastly, UseNet actually lacks a whole lot. I kinda miss fidonet. On usenet eg. it's impossible to participate in any kind of political struggle unless you are an extremist og got a NewsReader with a heavy/AI-filter.... but if you have that NR there wont be anyone left to debate!
Anyway, to sum up. For most people Web=Net. Most newbies don't know of IRC, UseNet, Talk, FTP, Gopher, Telnet/MUD... and that's why eg. ICQ have become such a success: old (cheap) wine on new bottles. When people don't know the free world of the net, it's easy to 'sell' what formerly have been freely available (and still is)....
Bjarne
He quit Usenet and now he's Swingin' the Alphabet.
ASSM: The reasoning behind my ISP bill
But, like all good usenet things, this too is moving to the web. And the web version is much nicer.
Incidentally, in case anybody's looking for more porn stories (are you listening, mr person-who-keeps-posting-porn-to-slashdot?), the best place to go -- that's right, the BEST place -- is The Alt.Sex.Stories Text Repository.
Thank you, and keep Porn alive!!!
I, for one, still read Usenet. The S/N is still high enough in the groups I read (even the ones in the alt.* sewer) to be worthwhile. DejaNews searches turn up a wealth of useful information, too.
The spammers have made me stop posting, though. Once you post to Usenet, your email address becomes instant fodder for the spambots. It's a shame, because the desire to not get spammed has outweighed my desire to be a help to the net community by sharing whatever clues I might have in a way that might benefit someone. Yet another instance of how spammers have ruined part of the 'net and made it worthless.
Perhaps most of all, the death of Usenet saddens me because I met my fiancee on alt.folklore.urban back in 1994, and we've been together (albeit long distance for most of those years) ever since. It's like discovering that the Lover's Lane where you made out with your first SO has been turned into a toxic waste dump.
Bill
Usenet is dead. Unless you have a very specialist topic (and one not related to sex), the thread you're reading will now be so full of spam, it makes it unreadable.
What is needed is a better system for news sharing. Usenet has no decent moderation mechanism (Yes, you can Cancel messages, but it's inefective).
I've always thought that a more "IRC" type aproach to Usenet would work better, with Moderators (Or OPs) for each thread, who can easily kill posts that don't belong, and even ban users/domains from threads who continusly break the rules. It would be nice if you could create threads easier, and have threads automatically die if inactive after a certain period (I.E 30 days). It would certainly make Usenet a better, more lively place to be, IMHO.
Syllable : It's an Operating System
Aren't you forgetting that *every* Internet app category except the web is following the same trend of proportionally less use among newbies than among the old guard? The web *is* the Internet for them, sad to say.
The other main services are not in decline (not by a long shot as their usage statistics make extremely clear), so who cares if newbies are slow to find them useful? If network news were any *more* popular we'd be utterly overwhelmed -- isn't a doubling every nine months growth enough?
And of course news is the main bastion of freedom on the Internet, being the only service that is largely immune to control, so it's good to see it growing so massively. I can't see much of a story here.
"The question of whether machines can think is no more interesting than [] whether submarines can swim" - Dijkstra
Honestly, I am begining to suspect that the net has very few options in defending itself against what is becoming increasingly obvious: Let the world communicate, and a small percentage of them communicate nothing but garbage particularly loudly.
Slashdot has escaped the worst of those consequences utilising the cooperative moderation system, condeming most of the spam and junk to their own little world that people using 1/2 moderation levels rarely see. Various IRC channels have managed by either being particularly unknown, or in the case of one channel I'm a member of, simply having a very low kick threshold.
Usenet similarly, has adapted in several ways, some groups are small and targetted so specifically that they rarely recieve spam or don't attract people who are liable to argue a point well beyond having lost it. Others are moderated, the IRC kick equivalent, and some users have killfiles, the Slashdot moderation equivalent.
Unfortunately, the sheer freedom of usenet is working against it. Killfiles are the responsibility of the user, and most users are not willing to put much effort into filtering. Cancelbots do a good job against the worst offenders, but even cutting the spam down by 25% still leaves way too much.
But the very worst thing in terms of junk is the timespan. On slashdot, a story lasts a day. Shit flies for a day, then its gone, consigned to the archives for people doing searches. On IRC, the conversations are too rapid and too realtime to last long, but on usenet a political or value argument can last weeks, with people reading daily, replying, branching out into huge unweildy threads of disinformation and mistakes. Worse, their persistence means that if a user who hasn't read for a week or two fires up their client, they'll see all the articles in a discussion dead days, they post, and boom it starts all over again, constant non-ending argument. it hops threads, it hops newsgroups via common users, and pretty soon your signal to noise ratio has gone to hell and you flinch every time you see a new post just in case it starts up another diatribe.
I don't have solutions, but the problem is all too clear, and for those websites implementing discussion forums, beware, such a fate is not limited to usenet.
You can't win a fight.
- it doesn't need (and prefers not to have) BlinkinGifs
- its safer to post to than mailing lists (you can spam-protect your email addr when you post; whereas that's obviously not possible on a mailing list)
- you have semi-selective control over the general lifetime of the message (if x-no-archive is set then deja and other archive engines are supposed to respect your wishes. deja seems to follow this for now, at least)
- the base subjects are reasonably well-defined yet new ones can still be created if a need exists.
and finally:
-NO SINGULAR ENTITY owns usenet. its the ONLY forum I know of that is, by its very nature, unbiased by a single commercial collective.
--
--
"It is now safe to switch off your computer."
Most new online users don't know what ftp is either, or irc or telnet...anything that isn't the www for that matter. Heck have you noticed how the www is constantly beeing referred as beeing The Internet in mainstream media and ads? And the reason is the web is the only way to annoy you with ads. Free services have no future in the corporate mind.
I have been a longtime user of Usenet and still kill a good 20 hours a week looping through my favored groups. But I am getting more fed up with it each year, not because it is tired or difficult to use or boring, because it is none of those. Instead, it has become bloated; I'd bet a good 60-70% of newsgroups never get any traffic, and the ones that do are inundated with spam. Messages expire in no time at all due to the absolute flood of spam that clogs up the Usenet servers, making FIFO actually work against the users. It really saddens me to see it in its current state, because there really is a plethora of great info to be had out there, but most people will never see it because they're driven off by the bloated waste that has attached itself in the form of useless groups and spam.
What I'd like to see is a new Usenet, a Usenet2; not like the invitation-only self titled so-called Internet2, but a new newsgroup system. I'm no ubergeek, so I don't know what would go into a project like that, but probably far too much for anyone to want to bother. But it really would be great to have a new system that is built from the ground up to help prevent the problems that are ruining Usenet.
Well, creating a new Usenet format probably wouldn't be THAT difficult to do, except for one minor little detail that screws the whole thing up: Usenet's current problems aren't caused by poor technology, they are caused by people. People create useless groups, people send out tons of spam, people don't bother to behave with at least a minimal amount of respect towards one another, people fuck up the whole works! And what can really be done about that while maintaining the things that make Usenet great, like anonymity, diversity, widespread access and ease of use? Fuck all if I know, to be quite honest, but if anyone has some good ideas, I'd love to help make it happen, because even as much as I dig Usenet, the bullshit is beginning to run a bit too thick. And it is bullshit when the casual user is being driven away because these days you have to devote a lot of time to reading even one newsgroup just to follow the topics of discussion, as newsservers are forced to push articles out faster all the time to make room for new articles and volumes of spam. And good luck finding populated groups that actually discuss the group topic. *shrug* Maybe they're right, maybe Usenet is dying.
Deosyne
I firmly believe that there is still a place for Usenet.
For one Usenet provides a hierarchy of discussion groups with the same basic rules. Web based discussion is fine for some areas of discussion. However every site has a different set of rules and is scattered over many sites. It is faily clear on how to find a discussion that pertains to a certain topic. With the web I'd have to search around yahoo until I happen upon a good web site that has a discussion forum.
The fact that usenet is not "centeralized" eliminates the single point of failure or control. If for some reason slashdot.org disappeared tomorrow for some strange reason where would I point my browser to and hit reload every 10 seconds? If I didn't like how slashdot was evolving what choice do I have other than to just leave?
I think the web and web based discussion forums are great, but there is not other better source for topical discussions. When ever I have a technical problem I always search Dejanews.
If you can't work out how to post there, then your comments are not deemed worthy to be posted.
I really don't see the problem with the vast (or is it half-vast?) majority of new users having no clue as to what USENET is: for the most part, the forums (fora?) they DO know about have a sudden plunge (or is it dip?) in SNR the minute that they get online. The REALLY funny part is that the newbie referenced in the story was none other than a Microschlong wee^H^H^Hemployee: IMNSHO MS is mostly responsible for the growth in newsfeed size (MS was one of the two large culprits in HTML mail/news).
Just because you're paranoid doesn't mean they aren't out to get you
Hell, if you want to hide and obfuscate information, just post it to Usenet. Clued in people will never find it; tough luck NSA.
Unfortunately, MS-Chat=IRC for far too many users...
This sig left unintentionally blank.
Okay, my ISP dosen't have an news server, how do I use usenet? (In linux of course..) Are there any public news servers?
After all, almost no one coming online these days even knows that DNS exists.
;-)
"The question of whether machines can think is no more interesting than [] whether submarines can swim" - Dijkstra
If ya wanna talk aging information sharing tools, go no further than compuserve.
I've been a newbie usenet reader for 6 years, and many of the comments here defending usenet, while totally laudable, apply equally or more to compuserver. Extremely low S/N ratio (because of the expense), and very high quality communities and high quality answers.
Yet who's going to try to preserve compuserve, like some urban club-footed butterfly. It was a real good thing in many of the same ways usenet was (although commercial), but good things wilter and die. Sad, but there you go.
What passes for "flames" or "flame wars" nowadays isn't diddly squat. In Usenet's prime, a ripe newsgroup would have one or two or three bulls who were so personally involved in enthusiasm and hatefulness that it was a wonder to behold. Unfortunately the candy ass wimps at Slashdot are so emasculated that it has been many a year since we have seen testosterone around here. Slashdot faggots routinely mark down posts that might offend some poor bastard's "self esteem". The web means a loss of vitality, a loss of masclinity, a loss of truth.
I never post on Usenet - I think my last post would have been in about '97 or something - and that email address got spammed out of existance
I still find www.Deja.com (or Dejanews for those who loved it from long ago) the best site anywhere on the 'net for finding something fast.
I do which they hadn't changed their interface though - having to go to another page to try and do a search on more than the last couple of monts news is pretty annoying.
Their database makes up for it, though. I think it goes back to '95 - or maybe even 94. I first stated using it in 95, I think, and I'ved loved it ever since. It was one of the first big sites using Linux, too, which makes it even cooler.
Digital AM radio baby ... W
We elders have been kicked outa the house by our kids. But in spite of the spam can schadenfreude, rumors of Usenet's death are --like Twain opined on reading his own obituary-- grossly exagerated.
This is not a signature.
Think I'll go troll some in alt.os.windows.95.crash.crash.crash now :)
It's a hobby of mine. If it weren't for trolls there I'd have never starting running Linux!
In my experience, I've found that when I've exhausted all other informational resources on the net (WWW, BBSes, mail-lists, IRC, archives etc.) AND off the net, typically books, the Usenet often comes to the rescue. The latest case was with configuring my XFree86 Setup. I found the solution on the Usenet in a few minutes and hit myself on the head for not having gone there in the first place. While I don't often use the Usenet (because there's simply too much stuff to go through), when I do need to use it for info, it has almost always been useful. It's still a valuable resource and I don't think it'll be dying out any time soon. Long live the Usenet, probably one of the most underused informational resource available. --e!- ---
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Unix _is_ user friendly, it's just particular about who its friends
Usually, I only post in the Dutch nl.* Usenet hierarchy. nl.* is binary-free and spam is actively canceled.
:-(
I won't EVER post anything in alt.*, since I simply KNOW I'll be bombed with spam. Both by email and directly from usenet.
In nl.*, I don't notice any decline in the number of users. Newbies pop up all the time, and some of them will stick around.
So, Usenet's not dead, the focus is just changing from the traditional hierarchies to local hierarchies with more control and active spam cancellation.
Still funny though that most newbies think everybody uses MS Outlook Excess to read their news, they won't even tell you they're using it when they're asking something about their software
This is your sig. There are thousands more, but this one is yours.
I can't believe most of you are using UNIX/Linux. At least, I always thought Slashdot was a UNIX site. Maybe most of you are using Windows. Anyways, how to avoid spam on Usenet:
DON'T mangle your e-mail address. It's against every fucking RFC on the internet!
I'm sorry, but I'm tired of clueless newbies saying that there's no way to get past the spam, breaking RFCs, and saying Usenet is dead. If I get moderated down as flamebait, I hope someone will re-post this in nicer words.
September that never ended
All time since September 1993. One of the seasonal rhythms of the Usenet used to be the annual September influx of clueless newbies who, lacking any sense of netiquette, made a general nuisance of themselves. This coincided with people starting college, getting their first internet accounts, and plunging in without bothering to learn what was acceptable. These relatively small drafts of newbies could be assimilated within a few months. But in September 1993, AOL users became able to post to Usenet, nearly overwhelming the old-timers' capacity to acculturate them; to those who nostalgically recall the period before hand, this triggered an inexorable decline in the quality of discussions on newsgroups. See also AOL!.
...but now, the new users are unaware of Usenet's existence. The only traffic increasing is binaries (porn, mp3 & warez, mainly).
So the influx has finally stopped! The newbies will be assimilated, as they always have. So it was, and so it shall remain...
Now if we can just sort out this spam, Usenet is back in business :)
Yours optimistically,
Martin Ling
check out PAN - the PimpAss News reader ;)
(works on linux - uses gtk)
get it at superpimp.org
w00
Many newsgroups are choked with spam. Maybe five to ten percent are actual real posts from real people, the rest are all bullshit. This is the reason why usenet is dying, spam from lame XXX pay sites and "Do you want to retire this year?" type scams. It really makes me upset every time I think about this. Surely the founding fathers didn't intend free speech to include talking so much and so loudly that no one else can hear or say anything. Unfortunately there is nothing we can do about it without running the risk of restricting speech that is supposed to be protected. Being a libertarian suck sometimes, if I weren't I'd be able to rabidly attack free speech with no thought as to the consequences, oh well...
Muslim community leaders warn of backlash from tomorrow morning's terrorist attack.
The mere existence of forums like slashdot prove that usenet as it exists today, does not fullfil the requirements for such a forum.
What makes slashdot different:
- topics vary widely and usually are alife for only a few hours or days at most
- the forum is moderated
- each topic is linked to a news story
- treads of messages can be presented to users in arbitrary ways
- it uses the http protocol and HTML for client server communication
Usenet is dying for a good reason, it can no longer cope with the requirements put on a forum these days.
Jilles
As others have stated previously, newbies think that Internet == Web, and they don't know that Usenet exists. So what? Does it really matter, that Usenet isn't a place where newcomers gather?
In my opinion, no. Usenet is a nice little service where some people feel comfortable, and those that don't can go elsewhere. I started out on BBSes back in '92 (yes, I'm a "newbie") and enjoyed the discussion taking place in various groups. Some BBSes carried international networks (RIME springs to mind) and that made us able to talk with people in other parts of the world.
When I first came online in '95, starting my college education, I didn't know about Usenet. I quickly got to know about IRC though, and #chatzone (or some other chat-channel) was my starting place. Around new-years '96 I found out how Usenet worked, and was happy to know that it was more or less like my old BBSes. Since then I've been an irregular poster to various newsgroups (mostly Norwegian ones).
I've tried participating on various web-based message boards, and there's always something I miss. Threading, ease of reading, and Gnus' incredible score-capabilities spring to mind. Things I am used to having around, things that make my everyday Usenet experience better. Not to mention that once those message boards reach a certain size it's fairly impossible to quickly read through it (in my opinion). Browsers (and the web) wasn't created with message boards in mind, I think.
The newbie/experienced ratio on Usenet is probably somewhat consistant, but those newbies are still easy to notice. I understand those who feel that Usenet has lost its usefulness because there's too much spam and clueless newbies. Trying to educate the general public is somewhat difficult, but it can probably be done (but lets not get into that discussion here).
I think Usenet is going to be around for quite a while. In Norway the traffic on Usenet is slowly but surely becoming larger. There's room for this kind of service.
That's no proof at all. It simply shows that for some people Usenet is not appropriate.
/. is moderated, but usenet can be too. The second feature that /. has over usenet is they my employer will allow http because they see a business case for it. However they don't see a business case for nntp and are afraid it would too hard to regulate/control like http.
Admittedly this is partially because
Maybe the real reason it's dying is because of the CONTROL
I hope, no, Usenet is the ultimate place of free expression (with Slashdot :)). I Must admit I have some reluctance to post since I changed my email address, I was a bit tired and angry with the spam I used to receive with my old one.
We need some automatic address anonymisers which prevent the automatic collection of addresses, as they are used in some web site, you don't access to email name but rather you post thrue an URL. This would a great service from Yahoo or Hotmail for instance.
"RobLimosAss writes The Poo Post has this interesting article on the status of usenet. It talks about the decreasing number of people using it and at the same time the increasing amount of irrelavent FUD posts being made. Overall an interesting look at how much slashdot sucks now. My personal experience at making my ass shut up by shitting just really doesn't work any more RobLimo says."
Usenet's just about dead as the PC and books. Why was this even posted ?
Noise to Signal in the case of Usenet.
I'm still working on a clever footer.
So this is going to happen again...
.au]
/. newbies: I'm talking about the one time chalanger to B news, not the other thing that should be dead too)
Funny, It seems to have managed to survive the last 'Imminent death of Usenet'.
Sure usenet has problems but to avoid thouse, I run my own news server. It gets rid of the problems of heaps of nonsense. I've got two very good feeders that spam filter before they send me news and I've got 4 feeds that basicly don't talk to anyone else. Since they are small they don't spam much and when they do, the clueless user is Located, Isolated and Eliminated.
I only run about 450 groups. I don't do binary groups at all and only a handful of alt.*. My ranking is sometimes in the 3k->4k range. [i'm looking for a good peer in
I don't think usenet is going off to the grave anytime soon. Notes, now thats dead. (for the
I recently turned off the spam filters and I was supprised that I don't get more junk. I'm getting about 4 messages a day and I've been posting using the same email address since mid 95.
In the meantime, those of us who have been using it since the 80s can continue to do so in peace and quiet.
It's like the CB craze in the 70s. It used to be a self-regulating anarchy, populated by a close knit community. Then it became popular, the common idiot came into it, made it useless, and then left. Now you still have a small number of CBers that use it a lot and it's gone back to what it was in the old days.
May usenet suffer the same fate. The world can naff off. The greater the intelligence needed to find usenet, the better for all involved.
http://auctions.yahoo.com/auction/16483283
I'm glad newbies aren't going onto usenet, as there are enough clueless newbies already using it, the last thing we want is any more.
<early morning cynicism>USENET will never die. It will just take its evolutionary niche. I believe the proliferation of information available on the WWW is mostly the cause. When a newbie posts on a newsgroup he is promptly spanked for not researching the answer before cluttering up the newsfeed. FAQ's, HOW-TOs, and knowledge specific websites abound, use them first! So what happens is that the few people that find out how to read a newsgroup are sent away until they get a clue. Is there a reason to return? A newsgroup then becomes a small group of members with not nuch left to discuss.</early morning cynicism>
There's a spider on your shoulder.
USENET Is faster, not this wasted BW with crap html, look at deja.com 40k of data for average 100byte message, and why does MS stil use msnews.microsoft.com ?
Uhhhmmmm... what are you comparing?
/. cannot even begin to carry the wealth and breadth of expertise that washes over Usenet every day. The reason they can't compete is the sheer volume of material. If you think the /. effect is bad, just imagine the consequence of every current Usenet user hitting the same site at the same time. Any replacement for Usenet must be distributed.
If everyone in the world visits the same Website to pick up their technical advice and chat, then that Website needs stupendous bandwidth, which costs a lot; which means that if it is to be provided in a capitalist environment it has to be covered with flashy adverts. Furthermore, that website is a single point of failure, and a single point of control - AKA censorship.
Usenet works (and will continue to work in the long term) because it distributes the cost of transmission of news across a very large number of nodes. Its store-and-forward method of propagation means that it is invulnerable to intermittencies in service. Each individual connection is relatively short distance, limiting congestion at network choke-points. It's easy to be selective of the groups you will cover on your own node, and, if you want groups which aren't available on your upstream node, it's easy to peer with another to feed them.
Furthermore, it's a profoundly subversive technology. It worked originally over dialup networks using UUCP; although we probably wouldn't use UUCP again, if the corporates succeed in getting control of the network backbone and deciding what we can transmit over it, Usenet would be incredibly easy to get working over other links.
Usenet will evolve of course, and ultimately will be supplanted by something else (RDF hints at some possibilities). But sites like
I'm not really at all disappointed that new Net users aren't adopting Usenet in droves. Usenet has always had a problem with acculturating large numbers of newcomers at the same time (it's always September...), and, as the people who are joining the Net are increasingly drawn from a broad, non-technical, non-academic public, the proportion who really have something to contribute (and who are able to express that something clearly and eloquently) declines. If Usenet were to dwindle into the hangout of the hardcore techies of the Net, that wouldn't worry me at all.
This may happen. But what won't happen is that Usenet will just die. Enough of the people who use it and care about it have the ability and resources to maintain it that you can guarantee it's survival for a long time. I first used it fifteen years ago; I will still be using it fifteen years into the future - not as my only information source, but as one of my information sources.
Simon, aka control@scot.news-admin.org
I'm old enough to remember when discussions on Slashdot were well informed.
Mark my words. Some day, in the not to distant future, some zippy little pin-head from micros~1 will be in your office telling you how they "extended" that "old outdated DNS system".
_________________________
It's easy to dismiss UseNet as an unwieldy, overblown relic of the times when people didn't zoom along over cable modems, viewing everything at 32bit colour on their 19" monitors. However, many people still live in that era. UseNet is enormously useful, if:
- You don't have graphical access to the internet. Yes, text-based browsers make many things perfectly usable, but have you tried using board-type discussion forums using Lynx lately? Sites such as Slashdot are usable - but when you want to rapidly check on cross-references, determine posting status, etc, a newsreader such as 'tin' beats web browsing any day.
- Secondly, a newsfeed is local. You browse articles on a local server, usually either on a campus/office network or just at the other end of your modem. I know many people praise the cheap and available nature of ADSL, Cable modems, etc, but in many places, individual high-speed access is just a dream. Take China and India, for example. What do you think is more realistic - millions of people clicking 'Read followup' in their Netscape/IE window, or selecting 'next article', thereby quickly retrieving a local article to their screen?
- Guess what. Newsreader interfaces right now are superior to anything I've seen on the web for discussion forums. They're also much faster, but that's just a snide remark. Even the somewhat crippled newsreader in Communicator beats any configurability and power that, say, Infoworld's forum's offer. This really isn't mean to be a cheap shot at web forums - but newsreader interfaces have had more than a decade or two to mellow and be improved. Sure beats the 'Submit' and 'Preview' buttons, doesn't it?
- Yeah, the binary problem is rampant. But so what? If your sysadmin has any clue as to what he's doing (and this means doing more than just configuring INN to auto-subscibe all), he'll be able to filter out anything he wants to. This specifically means binary postings, for instance. If a user desperately needs them (and I'm sure many do
:), then www.deja.com remains an option. - This is probably a moot point to many, but UseNet has become a global cultural archive of our age. From the days of clear, simple, useful inter-governmental discussions, through the university glory days, finally when AOLers became the most maligned force on UseNet, and ultimately entering our current stage, UseNet has become a cultural mirror of society. Larry Wall's postings from more than a decade ago are still *somewhere*, and the Wall Quote Archive is a damn good proof of that
:-) - Perhaps more importantly - UseNet is distributed. Yes, this means that a ridiculous lot of spam and other junk is moved around the net daily. But so what? I know that no site admin can censor what I want to read - there will always be open news servers, or even - oh dear - web interfaces like Deja.com. I will never ever have to fear that Andover and then VA Linux will mess with any freedom. I can create a new group, if peer approval is given. The people I want to talk to can subscribe to the group. Ultimate, anarchic freedom. Isn't this what the Internet is supposed to be all about - and what we're celebrating on Slashdot? We seem to believe that Slashdot is the ultimate free anarchical net community. Nonsense. UseNet is. Has been. Will be.
- I remember reading through the 'Zen and the Art of UseNet' years and years ago, my mind lighting up with the pure joy at the realisation that UseNet was truly self-governed. So what if spam innundates the unmoderated groups? You can set up a moderator, if enough people care about your topic. Even create a new group and get rid of the old one. Spammers can't always get to you, but the information will always get out to those who want to reach it.
Personally, I believe that Usenet will continue existing long after those who're predicting its death right now have gone away. Maybe it'll be a beautified Usenet, with lots of graphics tacked on top, the way Deja is trying to turn it into a 'community-based' collection of 'forums'I don't see anyone predicting the death of e-mail or the web, yet both are full of spam and useless junk. But similarly to Usenet, both are based on extremely simple principles, and remain usable with an extremely low technological investment. Everything IE/Netscape/Outlook/Eudora/etc. may throw at you, from Templates to Style Sheets to embedded video, is just eyecandy. The underlying backbone, the information, survives.
God, that was sentimental. Now if that wasn't the pinnacle of geekdom - coming close to shedding tears over the beauty of bits and bytes and a text interface...
Alex T-B
As Long as their is porn, usenet will never die
roche
Bah Humbug!
I am an avid Usenet reader, AND an avid /. reader. /. crew devised to try and keep the SNR (Signal to Noise Ratio) low are helpful IMO. /. centralized approach), but it would be an interesting challenge, wouldn't it?
Some of the solutions the
My dream would be to see an Usenet-2 (or whatever you wish to call it) incorporating some of the ideas we see here. Of course, a distributed system would be a bitch to write and maintain (as opposed to the current
The spirit of `the big company' doesn't like the internet thing. They want you to be just a dummy terminal. In the internet they are all hosted and nobody controls it.
So what they do ?
They pollute the information inorder to make it a huge data wasteland.
Usenet is one of the best things mankind has achieved. Total anarchy and freedom. You are judged by what you say and it does not matter how you look like or etc.. If you post sometihng irrelevant or offending you'll be simply ignored and thats the most fair thing.
But they 're also killing the WWW too!
Before 5 years you could search on yahoo and find interesting info. Nowadays every time i try a search I get 10000 mailing list articles, 100 commercial and totally irrelevant hits and www.linkstogo and similar crap.
So I say :
SAVE THE NET
alt.fan.cecil-adams
alt.folklore.computer
alt.tv.simpsons
comp.ai.neural-nets
comp.graphics.algorithms
misc.fitness.weights
misc.invest.technical
rec.arts.movies.current-films
rec.arts.sf.science
rec.radio.broadcasting
rec.sport.boxing
sci.math
I think that the increasing traffic is due to places like deja.com, where people hit it, and think that they are on just another website. Thats because deja does a good job of masking usenet as a bunch of people there to talk about products, for deja. Quite smart really.
I must be missing something, IMHO the web has much more spam and useless info than the Usenet. How many websites of what you consider to be useless information are there to every Slashdot site? The same principle is at work, read the useful newsgroups, ignore the rest.
Going there is like going back in time: not only everyone's overly nice to each other, but we regularly organize get-togethers, and, most importantly, when you ask a technical question, you have two or three world authorities on the subject that are more than happy to explain it to you. Just like USENET was back in 1994...
--
" It's a ligne Maginot-in-the-sky "
... but lots of people cumming online know it does exist =p
1. Striation of interests. You know what this is. One topic gets a newsgroup. Then another, then another. It doesn't stop until you have "alt.tv.highlander-the-series.swords.katanas.other .than.duncans" More groups get created, varying interests don't meet and mingle. Communication drifts off-topic and stays there.
2. Porn. So long as there are dirty pictures posted to the binary groups for free, there will be people who will download them.
3. Spam. This has been mentioned in some very good posts above, so I won't spend more time on it.
All in all, the system as a whole is changing. With the WWW usurping much of Usenet's capacities, and doing a better job of it, the glory days are clearly over. It has changed, but the fact that it still possesses a utility and seniority that the Internet hasn't, or possibly can't, achieve will all but guarantee that it will stick around for a long time to come.
---
---
Remember when "Truth, Justice, & the American Way" wasn't contradictory?
When I started with Amiga Network News, in November 1996, I was providing a quite unique service of summarising all the important discussions and postings that could be found on the comp.sys.amiga.misc newsgroup on an easy-to-access web page for people with little time or no access to Usenet.
Back in 1996, 1997 and 1998, the Amiga newsgroups were frequented by a number of very knowledgeable persons. Many people were directly involved in Amiga companies, or had access insight news via other sources. This meant I was able to present a lot of exclusive news to my visitors, which other web-based news sites simply did not have.
But gradually, most of the interesting people just disappeared or stopped posting for various reasons. After I found less and less news on Usenet, I was forced to also focus on websites as source of information. I think this transition happened sometime in 1999, after I had been trying (in vain) to get more people to post to comp.sys.amiga.misc, and had even begun reposting news items to be able to cover them on my pages.
Meanwhile, I think I succeeded in filling the gap that the slowdown of Usenet brought. I've been busy working on my site, adding my own comments system and adding other features that wouldn't have been possible if I had just kept on focusing on Usenet.
What I feel is missing though, is the informal atmosphere of Usenet. While the web is a fine place to find official announcements, or other mainstream news items, none of the sites I visit now ever managed to build such a "community", where end users, programmers, hardware gurus and company owners posted so much quality, and revealed so many interesting things.
Meanwhile, the classic Usenet has to a certain extent be replaced by web-based services such as Remarq and Deja, to an extent where some posters on the above sites don't even realise that they are not using a messageboard but a graphic frontend for one of the many newsgroups.
So to answer the question of this article ("Is Usenet dying?"), I don't think it is dying. I just think it is changing. But whether that change is for the better, or for the worse, is up for you to judge.
I used to work for a phone company's ISP department, and our usenet stats showed what everyone here could've already guessed... the top 135 groups that were accessed were "alt.binaries.pictures.erotica.*".
_______
2B1ASK1
I watched soc.culture.japan turn from a place where meaningful discussion about culture and language was exchanged by such notables as Jim Breen and Ken Lunde, to a place where 13-year-olds kept posting requests for: "HoT aSz JaPaNeeZ GEEsha CHIX!!" and adverts for asian porn. The forum died.
So you say these same people are now leaving? Allelujah! I'm going back!
PS, usenet will always remain alive because of the sheer raw cerebral power of alt.religion.kibilogy
"Reactionaries must be deprived of the right to voice their opinions; only the people have that right." - Mao
> Extremely low S/N ratio (because of the
> expense), and very high quality communities and > high quality answers.
WTF? That didn't make any sense at all! If you're going to use 7337 tech terms like s/n at least know what the hell you're saying.
I didn't have to read the article to tell you all what I think on the matter of Usenet. Usenet is dead and has been dead in my mind for quite some time now. I have not checked any Usenet groups for messages on a regular basis since 1997. I began to notice Usenet was seriously ill in 1994. The slow death march began in 1996. Just so you know I have some frame of reference, I've been using Usenet since 1990.
I don't know for sure if AOL coming online had any direct correlation to the decay of Usenet, but it was at about that time that I began to notice the decline. There were suddenly more press releases, more spam, more "Get your Green Card here" messages. The number of alt.binaries.* groups skyrocketed, mostly in the pictures.erotica categories. At the same time I started receiving more spam in my inbox. You could no longer post on Usenet without spam protecting your e-mail address because direct marketers were trolling Usenet collecting e-mails and sending out mass mailings. Thanks to DejaNews, I believe that I still get spam related to Usenet postings made two and three years ago.
Usenet used to be a fun and informative way to waste a boring evening in the dorm room, and now its just a colossal waste of bandwidth and time.
I have not checked any of my old Usenet haunts yet in 2000, and in 1999 I checked some of the old groups I used to read and post to once or twice one weekend in November, just to check that I had my newsreader configured properly on GNU/Linux and that it would get through my little firewall.
I now subscribe to a few e-mail lists and read Slashdot and visit a few web sites that pertain to my current programming interests, and I've abandoned Usenet, probably for good.
Just be sure to wear the gold uniform when you beam down -- you know what happens when you wear the red one.
Big minus: flamewars crossposted to hell and back. But the killfile can take care of many of those also.
Usenet is remarkably adaptable. In roughly 10 years I've seen it successfully handle many annoying things:
The key to its adaptability has been the presence of somewhat clued-in individuals (admins. and users) who can proactively take measures to filter out the annoyances. Only if such individuals leave will it be in trouble.
http://metalab.unc.edu/Dave/Dr-Fun/df9601/df960124 .jpg
On the other hand nowdays your friends in real life might also read usenet and if you don't have very good verbal skills and you are not winner in this fame-oriented discussion you are considered as stupid loser. You might even lost your friends at the end. So you better to keep quiet.
Usenet is de-centralised, and all articles (usually) get replicated to all servers. This makes retrieving the information that much easier.
If
"Reactionaries must be deprived of the right to voice their opinions; only the people have that right." - Mao
For instance, git.cc.class.cs2330.flame gets sometimes hundreds of posts a day. Git.unix.linux is one of the best newsgroups around for getting help with problems/questions about linux.
I think that by setting up, say, Mindspring newsgroups for mindspring customers (and advertising them) that they might be able to utilize usenet. But you need some way to keep tabs on the spammers, and terminate them to the full extent of the user agreement.
-- Erich
Slashdot reader since 1997
Hello !
I'm Web/Developper since 1992 and I need a lot of technical information each day.
With deja.com (usenet search) I found 80% of all informations that I need.
10% with google.com when I'm looing for a web site
(but NOT information)
10% with bookmark (Usefull on-line database)
Revenge is a dish best served cold. I say we send in the Slashdot ninjas..
I'm sure that's what Usenet feels like to any new users that fall into it.. All it needs is King Fausto..well, we have Kibo, I guess.
The problem with web-based forums is locality. With Usenet, as long as your ISP has a newsserver, chances are your access to newsgroup content is fairly quick, as it's local to you.
/.'s speed compared to that of newsgroup access?
With web-based forums it's different. How often have you had to wait a couple/few minutes for a busy page or a page from a far-flung country to load? The longer the page, the longer the load-time. The page you're connecting to may have a REALLY slow link, or other slowdowns may occur.
Admittedly, some of these slowdowns would affect a "local" newsserver as well, but definitely not to the extent it affects foreign webpages, or those on slow/busy links.
(The drawback to the localized server approach is that posts sometimes take a great deal of time to propagate to other servers...whereas web-based forums are updated as soon as your post makes it there and is processed)
Anyone from overseas (non-North America) care to comment on
I've never seen an online chat forum that gives me the same power, flexibility, ease of navigation, responsiveness, etc. that a good newsreader like strn offers. Much work would need to be done to supplant Usenet by the web. (I'm so sick of "click forward, click back, click forward, click back" navigation... and reloading...)
Usenet is one of the last strongholds of free speech. A place where censorship of any kind is futile. It would be a shame to let it die.
And they do. I am a member of ACM SIGART, and I have an experience with forums on web. Pretty? Kiss your pretty sister if you want things to get pretty about discussing something.
/. either, it has began suck also. The quality and hacker flavor here going down...
:) Anyway, it's the *people* that make this or that medium better for a particular use, so we shouldn't miss that. It should be the kind of medium which will distract lamers and attract and accumulate everybody who's interested and have something to say. Free speech.
I'm referring to the intellectual dimension of discussion though, not laking about the pure "news" or subjects that have a more social aspect (like "sex").
When we started the web forum, I took my time and posted some small articles there, now sitting there totally hopeless...
Whatsoever, the USENET is neither the perfect medium for such discussions. The hurd of newcomers, and the lack of moderation in many areas, causing the spam, and the lack of decent NNTP servers around the world (My ISP isn't connected to the USENET, I can only reach through the university) degrade the quality of USENET. It would take a more modern system for a new breed of fresh news and discussions. Not that I praise
Whatever, anyone interested in writing up an RFC for a whole new protocol? I have some implementation expertise (I implemented DICOM3.0), so I'd be happily writing servers and clients for that
That was my 0.02 cents...
--exa--
Usenet is the best place to quickly get tons of free porn.
A Slashdot like moderation system for Usenet.
;)
;)
(this is a rough draft)
Project Proposer: Colin Davis
Project Name: www.MyUsenet.com
Basic Project Description:
Create and publicize a newshost (nntp server) named 'news.myusenet.com' . In accordance to user's customizations, this news server will answer
requests for headers/bodies in any public newsgroup. Attached to the end of the header will be a terminator, which signals end of the original header,
then gives then gives the current rating of the message, as assigned by readers.
(Begin Example 1)
Subject: Read me
From: cdavis@thepentagon.com
Organization: little
Newsgroups: rec.arts.startrek.current
X-Rating: 3
This is the text of my message
(End example 1)
Users will log in to the NNTP server, which then only sends the headers which meet their preferences.
Explanation of Ratings
Users will be able to post to a pseudo-newsgroup named 'alt.myusenet.ratings'. (Cf. alt.config). The news server program would accept a post to the
news-group, not post as usual. Each message is parsed by scripts, and acted upon. Each message contains either in the subject or the body the string
"message idnum rating +1" or the string "message: idnum rating -1". If the string appears twice, the first case will be used.
(Begin Example 2)
Subject: (no subject given)
From: cdavis@thepentagon.com
Organization: little
Newsgroup: alt.yourusenet.ratings
message rating +1
(End Example 2)
The news server will then apply this rating to the existing average for each message and modify the header, as explained above. Users will be allowed to
rate one message per 50 messages in group per day.
Explanation of Website: www.myusenet.com
On the website, users must create their accounts for use of the system. These Username/password accounts are both to verify identity, and so establish
preferances for message download. Examples of preferences may be:
(Begin Example 3)
Download only messages with a rating of at least
: download all messages(*) 0() 1() 2() 3() 4+()
Download replies with a rating of
: download all replies(*) 1() 2() 3() 4+()
Number of generations of replies: __10__
Limit: Only this many messages/day/group.
(*) no limit
() Limited to __500__
Chosen by time (*)
Chosen by rating ()
x-no-repub=yes
(End Example 3)
By default, My usenet will honor X-no-archive=yes, and not republish these articles. If a user wants a message to be carried over on to the myusenet
system, but archived on a system such as Dejanews they may add:
x-no-repub=no
to their message.
If a user wishes Dejanews to archive their messages, but NOT my usenet, they can affix the header
x-no-repub=yes
to their message.
Additional Explanation:
This system is not terribly confusing. We will assume by default that the people who do not want their messages archived will also not want them carried
over. This can be overruled by using the new 'x-no-repub.' header.
In order to incourage growth of the system, the system will placed under the GPL. This will incourage porting and rapid adoption.
Servers wishing to mirror the rated pages can connect to a secondary news server, use a username/ password issued via the web page.
Servers wishing to allow ratings to be posted to them may log in to the secondary news server, and submit a batch headers. A minimum time length
between batchess must be specified.
Colin Davis
--------------------
If you would use Usenet, then you would notice new users to Usenet (they do what new users to Usenet have done for years...). If you don't use usenet, it's easy to reason that no one else does either. What a lot of people don't think about are the other usenet news groups, for example, the entire bugfix discussion for Opera (and all the other opera discussion areas are all usenet based. (The name of the news server is news://news.opera.no.)
Moderator. Please moderate this article down.... Oh wait you can't do that... ;)
-----
No Zen is good zen
USENET was quite fun, but I suppose most users now can accomplish their needs for communication through ICQ, or Quake or something.
USENET won't die, but having it fade away is a bit sadder..
free speach
Did you mean: free speech
The porn is propigated by binaries, get rid of binaries NOT usenet.
The daily gems are still there, thanks to Glew, Stern, and others, but the newsgroup is slowly dying because of dozens of rude (off-topic) cross-postings each day. Add the recent ad hominem brawls, the homework question threads, and it's not such a nice place to hang out any more.
I disagree that Usenet will remain popular. My main reasons are:
:^)
*complaints I've heard from countless sysadmin types about bandwidth requirements
*SNR: the last few times I posted to Usenet, and this was in Linux forums, I received about 300 junk emails *apiece*. You might argue that I should use a false email, or that I should add NOSPAM to the address, but it's difficult to get people to cc: me if I do this.
*SNR Again: I checked out the forum for porting Mozilla to MacOS X (what a disappointment: all the development is in Yellow Box, not OpenStep. So much for a GNUstep Mozilla...especially with that atrocious cross-platform toolkit...anyway...) and of the 300+ messages, I'd say around 250 were spam. Really. That, and the development group had switched to a private email forum. Which brings up my next point:
*Many projects/interests have set up non-USENET (i.e. email/Web/combo) systems so that a tighter leash can be kept on a forum. A good idea, IMHO. This, of course, is a disadvantage for those who don't have the equipment, but companies such as egroups.com are filling the void.
Stating on Slashdot that I like cheese since 1997.
What confuses me more than the "impending collapse of Usenet" is the whimper which gopher died. Try as I may, finding even a mention of it anywhere is next to impossible. What happened?
If I could only live my life with my threshold at 4...
Perhaps it's time to create a strictly moderated Internet community. People join and are identified by some piece of verified information, such as their ISP account information. Then, they can participate. If they make it clear that they are interested in disrupting the community, their access is removed for some (long) period of time. If they offend repeatedly, they could be banned. Nothing would be anonymous, and spam would be minimized. "Usenet II", perhaps. ;)
... that ISPs threatened with a UDP (UseNet Death Penalty), like @home.com, come groveling for forgiveness faster than Pauley Shore movies go to video? Evidently enough of their subscribers care about UseNet access, or they could thumb their nose at the UDP with impunity. That UseNet use isn't growing as quickly as the net.population as a whole should not be a surprise. Those with the technical wherewithal to appreciate it are already here and have been for many years (for the most part). Though I'm always happy to see more people in my genealogical and Shakespearean newsfroups, the traffic in each is quite sizeable now, and I see no evidence that they are declining in any way. And both have legions of web-based counterparts, with which they co-exist quite nicely.
The problem with declaring it dead, is that the controllers are still using it. Just go to comp.dec.sys, or comp.unix.sun.admin and see useful posts, or ask questions of people who have answers.
A number of Universities use their news server to post class info. There are groups of individuals who do use the usenet for discussion like it was originally (see some of the groups in alt.books.`insert author here`)
I laugh at articles like this normally, but it gets me because newspapers are still read by people, and reporters are getting sensationalist to try and sell papers in an increasingly digital/TV world.
> Personally, I believe that Usenet will continue existing long after those who're predicting its death right now have gone away.
.
:)
/nostalgia{and you could read the entire newsfeed for all thirty newsgroups in two hours}. However, as the influx grew, it didn't work any more. The solution was to aggresively forward to abues@.com.
:)
Hmm, I just ran into a limitation of lynx--I can't break that quoted line. But itstill beats thetar out of netscape for reading things . .
Anyway, the Imminent Death did occur. Most of the usenet was nukedinto oblivion and rendereda wasteland ofspam.
However, some groups survived (Including the two that I care about
In both cases, it was due to agressive reporting of any abuse or advertising. The days when newbies could be flamed into compliance wiht nettiquette are gone (and seem to have ended before "newbie" was regularly used in this context). That worked when the established population was quite large compared to the newcomers, and it took a bit of effort to connect
A few groups survived. Many more didn't.
Ooops. I said the two groups i cared about survived. That's not right. Two ofthe three groups survived. The third got overrun, and the old regulars formed a mailing list. Then that became popular, the new folks got hostile about our culture (the amount of off topic stuff), and the old core formed a closed mailing list.
hawk, who really can't be old enough to be this nostalgic about the good old days
Slashdot is a web forum for one main reason, so that they can control it and display banners.
/. was on the public network (not running their own server) then they'd be bound by public opinion. Also, as /. owners have said, they considered a Usenet interface, but didn't because they rely on banner ads.
Usenet is more democratic, if
I don't read Usenet much anymore, in numbers of hours spent browsing, but when I do, I can almost always find the answers I need. Web pages are too static, and web discussion boards are rarely as full-features as newsreaders, which allow decent searching, threading, killfiles, etc.
Well, to introduce myself, I will only say that in '92 became exposed to the internet for the first time. I fondly remember Usenet just before the coming of the Eternal September...Usenet overwhelmed me with information, ideas and thoughtful commentary. I was actually AFRAID to post because I knew I didn't know 1/10th what other posters knew....I sat, I read, I lurked and I learned.
Then, things changed. The coming of the Eternal September wasn't a sudden event, but a gradual force coming from many sides...not just AOL, but Compuserve, Delphi and other large services (for a time I thought the 'Delphoids' were actually WORSE than the AOLers). At first it was just that AOLers and Delphoids didn't know the difference between their own on-line community and Usenet...AOL didn't allow them to see any difference. Lots of great newsgroups got flooded with infuriating cluelessness that never abated. The era of people 'sitting, reading, lurking and learning' was over before 1994.
Then, in '95 two questionable lawyers, the infamous (infernal?) Canter and Seigel decided they would try to make a fast buck at everyone else's expense by sending the first major SPAM around the world...the Green Card Spam that sparked a thousand bad ideas. No, it wasn't the 'first' time someone had spammed...I remember the somewhat humourous "Global alert for all-Jesus is coming soon!" spam from before C&S, but this one made all the difference. As C&S arrogantly pushed their agenda forward (anyone remember CyberSell.com? That was the first major spam domain.) they published a book (now languishing in bargain bins everywhere for 99 cents) called "How to make a fortune on the information superhighway". The floodgates began to open and we were deluged with spam.
Suddenly, server hard drives were filling up but the amount of meaningful discussion was going down. Posts were getting lost due to the vast amounts of garbage being shovelled down the pipe. People started looking elsewhere...and that's where the web stepped in.
Fast forward to now...what's left? Even the most academic newsgroups have degenerated into worthlessness. Sci.astro.amateur--formerly a place for amateur astronomers to chat--is now a flameboard. I asked a question about a damaged telescope and got an entire thread of ignorant flamage. I knew I was wasting my time.
And what of Slashdot? Heh, I remember when this site started to experience it's own Eternal September... 'round the end of '97 I believe. All kinds of garbage was piling up in formerly clueful discussions (idiots like Meept and other random trollers started polluting this board). Now look at it...with all this elaborate moderation, what has been accomplished? Moderation didn't save the Usenet, and I see increasing abuse from neo-AOLers and neo-Delphoids further diluting the once clueful chatter that was once here. And moderation doesn't carry the spirit that Usenet had in the past...I guess nothing will ever again, because the internet is now open to anti-social morons of every flavour who just LOVE to shit on the common microphone.
Regardless of what anybody else says, here are some real world statistics.
2 and a half years ago we started a small mom/pop ISP in a small town. Started up with 12 analog 33.6 modems connected to a terminal server. As most startup ISP's do we outsourced our news service. We purchased 10 concurrent connections for $50 a month. Two and a half years later we have 204 phone lines over 2 POP's, 1200+ paying accounts, and guess what? The same 10 concurrent connections to Usenet for $50 a month. I am a nightly reader of Usenet and have never hit the connection limit, and I have never received a complaint.
Despite a fair amount of growth and an average increase in online time accross the board, Usenet is the ONLY service we offer that we have never had to increase or upgrade.
What does that say?
Sigs are awesome huh?
"My personal experience is that almost no one coming online these days even knows Usenet exists. "
True enought, but I think it's important to stand fast against the always tempting pseudo-democratic ideal of considering all opinions equally valid -- Specifically, the assumption that those who 'do not know' are 'more representative' and hence a indicator of the future.
Everyone is a newbie once, but not for (one hopes) very long. Newcomers do not determine the future -- especially a 'Net fluency approaches telephone fluency.
We shouldn't forget that one reason for its early popularity was that it was 'mail-like' at a time when 'mail' was the key to the learning path. Newbies used to advance to usenet, FTP, telnet etc. (the order varied) in order of divergence from the mail paradigm.[Gopher, etc. changed akll that, by making file-based access]
Yes, usenet has advantages over other modalities (decentralized, low bandwidth) -- but absent a gov't/commercial crackdown, 'decentralized' may mena little to end users, and 'low bandwidth will mean equally little, when everyone demands fat pipes for their other internet access, anyway.
That does not mean USEnet is forever. USEnet depends on the number of experts -- not newcomers -- who use it extensively. It will survive as long as its knowledge- and thought-base does. [Several posters have complained that it can be hard to squeeze some types of answers from the Web vs. USennet, yet the very observation suggests that *even they* turned to the web first!)
The broadcast and community functions are well-served by Web-boards and listserves (and will be even better served in the future, as tools evolve (aided by open source) to make the Web-board experience equal or exceed USEnet. (remember what a pain it was to search usenet before DejaNews?) The best demonstartion of this was the evolution of the newsreaders themselves
I am afraid that, absent a gov't or commercial 'crackdown' on websites, USEnet's decentralized nature will not be a potent 'selective pressure' in the evolution of the internet. Its efficient use of bandwidth is unlikely to be a factor at all (Users need 'fat pipes' for their other Internet use, so they will scarcely notice the difference, espcially since newservers are increasingly overloaded 'lower tier' equipment)
If other once-avid USEnet regulars (and subject matter experts) don't follow USEnet anymore (mea culpa), it will die. Already, the greatest achievement of USENET -- its library of FAQs -- is becoming out-dated in many subjects.
If you can go to bed, knowing you did a valuable thing today, you're very lucky. If you can't... it's not bedtime
The recent (?) flood of activity on the 'net in general has brought massive amounts of traffic -- new users who really know nothing about computers, networks, or the history of the Internet. These people have short attention spans, and are interested only in bright, shiny, flashy things that catch their darting eyes. Usenet involves reading and writing. Your average, typical AOL user or someone who just got a new pee-cee from Wal-Mart is certainly not likely to be interested in *reading* anything.
I don't know if this is simply a reflection of the state of American society in general (since the vast bulk of Internet usage still originates in the U.S.), where intellectual pursuits -- even to the extent of engaging in discussions on a newsgroup or BBS -- are generally not considered worthwhile.
Even so, despite another "Death of Usenet" warning, the newsgroups are STILL growing -- activity is flourishing, even if more and more of it consists of binary traffic. The "classic" BBS-style newsgroups will never die as long as people have some desire to participate in a discussion with a group of others who have a common interest.
One good thing about all this is that new Internet users (and quite a few old ones) don't flock to Usenet, thereby creating massive amounts of traffic -- it's bad enough trying to sort through all the garbage out there now.
As an aside: since the author of the article mentioned "porn" and "MP3" in relation to Usenet, how much do you want to bet that you'll start seeing more articles from various sleazy reports detailing the "horrors that take place on Usenet discussion groups", and the inevitable "censor Usenet" cries going up from the politicians....?
-- Michael Maxwell
Add into the mix, MP3s. I've virtually given up on the hotline scene with all the friggin banner servers. Hotline servers also generally have narrow tastes, except for some private servers. I get 80% of my music off usenet these days. About 2-3 GBs a month. So I can understand that traffic is up. Other newsgroups I frequent besides alt.binaries.sounds and alt.binaries.pictures are rec.auto.makers.vw alt.audio.equipment rec.video.dvd alt.audio.minidisc all the macromedia newsgroups I get alot of relevant information via these groups, information I haven't been able to find on the web yet. People I work with, generally have no clue about usenet. I ran into one marketing person who had to do some research on newsgroups. Her narrowminded impression of usenet was that was a club of pedophiles.
Of course, it seems like 99% of the users don't even know that Usenet exists. Most of the 1% who do know that it exists aren't interested for various reasons, and prefer IRC because of its immediacy.
This isn't really a good thing, because as others have pointed out previously, Usenet has some things going for it that neither IRC nor Web-based discussion boards have. Unlike IRC, it's asynchronous and persistent. Unlike Web-based boards, it's both centralized and distributed. It's centralized in this way: If you have a question on hardware compatability for Linux, you can easily figure out that you should go to news:comp.os.linux.hardware. On the Web, there's no one place you could go, and you'll spend a lot of time chasing pointers. And of course, it's distributed over N local newsservers, making it that much quicker to d/l your alt.punk fix. And unlike Web boards, the protocol is standardized and the interface is customizable.
If the text-only nature of many Usenet discussion boards scares people off, good. If people can't feel comfortable communicating using plain text, they should probably stay away from computers altogether until someone comes up with a telepathic user interface....
Give a monkey a brain and he'll swear he's the center of the universe.
`Usenet' is not really correct terminology nowdays. There are many newsgroups which are not part of Usenet. Newsgroups are the *only* reliable, and *interactive* source of information available on the net right now. Where else can you get advice from world-class experts on virtually any topic? comp.lang.c, comp.unix.programmer, comp.os.linux.misc, sci.math.. and the list goes on. All of these are filled with regulars who know more about their topics than everyone else. Usenet == Knowledge. Have you ever tried asking a question on IRC? You're not going to get a real answer from a bunch of script kiddies who are idle 99 percent of the time. The only other real information source other than newsgroups is mailing lists, even though the two are usually closely related. The conclusion is, newsgroups (or Usenet) is the only place where you can ask a question and almost guarantee a reliable answer. Too many people rely on Newsgroups Let IRC die, leave me my News.
-- developer_fuze
The only thing that worries me is, it looks like it might be a breech birth, full of extra pain and difficulty. At least one major ISP has announced it has no plans to participate. Also complicating the transition will be the fact that Usenet II requires a valid e-mail address to post, meaning that spammers with read access can still do what they do.
Then again, in its early days, Usenet was often an unauthorized service provided by site admins while management turned a blind eye.
-- Old Man Kensey
Spam has killed usenet as we know it. I still use deja.com to find techical answers (and the Linux-oriented groups are still pretty good). More and more of the spam free content are on private news servers (Redhat, Netscape, VMWare, Symantec) that provide product-specific information.
There are still some groups out there that are worth reading-- anyone else follow the insanity of alt.fan.keanu-reeves and the evil self-appointed moderator.
/. should take note--the crap that made usenet "uselessnet" is taking over here, too. The price of popularity.
---
To most people, The Internet is The Web, or more accurately, AOL with a web connection.
How many people have heard of Gopher, Archie, or Veronica? I just sold a client a gui FTP client because claimed that he "just couldn't" use an FTP command line. Heaven help me if I'd had to explain Telnet.
And what ever happened to the old Internet Scavenger Hunt (circa 1993-1995) where you had to use any and all net resources to solve the questions?
Oh well, I sound like I'm in old fogie mode:
"Kids today! Why, when I were a youngster, we had to bang two rocks together to get ones and zeroes!"
Mark Edwards
Proof of Sanity Forged Upon Request
it would work better being pruned a bit
The spam put the dagger in its back and the online forums finshed it. All you got to do to revive it, is give it some nicer graphical portal. With all the porn which goes around in it, it's a sure success! Drik
Usenet is by far the most powerful communications medium ever devised by humanity. *Nothing* else comes close to bringing so many diverse people from all over the world together to share ideas.
AFAIK, uploading binaries in most news readers automatically sets the X-NO-ARCHIVE flag, and for good reason! .Heck, I changed my user info on /. to a domain I own but won't have time to set up until March. If people really want to contact me personnaly on USENET, they can ask. .nospam.interlog.com, so I'm covered either way!
I don't know about Deja, but I bought a subscription to SuperNews simply because a lot of binary groups on my ISP never got complete postings.
I don't have a problem with spamproofing my email, esp. in USENET. I use a whole other personna, as do most of the regulars in ABSMP3 that I talk to
Also, my 2nd ISP set up procmail to automatically delete anything coming to
Pope
It doesn't mean much now, it's built for the future.
-Legion
Any comments?
Paul.
You can still experience the old-fashioned flaming. Just go over comp.os.os-2.advocacy, look for a post by Dave Tholen, and disagree with him.
You can make it last as long as you want, too, just keep on replying.
Exploitation is the key to USENET's success.
icqqm [ICQ:11952102]
As old groups become talked out, or invaded, new groups are added or old junk groups suddenly come to life.
Here are some stats on the most read groups (according to one medium newsprovider):
http://www.newsadmin.com/top100reads.htm
Usenet continues to grow, and thrive. It's over 100GB a day now, and over 1 million articles.
Size of Usenet Stats here:
http://newsfeed-east.remarq.com/feed-size/
Although a lot of that is MP3, Movies, Porn and Warez, the number of text messages continues to soar as well, over half those messages posted every day are under 20k.
Message size stats:
http://www.newsadmin.com/cgi-bin/msgsummary
Dejanews is still the best source of information for me, blows away any sort of web search engine. The old Dejanews interface is aailable at:
http://www.exit109.com/~jeremy/news/deja.html
As for SPAM, it's become a virtual non issue if you have a decent news provider.
Usenet SPAM stats:
http://www.newsadmin.com/spamreports.htm
Sure there are the occasional wars and attacks on the usenet infrastructure, stuff like insane number of jobs posts, the clueless cable modem users who post the full Quake3 CD image a few times in one day, the superceeds, forged cancels and so on. But usenet is big, DAMN BIG... it can take a lot of punishment, there are sizable companies throwing mountains of hardware at the problems to keep their paying customers happy.
Usenet may be dying out among some users, but at my university (CMU), newsgroups, both internal and external, are much used and well-loved, by newbies and experienced users alike. Most of us recognize that the newsgroup format is very well suited for the quick dissemination of information, as well as for the ensuing discussion. Occaisionally, someone will try to suplant the newsgroup format with a web-based discussion system, generally with little success. I would venture that newsgroup systems are similarly important to other universities, even those that are less technically oriented than CMU
---- I'm going to lead you kicking and screaming, giggling and laughing into the future.
There are lots of reasons why use-net will remain as popular only as it was, only because of what it was, because of money... how mant people they can get in, in a month, and in our part of the world, (australia, that's how it seems)... I wish so many ISP's were'nt interested in cash, and cash only, but thems the way it goes....
VK3TST
-- "People aren't stupid. Usually." -- jd
Some hotshot Open Source programmer is going to get it in his head to write a USENET-like system that brings Slashdot-like, user-moderated discussion forums to the Web in a USENETish decentralized way. When this happens, USENET's only use will be as a mirror for this service.
Why? Well, imagine if any web site that wanted to could plug in "the global discussion forum" for their pet topic and actually get more than the handful of posts that most sites get to their talkback areas.... This would lead to sites everywhere hooking up, and probably dozens of Deja-like services for indexing it all.
All you need is:
When this exists, the last reasons to use USENET will evaporate.
I'm going to dust off one of my favorite soap-boxes, and try to introduce a few people here to a fond place in my memory. It's called FidoNet
FidoNet is a network of independent, dial-up bulletin board systems. You connect with a modem to a PC running in some guy's basement. Everything is text. "Graphics" means color text with line-draw characters. Almost none of these systems are connected to a permanent network other then the one run by AT&T. Every night, all these BBSes call the BBSes in the next towns over, and exchange mail and files. It isn't far wrong to say FidoNet was designed primarily to cheat the phone company.
For a long time, this was the only way for someone like myself, living in rural New Hampshire, USA, to get "online". The Internet was something to be found at universities. But FidoNet was everywhere. It had over 40,000 nodes when the Internet hit the big time and started killing it off. It's still alive, but slowly dying out as the 'net makes it obsolete.
What does this have to do with anything? Well, FidoNet had open discussion forms, like Usenet. Fido's "newsgroups" were called "echos". Like Usenet, FidoNet was largely self-regulated. The "coordinators" were a loosely-knit group of system operators who tried to keep everyone on the same sheet of music. But, unlike Usenet, Fido had controls in place to keep things like spam from getting out of hand.
Every Fido echo (discussion group) had a moderator. Not like a Usenet moderator, but more like an IRC "op". The moderator was responsible for keeping the echo in the echolist -- if noone cared about an echo, it would automatically remove itself in about six months. Moderators were free to implement whatever policy they chose. Anyone was free to start their own echo if they didn't like any of the current ones.
The big thing was: People were held accountable. If someone started making an ass out of themselves, the moderator would warn them. If the twit didn't listen, the moderator could mail the sysop of their board and get them removed from the echo. If the same guy kept getting kicked out of echos, the sysop would generally cut their echo access entirely.
But wait -- it gets better. If a particular board was a frequent source of twits, spammers, and the like, a coalition of moderators could contact the local network coordinator (NC). The NC would warn the board, but if it did not improve, it's FidoNet feed would be cut completely. There were ways for this to progress up the chain of command so that entire networks (local areas) could be cut.
If you are used to the loosely regulated anarchy of Usenet, this seems drastically different. But it did work, for the small population of Fido at the time. In effect, FidoNet has a cabal, and is better off for it.
Of course, we'll never know for sure if FidoNet would have scaled as well as UseNet has (and Usenet scaled, just not as well as we'd like). However, a system like FidoNet's might be something to consider for those looking to "replace" Usenet with something "better".
*climbs back down off soap-box*
Just my 1/4 of a byte. ;-)
dragonhawk@iname.microsoft.com
I do not like Microsoft. Remove them from my email address.
Yes, USENET is dying. It's nearly totally useless at this point. If we shut down all the news servers and turn off all the groups the amount of bandwidth and processing savings boggles the mind.
---
--
If I actually could spell I'd have spelled it right in the first place.
In the version of Lynx I have, you can edit the text in Textareas with your default editor (defined by the $EDITOR environment variable) by typing Ctrl-V e.
I think it would mean that the Internet had completely succumbed to Banner Ads, SPAM, one-click shopping, TV (streaming Video) and other nonsense. It would mean that the Internet is nothing but a commercial vehicle.
That's the wonderful thing about Usenet. It connected people everywhere with similar interests and there was no question about commercialism.
In a way, Usenet was a "free ride" for people to connect without paying anything. Maybe everybody pays in their ISP or for supporting institutions (like Universities) that support Usenet, but with less interest in Usenet will this be supportable? I'm not sure the world of the future will be so kind to those people who just want to connect.
Maybe it's time for subscription-supported discussion and Web sites. Adbusters is perhaps in the vanguard here. I'd like to see other such media with less of an anti-pop-culture theme, to discuss all sorts of subjects of interest.
There is a place for publicly supported media. Even with their political slant, I find NPR to be the best source of News and discussion on the Radio.
What really happened to cyber-cash initiatives of a few years ago? I know they pretty much died for lack of interest, but I'd sure like to be able to read interesting articles and pay some pittance for each article.
-Jordan Henderson
I think that something that would be quite usefull to anyone who likes the text-only part of usenet and doesn't appreciate the spam/ignorant newbies type stuff (seems like most of /.) would be a newreader that is text only. Not the traditional text only, but also taking any article that contains <HTML> or other tags (I haven't bothered looking at what most HTML posts use) and just throws them out. Don't bother to cancel them, just not show them to the user. Anyone who wants to get a question answered by some of the people they see posting would realise eventually they can't post HTML. Spammers would probably not drop to text only because it seems most of them rely on graphics and stuff to get their point across. If someone wants to refer to something just post the text only URL (no HTML link) and people can use that. No unwanted banners, tracking, etc.
IMO, because the reach is just a bit too limited. I'm not saying they need to relax the rules, necessarily; I'm just saying that the fact that many otherwise clueful people don't even know Usenet II exists suggests that the strictness does have a negative side effect.
I'm a fairly long-time Usenet user (since 1990), but I don't use Usenet II, because it's just too restricted.
New XFMail home page
I've heard all week. Moderate the above post up please (I can't, because due to my strong feelings about the state of moderation on slashdot, I refuse to get an account, and I refuse to moderate at all. This might make me change my mind.).
And if you think the extra load from this choice of moderation is going to bring slashdot to its proverbial knees, simply do away with meta moderation - it won't be needed once you can ignore the "troll" moderators (ie. the people who mark down posts 90% of the time, rather than boost up the good ones. A good moderator works the other way around.).
Just saying you used to use USENET these days dates you well enough! ANYWAY, your definition of USENET made me fall out of my chair this morning in my still drunk from last night state. You rock. Man, I remember when usenet had ~500 news groups and I thought that took for god damn ever. The flame wars were the awesome, espeically in the alt.sex areas! It used to be a really cool place to meet people until like '91-92 I think. About all it's good for now is a place to get free smut sometimes, too bad because I really prefered that interface to the lame ass html IU's that are out there. cheers!
Before I bothered with this web stuff, the Internet to me was archie, telnet, ftp and USENET.
If I was looking for specific information, I would first find the newsgroup(s) related to what I was looking for, ftp to rtfm.mit.edu to look at the FAQ, if it existed, then lurk lurk the newsgroup to see if it was being discussed. Failing that I would post a question and it would be answered in 24 hours.
At that time, spam was non-existent. Traffic was low enough that I could read all of my subscribed newsgroups every day, as most of the posts were informative. The rest were flames, not spam.
Then I broke down and started using HTTP.
I remember a few years ago, I went on alt.comp.hardware.homebuilt and saw somebody ask a question which had not yet been answered. I wrote a detailed answer to the question and posted it. I then got an email from an automated anti-spam program which had deleted my post, as it thought is was spam (I am still unsure what triggered it).
I gave up.
Nowadays, I only subscribe to local newsgroups such as nf.wanted, and the groups for my cable modem ISP. They are low traffic and informative with minimal spam.
Sci.electronics.* is pretty much a writeoff, IMO, as are a lot of other "world" newsgroups.
Nowadays, I subscribe to mailing lists instead. They are much better, I think, for handling spam. Sure, I get ~250 email a day, but I can go through them quickly, and it sorta forces me to read them, because I can get lazy on the newsgroups. I can also feel safe in using my real email address without the threat of spam. I hate those "user@NOSPAM.whatever.org" addresses and I don't want to have to put crap like that into mine. Slashdot, so far, has been completely safe, as I almost never get spam. The spam I do get is a result of putting my full address in USENET messages for "world" groups, years ago.
This is why I hang out here. It's sort of like what USENET used to be, with neat self-moderation features.
The greatest problem with Usenet is obviously spam. Spam is like a cancer, and there is only one cure.
Step one is to make spam illegal. That's already done in some states and in the works in others. Step 1.5 is to make spam support illegal, and make spamware illegal.
Step two is to make spam's illegality retroactive. If it takes a constitutional amendment to allow ex post facto laws, so be it.
Step three is to make spam and related crimes into capital offenses.
Step four is to publicly execute Sanford Wallace (he claims to have reformed, but he was one of the first, so he must be an example to all), Canter and Siegel, Andy Brunner (his cartooney won't get him out of this one), HipCrime and his cronies, Alex Chiu (let's see his immortality rings save him from this), the Network Solutions marketing department, and a few other persistent spammers, who I can't name because I don't have my hit list handy right now.
Step five is to appoint an elite squad of net.abuse experts to hunt down EVERYONE who has EVER spammed, and to hunt down those who risk their lives to continue spamming.
Not only will this save Usenet, but e-mail will be restored to its former usefulness.
-- The Brory Stool Co.: We accidentally the best stools from behind seven proxies, since 2009.
In computer times, the difference is huge. I get like all headers from 20 newsgroups, in the same time slashdots frontpage loads (and I have a 512Kb pipe)
In usability it doesnt mean diddly however. Unless slashdot is really slashdotted, but that doesnt happen very often.
Hugs SlashDread
My experience with usenet extends back only about 11 years, to mid-1989, but back then, as a college student, curious and quite innocent/ignorant of the world, I happened apon the many curious and fascinating channels that were usenet. This, when the groupname alt.swedish.chef.bork.bork.bork was considered genuinely funny! The best, the most rewarding and exciting groups, however, weren't the technical, however, but the queer social straights of the alt.sex hierarchy.
WOT? SEX? you ask. "Sex is the death of usenet all by itself!" is a popular notion today, but in the mid-late 80s, the alt.sex groups were places where confused and curious college aged folks could talk about things they might not be comfortable elsewhere; share stories and rumor (and quash rumor, where appropriate). They were largely a supportive and friendly environment, though with numerous silly trolls the flames were always stoked. I learned much about my body from alt.sex, that it would have taken me years (and not a few STDs) to figure out on my own.
Today, nary a one of the original alt.sex discussions remains. Every single one of the groups, without any exception, is filled thickly with advertisements for web pron. The pronmeisters sieze apon any group with the 'sex' string in its name and wipe it out. I think all the discussion groups (with one exception) long gave it up and moved on to pasture, which I find tremendously disheartening. Its a grand step backwards; thousands of pron groups are completely useless!
The one 'exception' that I have found isn't exactly an original group; it was formed ca. 1996, with the intention of challenging the usual spammers; it has a signal/noise ratio of at least 1/100; most of the signal can be detected in posts with a subject line containing "POD". alt.sex.cthulhu sadly, is a mere skeleton, but its probably the last bastion of an alt.sex hierarchy we have left. If ya got tentacles, please support!
anon-y-mouse
Usenet is better than web interface because:
1. no annoying banners.
2. no biased moderations.
3. real good technical people are on usenet more than web interfaced sites. that means more help.
4. speed. and clean interface. Web interface is served by one site, (how slow is slashdot?) usenet is served by thousands of servers.
5. Usenet can be highly specialized. There is a great sense of small community because no one has to pay for the database server and web construction.
Once, I typed "HA HA HA" and the nice people on opera group told me that the operetta I was looking for is "the bat". That is after I listened to hundreds of samples and couldn't find it. Where can you find such specialized information? the usenet.
The only thing i'm worried about is that these days, new comers don't really know how to use usenet anymore.
Remember: Freedom is more important than control. Always!
With proper filtering and searching, usenet is quite pleasant. Unfortunately there are NO good usenet clients for unix. the best being slrn.
( Wine + Forte Agent. is the best solution so far. please pay for agent, they are a great product and they need some revenue.)
On a related matter, today i saw a "public service" announcement describing what the internet is. Of course, to them, Internet = WWW. At first i was mad, thinking that the dumb were preaching to the masses. After reading the posts in this article i thought "yeah...that's good - don't let the ignorant know about usenet and all the other goodies that they'll just fsck up for the rest of us!"
Demonstrant's Open Source Tools
You forgot easy mass-advertising with banners, which is why Usenet is being ignored.
I first heard that usenet was dead in about 1983. At that time it was getting to the point where you couldn't read all the postings in an evening any more. There were more newsgroups than would fit on a 24-line terminal! Not only that, but the traffic on the newsgroup called "general" (no special topic, anything anyone wanted to talk about) was getting annoyingly heavy---hundreds of postings per day. And undergraduates had begun getting accounts at some universities. The old timers were convinced it was merely a matter of months before the whole thing collapsed under the weight of its own success.
With Jabber's flexibility I see it merging what ICQ, Napster, and Usenet do all into one. I expect to see J loops (web circles, newsgroups kinda thing) pop up along w/ an add-on protocol to support them. The basic idea is that the time of every message on the whole freaking Usenet being piped to all those servers is past and that centralizing them to a couple main servers that are logically connected is better. Then users would add the loops they want to their ICQ list and would get a list of messages and waiting file transfers, contact, urls, etc they could either choose to get or ignore until they expired. Since files would be stored and transfered as binary that'd be quicker and save hdd space and since the system would be built on XML searches could be far more powerful. Since each loop is somewhat self contained it'd be easier to moderate messages. The XML would let the moderator choose to either delete the message or tag a SPAM rating depending on how spammy it was and their policy for the group. It'd be possible to even set up a peer review system like Slashdot has.
At what price learning? At what cost wisdom? The price is a man's peace of mind, and the cost is his life.
There are hundreds of moderated newsgroups. The names typically end in ".moderated". The groups I care about are typically ('way ;-) more focused than Slashdot, so the moderation can be stricter and more effective. The moderators are typically expert in the topic areas, so it works.
The reason why less people are using it and the traffic is increasing is because of all this spam advertising useless stuff, usually webpages that don't work, or because of the number of people that post insignificant comments such as quoting someone's whole post and adding "I agree" or some such thing to the end of it.
heh, that's what the PC is for, if you're using one... you flunked the test!
Well, if I had a $1 everytime somebody ...
./ is about the only site that I read regularly on HTML. I do occausional use deja.com to search for specific topics, when it's not obvious which newsgroup I should start reading.
Since I started reading usenet in teh late 1980s, I've been hearing more and more of the death of X.
For me, usenet will never lose it's importance. Reading on the web sucks,
For some people the problem is their connection speed, which isn't really a poblem for me since I have cable@HOME and T1 at work. Good old text-based Usenet is just better for reading. Many people will complain about the spam, flame/holly wars, and trolls, but that's all part of the fun. Having said that, I wouldn't mind some slashdot-style moderating.
ON USENET NO HELP TO FIX MY PC! PLZ HELP MR BOB
I don't understand how anyone claiming to be a journalist can do an article on newsgroups and fail to mention Deja.
Deja is keeping newsgroups alive and healthy, weeding through span and finding messages needed in a flash. Without Deja newsgroups may have died years ago.
I get about two thirds of my technical questions answered using deja. If newsgroups die I'll be very sad....
It would be a shame for it to die, since it's usually more useful than /. You can read a few messages at a time, rather than having to wait 10 minutes for all the other idiotic comments to load, a la /. No annoying gifs. Easier to filter out stupid people. Discussions are usu. on topic and attract knowledgable people, also in stark contrast to /. Oh, and usenet moderators tend not to be boobs.
If Slashdot won't do it, someone will add it to Slash, startup an alternative forum, and completely replace slashdot.
Right now, slashdot doesn't have enough moderators to come close to doing a good job. Unfortuantly, adding moderators doesnt help because most of them SUCK.
This would be a big help. Another would be giving EVERYONE moderator access, and auto-subscribing people to the people who currently get moderator now.
Slashdot could even hire a few full time moderators, that people could selectivly subscribe to. (They could put of ethos pages and people could decide who's moderation they want).
> Yeah, the binary problem is rampant... :), then www.deja.com
n ies/Internet_Services/Usenet_Servers/Comme rcial/
> If a user desperately needs them (and
> I'm sure many do
> remains an option.
Deja.com discontinued their direct news service (the only way to access binary newsgroups via Deja.com, and the only way to read the deja/dejanews internal newsgroups with a standard newsreader).
Alternatives are: Airnews, Altopia, Remarq, Giganews, Newscene, Newsguy, Remarq and so on. You can find any of them at Google or at this Yahoo category:
http://dir.yahoo.com/Business_and_Economy/Compa
Or even better check out the newsgroup which exists to compare news providers:
alt.binaries.news-server-comparison
Here is the letter Deja.com sent to account holders on Jan 22, 2000:
To Our Valued Customers,
You are receiving this email because you currently have a
Deja.com Personal Newsreader account.
Deja.com and bCandid Corporation, the providers of the
Personal Newsreader service, have elected to discontinue
offering the service effective February 2, 2000. In
connection with the discontinuance of your account and as
provided in the Terms of Service, bCandid Corporation will
be issuing to you a prorata refund for any prepaid but
unused days of the Personal Newsreader service. bCandid
Corporation will start issuing refunds in February, 2000.
The refund will be made to the credit card specified in
your Personal Newsreader account. Please let us know if
your credit card information has changed.
Should you wish to continue your Newsreader participation,
we have located a qualified provider, UseNetServer.com,
that can provide a similar service. UseNetServer.com is
prepared to offer you the first 30 days of service free of
charge, and can transition you to its News servers without
service interruption if you act before February 2, 2000.
To take advantage of this offer or to learn more about it,
please visit:
http://www.usenetserver.com/deja.htm
We believe UseNetServer.com will be able to provide you
with a smooth transition to a high-quality Usenet service.
If you have any questions regarding the discontinuation of
your Personal Newsreader account, please do not hesitate to
contact us at support@bcandid.deja.com.
Sincerely,
Deja.com
bCandid Corporation
Slashdot mods are morons because most people are fairly dumb.
:)
Since slashdot picks randomly from a dumb population you get a dumb sampling.
All of the moderation systems I've ever seen that work are the ones were moderators are required to put in effort. The typical morons won't put in effor, thus arn't moderators.
Try bidding on ebay. I put in one bid, on a freshemail account and was getting dozens of spams a day until the spammer made it into the RBL.
Legions of shiny-eyed adolescents (or the mental equivalents) with high-bandwidth connections dumping loads and loads of OBZs/endless reposts. They have no time for consideration, for topic, for knowing WTF they're doing before burying USENET alive in garbage posts. The SPAM and the deliberate trolls are taken care of to some extent by Chris Lewis and company's SPAMbots. What's not being controlled is the introduction of mass numbers of cheap-and-fast-pipe types who don't bother to learn the intricacies and etiquette of whatever group before jumping in and making an ass of themselves. They're belligerent when corrected, and some turn into the utter nitwits of nanau.
I've been on USENET longer than some, shorter than others, and certainly before big pipes were commonly available. There used to be folks in any given group who took time out of their life to spend educating, welcoming, and nurturing newbies who happened to wander in. But slowly the tide became too much. Too many assholes who felt it was their Bob-given right to take a dump whenever and wherever they happened to feel like it. After a while, the nurturers just gave up, and in some cases simply left altogether.
It's a sad thing to watch, and the clueless have no idea what resources they ran off, nor do they seem to care. There are still pockets of the clueful, but you have to look hard, and the numbers have dwindled away as USENET just became too much effort.
USENET is now ~100GB/day and counting. Wonder where it will end?
-- Brad Felmey
I like the emacs gnus newsgroup reader. I also use it for mail on some of my accounts, and on my main account I have procmail directing my mailing lists into spools that I read with gnus.
Gnus just rocks.
I would really like a gnus interface to slashdot. Maybe some elisp hacker could use the emacs web borwser (w3) and link them together. Among the benfits that would bring would be the ability to compose posts in emacs, so I could use a spell checker.
I would read so much more of slashdot in so much less time. In fact, if I sat down and did that task in week or whatever it would take me, I bet I could make up the time in three years.
Other sites, such as arstechnica (their html sucks watermelons through a garden hose) and wired (same class) and nytimes (slightly better) could benefit from this.
Could you have access to the cookies and deal with them in elisp ? Because then you could write little elisp functions which would cycle the nytimes account randomly through a list of fake accounts you built up, putting noise in their database of what articles you visit.
If these scores were shown along with slashdot's, we could see interesting comparisons, and if we could threshold filter based on a sum of everyone's "Worth Reading" scores, I suspect that's what I'd do.
Slashdot could easily do statistics on how many views were filtered how, and we'd all learn something. (they could already do some interesting numbers -- what are the percentages on nesting, or latest-first, or threshold levels?).
Not to eliminate the old way, just to provide a new option.
This seems to be, unfortunately true . . . I work for a very large (4+ million users) nationwide ISP, due to corporate issues I'm not at liberty to say which one. Nonetheless, less than 1% of our customer base uses the news servers, and it's _extremely_ rare for a new user to even know what USENET is... Too bad.
Some people have bad reasons for looking for other people, and I'd hate to help a stalker by mistake. So I would advise extreme care in replying to a looking-for post. If you happen to have run across the name as a bank teller, or in some other way where you don't really know the person, you might feel a natural urge to be "helpful," and share your clue, but don't do it without first contacting the person who you could be putting at risk. Don't act on any story from a person asking information, unless you check it with the person being asked about first. And if you are not in a position to check, don't reveal anything.
Casual distribution of personal information you happen by chance to know can be deadly. I'm not saying the above poster is a stalker bent on mayhem. I am saying really bad stuff sometimes does happen. Be very careful not to be suckered into playing a part. Don't respond in any way without checking with the sought-after, because any response might narrow the search.
It is a real bummer, not to be able to respond freely, but it could be worse than a bummer for the one you happen to know something about.
And when did /. start catering to the mean population of the inet? This is news for Nerds, not news for the average web surfer :)
Minupla
On the whole, I find that I prefer Slashdot posts to twitter ones because I don't get limited to 140 chars before
Well, maybe never is too strong of a word.
:0) Hence the nick "V6stang"
I hope that it won't go away for a very long time though. I discovered R.A.M.F.M.* about a year ago, and it is just like having a second family.
Long live R.A.M.F.M.!!!
* For those of you who don't know it, R.A.M.F.M. stands for rec.auto.makers.ford.mustang. Gotta love them Stangs
"I always wanted to be a procrastinator,
If anything is contributing to the "death" of usenet, it is forums, such as this one, as well as them advent of themed chat-rooms, where people get thier answers as fast as they have written them. But, y'know, why would my mail/news people over at (ISP withheld) keep adding newsgroups that were recently setup, or ones that I requested for?
One more good thing about usenet (and at the same time, the worst thing) is that you can say what you want and not be filtered for the most part (depends on who operates the news server, etc.). So I can put my comments about the AOL lawsuit on alt.aol-sucks, and have them heard by other people, as opposed to posting my thoughts at ZDNet, and getting filtered either because of my language or lack of grammar or objectionable ideas (hell, it can happen here, watch as I get a 1 or 0 and no karma points.).
Finally, on the subject of binaries, most users of a newsgroup frown upon posting them unless the title of the newsgroup explicitly says "binaries", and those who do not follow the rules often get killfiled or reported to their ISP (at the worst). Well, back to alt.games.starcraft. -- one thing that makes me down is when people put bandanas on their dogs
I think services such as EzBoard offer the best of both worlds. EzBoard offers thousands of topical discussions that are easy to find, easy to read, and easy to join - while providing a more personalized and enjoyable interface to the discussions than plain text newsgroups can. Oh, and you can access them from anywhere at any time from any browser - which is nice considering that many ISPs no longer offer usenet as a service (not mine....but many).
There seems to be two thoughts on this...
:) :) It's just a neat toy to chat with people on the same Unix box.. so both have to be logged in to the same box... but it's fun :)
"Usenet is [Dead/dying]" and "Usenet is immortal"
Both are wrong...
As long as there can be a Slashdot story on it's death the Usenet will be alive and well...
Anybody remeber RC or ICB? write? No you say? It dosn't come to mind?
Of course not... they are dead... write is still supported in Linux... I think you can still get ICB clients... and an update in the ircII client provides ICB support.... but who uses ICB? Better yet... where are the servers?
But a few years ago ICB was alive and well... I played with it myself... compiled a client on a Sun Sparc.... It was cool
But that was then.. Only the elite few knew what ICB was... then the elite few became fewer... and eventually the ultra elite... and then.. nothing.... No spam.. spammers never knew of icb...
What about RC? It was replaced by IRC... I never knew what happend with RC.. never could find an RC client or an RC server.....
And write... I still use that to spook people
(BTW RC = Relay Chat NOT RC5... I'm refering to the chat system not the crypto challange)
There are probably many Internet protocalls that have long sence died that many of us don't rember..
Before it can die off we have to start forgetting it exists... then it's uses dwindle to a few loial and then they lose intrest.. the last server closes and it dies...
But usenet is alive and well... we rember what it is and as long as we do it shall live... I rember it... I think... what was Usenet again??? (Just kidding)
What IS happening is Usenet is no longer trendy... It's not the center of the Internet anymore...
Usenet once defined the Internet... not it's just a part of it...
Today the world wide web defines the Internet...
Some day that may nolonger be the case.....
Some day... maybe.. we'll be using a Java enhanced data protocall where Java applets are served up by Java transport protocal to JVMs Or maybe not...
It dosn't matter... Usenet isn't dead by a long shot... It's not trendy... thats far from dead...
It can return to being Usenet.. what it's allways ment to be... instead of some cheap way to stuff press releaces down the data stream...
I don't actually exist.
My personal experience is that almost no one coming online these days even knows Usenet exists.
You make that sound like it's a bad thing.
cheers,
NetZero, the leading free ISP, with 3 million registered users, doesn't even offer Usenet access.
Bullshit, <B>news.Level3.net</B> works fine (Level3 is the backbone provider for NetZero).
NetZero, the leading free ISP, with 3 million registered users, doesn't even offer Usenet access. Bullshit, news.Level3.net works fine (Level3 is the backbone provider for NetZero).
usenet is the single greatest resource on the web today. Its "imminent" death is exagerated. However port 119 often is not open behind corporate firewalls, and although there are public newservers around, often you can't post to them. This should change. -hoz
;)
[ insert your own witty .sig here ]
True, but a LARGE part of that is - sadly me thinks - sex/porn related.
Just because one doesn't find sex & porn interesting, educational or uplifting oneself, doesn't mean to say that it's any less worthy of bandwidth on network news, any less deserving of protection as a customer service, or any better or worse in accordance with some hypothetical universal morality or absolute value judgement. There are no such universals, despite the hoards of coercive moralists that continually try to impose their own particular values in place of our own.
Personally I prefer to take part in discussions about object orientation, kernel architecture, nanotech and futurism, but that doesn't mean that my own preferred interests are in any way "better" than porn is for those that want it. And for what it's worth, I know that many people would consider my technical interests either a complete waste of time, plain boring, exploitative of the third world, or destructive to the environment of the planet.
So, to each his/her own.
"The question of whether machines can think is no more interesting than [] whether submarines can swim" - Dijkstra
If UseNet were really dying then no one would run stories about @Home getting the UDP. And @Home wouldn't care if they got the UDP. It is true that UseNet attracts proportionately fewer new Internet users each year, but I have always gone to UseNet for quality of information, not quantity.
I remember those days before the web. When the net ment email and usenet. I remember when there was under 7,000 newsgroups. Most people only had one account and that was provided by your employer or school. Lossing that account was only slighty better off than death.
I remember killfiles. I have a saying, "on the 10th day he created killfiles." I remember every September that sound would echo from every corner of usenet, *plonk*. I remember the culing of the killfiles. Every December you would pull the lid off the killfile and see who had been "enlightned" and who hadn't.
Them where the good old days. Now where did I put my teeth?
I read at +2. If your post doesn't reach that level I will not see or respond to it.
The mere existence of forums like usenet prove that slashdot as it exists today, does not fullfil the requirements for such a forum.
What makes slashdot different: - topics vary widely and usually are alife for only a few hours or days at most
More wide variety than rec.arts.bodyarts, alt.psychology.nlp and alt.magick?
- the forum is moderated
Many Usenet newsgroups are moderated. I do agree that slashdot's moderation scheme is preferable to any I've seen instituded in newsgroups. Still, I tend to prefer an unmoderated newsgroup with a good killfile...
- each topic is linked to a news story
This is only a benefit if one wishes to exclusively discuss news. When one wishes to discuss parenting a teenager, or bondage techniques, links to news is not necessarily useful (though links to FAQs and such often is).
- treads of messages can be presented to users in arbitrary ways
There's many more choices in newsreaders than in HTML formats...
- it uses the http protocol and HTML for client server communication
This is a disadvantage - NNTP is much faster at moving text than HTTP. Also, most newsreaders are much easier for sending text than an HTML form.
I was worried at first that putting "Usenet" in the headline would scare the readers off. Apparently not.
I haven't gotten through all the messages, but there's a lot of fascinating comments here. I see that many of y'all have a "problem? what problem?!" response to the prospect of a smaller newsgroup population. As one of the users I quoted wrote, "Just personally, I'd like to see Usenet traffic down to levels it was at a few years ago.... coming home from vacation and finding 5,000 newsgroup articles is really irritating."
Rob Pegoraro, Consumer Technology Editor
I couldn't agree more. In this day and age, proper social handshaking protocols are usually expected. I'd hope somebody would reply to my search tag with something like "Yeah, I know her. Give me your phone and such, and I'll forward it on to her." I'd actually be a little concerned if someone just gave me personal information on somebody without knowing me.
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2B1ASK1
I'm sorry that is the way it is. Think about it: If someone once made a credible threat to your life, and they posted a "looking-for" to find you, wouldn't you like to be contacted first?
How would you feel if someone said to you, "Oh, hi, it's you again. I just happened to remember your name, 'cause you bring your dry cleaning here a lot, and I just talked to a nice Mr Terminator, who posted a note on the internet that he was looking for you, and he gave me this phone number to give to you."
Ah, good point.. What a world we live in.
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2B1ASK1