Slashdot Mirror
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.
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..."
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.
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."
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
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.
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.
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.
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.
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
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 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
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.
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?
IMHO Slashdot needs the ability for people to subscribe to moderators, or to killfile someone's moderation. By clicking on a message that I think has been properly moderated, I should be able to have Slashdot automatically use that person's moderation in the future, and the reverse when I think someone has been marked down unfairly. Then we'll choose who we let help us cull our choices.
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
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.
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.
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
> 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
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.