Spaf's Farewell, Ten Years Later

catfood writes "Ten years ago this evening, Usenet legend Gene Spafford posted his farewell to news.announce.newusers, news.misc, and a few other newsgroups. Among other things, spaf wrote: 'People don't seem to think before posting, they are purposely rude, they blatantly violate copyrights, they crosspost everywhere, use 20 line signature files, and do basically every other thing the postings (and common sense and common courtesy) advise not to. Regularly, there are postings of questions that can be answered by the newusers articles, clearly indicating that they aren't being read.' Speaking of his own post, spaf said, 'even if it is perceived as self-indulgent garbage, it will fit right in with the rest of the net.' Ten years later, we still have all of spaf's complaints plus mounting spammage just barely held in check by auto-canceling volunteers. Is Usenet still useful? Is it worth maintaining? I say yes, but I can feel spaf's pain. It may be too late now, but hey spaf: thanks."

Comments

Usenet still has value

[jonathonc]

Everyone knows Usenet is full of spam, trolls and people who've never mastered the subtleties of online etiquette. But don't write it off yet. It's still a fantastic place to interact, get technical support, debate the world, share common interests and grab MP3s. Just because it doesn't have a pretty GUI doesn't mean it lacks value. Usenet is the Wild West of the Internet. Use it, respect it and protect it!

Re:Usenet still has value

[Joe the Lesser]

Usenet is full of spam, trolls and people who've never mastered the subtleties of online etiquette.

Reminds me of this site.

Re:Usenet still has value

[Kaimelar]

It's still a fantastic place to . . . grab MP3s."

Considering that one of Gene Spafford's complaints was that Usenet has become a place where so many people "blatantly violate copyrights", I think that the MP3 trading you're praising may be part of the problem as he sees it . . .

That being said, I still think there is a great deal of value in Usenet. Like everywhere else, though, one has to seperate the wheat from the chaff -- or, in this case, the insightful and useful information from the trolls, flames, and warez traders.

Re:Usenet still has value

[Ryu2]

I don't see why people still use USENET for any sort of large file sharing, copyright violations or no... it's a incredible hassle, dealing with missing uuencoded/MIME partial posts and whatnot.

it might have been the only option back in the UUCP days when live IP connectivity was limited, but now, IRC and P2P services seem to do the job quite well.

Re:Usenet still has value

[vasqzr]

Everyone knows Usenet is full of spam, trolls and people who've never mastered the subtleties of online etiquette. But don't write it off yet.

Replace that with THE ENTIRE FUCKING INTERNET and the sentence is still true!!

Re:Usenet still has value

[Anonymous Coward]

It's the only internet broadcast I know of. Most popular P2P systems do not allow a true one-to-many broadcast.

Re:Usenet still has value

[ctr2sprt]

Well, you look at USENET the way it was described 10 years ago, then look at it now, and you won't see any changes. Seems depressing at first, but then look at the WWW. It's gotten orders of magnitude worse. It's populated by narcissistic children (mentally, at least) spewing forth their idiotic opinions from every orifice, completely free from any criticism or objective evaluation. Even worse, 90% of the Internet inexplicably thinks this is a good thing: they equate the freedom to express useful, new, creative ideas with the freedom to make a complete ass of yourself in front of millions of people. Ads on the WWW are unavoidable: we get excited when we find a website that only has 3 or 4 unobtrusive banners (this means banners that don't actively impede your ability to use your computer). Most of these trends were around then too, of course; they are, as others have noted, a part of human nature. But this self-indulgent celebration of some of the worst aspects of human nature is very new, and very unpleasant.

You look at all the shit that's gone horribly wrong with the WWW and how fundamentally worse it is compared to 10 years ago, and suddenly USENET's "lack of progress" looks pretty damn good. It's not perfect, but at least there's a core of really dedicated, smart, and talented people working really hard to keep it usable. And because of this, USENET continues to grow in utility and popularity, though probably not as fast as the rest of the Internet.

Re:Usenet still has value

[poot_rootbeer]

You look at all the shit that's gone horribly wrong with the WWW and how fundamentally worse it is compared to 10 years ago

What in fuck's name are you ranting about? Ten years ago there was no Google, no Amazon, no Yahoo, no Slashdot, no NOTHING on the web. Vast, VAST amounts of information are available on your home computer now that 10 years ago would have required at the very least a trip to the library, and probably a lot more work than that to find what you were looking for.

To suggest that there was been no progress on the world wide web in the last decade is foolish. To suggest that there has actually been REGRESSION is ABSURD.

Re:Usenet still has value

[2short]

"the freedom to express useful, new, creative ideas"
pretty much requires
"the freedom to make a complete ass of yourself in front of millions of people"

"You look at all the shit that's gone horribly wrong with the WWW and how fundamentally worse it is compared to 10 years ago"

The web is "fundamentally worse" than 10 years ago!?! What a ludicrous statement. Let's see, 10 years ago I used the WWW to look at the card catalogs of libraries (but not the ones I could check books out of), find documentation on the WWW itself, see if there was coffee available in a room across the ocean, and that's about it. Today it is my information portal of first (and generally last) resort for pretty much everything. In the last few years I have not used a prited newspaper or reference book for any purpose but nostalgia. Is there a lot more excrement on the web these days? Sure, there's a lot more of everything. A higher percentage? I have no idea. Simply put, I do not "look at all the shit that's gone horribly wrong with the WWW". I look at the stuff that's gone right. These days I find USENET is only usable at all because someone (google) put a nice web-based front end and search engine on top of it.

Do you seriously measure the worth of the web based on the worst sites you can find? Try measuring by the best sites you can find, and how easily you can find them.

Re:Usenet still has value

[Simon Brooke]

What I'm getting tired of having to point out is that signal to noise on [insert your favorite human communication vector] is inversly proportional to the number of people who are allowed to speak. Through true freedom of speach comes noise. Through the application of intelligent filtering you can interpret this noisy spectrum just as you would any other

I just don't accept this. Noise is a result of bad manners and selfishness. Most people voluntarily refrain from bad manners and selfishness. Slashdot to some extent protects itself from the effects of the tiny, destructive minority who for reasons of egotism or spite seek to destroy the information systems they use. Real-life social fora (such as bars) protect themselves from antisocial egotists by, er, physical persuasion. Usenet has no such mechanisms for self protection.

Among other things I'm control for the scot.* hierarchy. Currently we're having an election campaign in Scotland - we're voting on Thursday. It's quite an important election because for hte first time ever the nationalists could be the largest party. But if you were to look at scot.politics you'd never know this, because the group has been effectively destroyed by the actions of trolls. What makes it even more painful is that the principal troll has (or claims to have) no relation to Scotland - he doesn't live here, he has no scots ancestry, and his only interest is to destroy for the sake of.

For twenty years Usenet has been a vey important part of my social life, but like Spaf I now feel that it is dying. And I think that is extremely sad. I think it's a crashing indictment of modern standards of behaviour and manners that people are prepared to willfully and casually destroy something which has been so valuable to so many.

Bad behaviour is voluntary. No-one is compelled to be destructive. Freedom of speech does not cause people to behave badly, it only permits them to. Usenet, as a semi-anonymous virtual arena, doesn't have the normal social sanctions on bad behaviour - but just because you won't get beaten up for being abusive or antisocial does not force you to be antisocial.

Thinking about this makes me feel very old, and very depressed.

Re:Usenet still has value

[cjpez]

On the contrary, I've found sucking files from usenet to be exponentially easier than grabbing files from any p2p network (haven't tried IRC). The wonderful part about it is that what you see posted is what you GET. I see something I want off of Usenet, there in the list of subjects, and I know it's there. I don't have to waste a bunch of time downloading something from a potentially slow-as-all-hell connection just to find out that it's incomplete, or recorded from some crappy radio broadcast, or something else entirely. Even better, because my usenet feed comes from my ISP, it always maxes out my downlink. Now add in the fact that I can use incredibly simple command-line tools like brag to grab 'em, and you've got a nice little service there.

I spent awhile living off of alt.binaries.tv.simpsons; it's what finally got me to stop watching TV...

ummm.

[fjordboy]

Among other things, spaf wrote: 'People don't seem to think before posting, they are purposely rude, they blatantly violate copyrights, they crosspost everywhere, use 20 line signature files, and do basically every other thing the postings (and common sense and common courtesy) advise not to.

I actually wrote an article similar to this on my webpage that discusses the lack of common courtesy and many of the problems with discussing things in email/instant messaging and messageboard style communication. I don't think it is that people don't have common courtesty, I think it has more to do with the medium of discussion and the false sense of intimacy and the obvious sense of anonymity. I guess I focused more on instant messaging, but the same things apply for message board style posting as well.

Tuff times for usenet

[TheViciousOverWind]

What I see happening most of the times, is that advanced users have a kind of "private social club", then a lot of newbies arrives, asking questions that don't really interest the more advanced users.
It usually ends up with arguing about it, then a FAQ is made, no one reads it, then the more advanced users leave... And after a while the group isn't useful for anything else than simple answers anymore, because the persons with the skill to answer them are gone.

Re:Tuff times for usenet

[juanfe]

You're describing what is known in businesstalk(TM) as "communities of practice"--groups of people with very specific domains of expertise who interact with each other in various fora and who thus exchange information that becomes collective knowledge (knowledge=information that can be acted upon).

For these "advanced" communities to thrive--i.e., for the advanced members of a community of practice to continue to be involved--the advanced nature of the group needs to be maintained, and the new users need to be assimilated into the group so that they don't disrupt that arrangement.
One way to do this is to bring new users in little by little by invitation. Another is to establish some form of mentoring/buddy system in which new people are brought into the group's culture. A third way is to establish listen-but-speak-not arrangements.

While most of these things are possible in Usenet in one way or another (moderated groups, walled garden groups, informal social arrangements between members, etc.), they require a high level of human administration.
Without some members (not necessarily the most advanced users) wanting to do this major/minor amount of administration to maintain the value of the advanced community, the community will tend to fall apart due to what you describe.

Why does Slashdot not collapse, for example, under a similar structure, and why do you still read intelligent advanced insight on this site? The moderation and metamoderation tools tend to keep the good stuff floating to the top, keeping the advanced users interested, while providing enough social structure around it for fools to be kept at bay and new folks to be acculturated reasonably successfully.

So when did he stop using email?

[rendermouse]

"Reason, etiquette, accountability, and compromise
are strangers in far too many newsgroups these days."

Same beefs, different protocol.

usenet was great... in 1993

[sirinek]

With the massive proliferation of special-interest web sites and message boards (helped in no small part by quality OSS software such as apache, php, mysql and phpBB, as well as many others) usenet is becoming more and more irrelevant. Most action happens in the binaries groups where people just fire up pan or agent (or some other bin-friendly news reader) and go to town downloading software.

Another large part of this is the signal-to-noise ratio. Even though you have the cancel-bots traversing usenet, its still choked full of spam. Web-based message boards and plain old email lists that require you be authenticated before posting have done much to raise the all-important s2n ratio.

Re:usenet was great... in 1993

[ctr2sprt]

USENET has two things going for it. First, there is a much greater ratio of clueful people to clueless people, simply by virtue of USENET being less well-known than "the Web." This increases your chances of getting a useful reply, instead of "u 2? i have that problem, email me if u get an answer" over and over. And second, all this accumulated knowledge is really easy to access using Google Groups. It's like a search engine that ignores the 95% of the Internet that's useless trash.

I just can't explain your problem with spam. I see maybe one spam article per week on about 5 newsgroups. Either I have a really good feed or you have a really bad one (or both), but spam is simply not a problem here.

Usenet still rules

[dubbayu_d_40]

Because web interfaces for threaded discussions suck shit. This is one area client side apps are superior.

A visionary

[Bendebecker]

He saw what is the biggest problem with the net at least five years before anybody else. The net is full of great people it interconnects millions, and is home to some of the biggest rejects, dickwads, and lamos in the history of the world. In the last three years alone, the net has become the focal point for every immature jackass on Earth. People are insulting for no reason, rude becuase they can be, and moronic pretty much all of the time. The worst thing that ever happened to the net was when we let Joe User on to it.

USENET is a very valuable service.

[mistermund]

Is Usenet still useful? Is it worth maintaining? I

I say certainly! I use USENET daily. Believe it or not, there are still some groups where valuable discussion still goes on and where the tide of spam isn't much more than a trickle. Certainly, I'm not sure I participate as much as I used to, but I attribute that more to school than anything else. I'll take USENET over web based message boards any day - it's quicker and you don't have to reload your interface every time you view a new message. All available discussions are on the same server, usually maintained by your ISP, so USENET is often more reliable to get to as well.

USENET archives via Google Groups is a godsend for anyone looking for technical advice - I'd still be figuring out how to install Linux rather than being paid as a Systems Administrator if it wasn't for the learning opportunities in the numerous messages on very specific problems you're likely to run across. (I want to interface my blah blah modem with my toaster, etc)

Binary groups rock as well - they're a great way to uncover rare and obscure music that other enthusiasts might have in their collections.

Overall, I love USENET. It's not perfect, but it offers advantages that other Internet protocols can't match. It's survived this long - it will probably be going strong for years to come.

Spafford is right.

[IGnatius T Foobar]

The signal to noise ratio of UseNet makes it completely unusable. This is why you're more likely to find good company in smaller forums. Why not sign on to an Internet-connected BBS instead, and have discussions with people who you might actually get to know after a while? Where the users number in the hundreds rather than in the millions -- and there's not only a hope, but a good probability, that any abuse of the medium gets nipped in the bud right away?

That's for your everyday "hang out with good company online" activities, of course. For your very specific needs, mailing lists seem to do the trick.

UseNet is UseLess now. If it is to be saved, ever, it needs to be broken up into multiple smaller NNTP networks. Each could have its own culture, policies, unique content, etc. Eventually, some sort of meta-index would appear, to direct users to the content and culture they want to find.

Re:Spaf...

[EvilTwinSkippy]

Visionary.

Before it was cool to blast the internet for the banal commercialized cesspool we know it today, he called a spade a spade.

I don't think folks like Spaf are overly idealistic. Running a computer network for 5 years, you learn that some people are rude like it's their job. We don't accept rudeness in public places. People cutting in line get a firm dressing down from fellow line goers and/or ejected from the venue.

I volunteer at a folk festival. You learn quickly that with 10,000 people in a campground, courtesy is not courtesy, its a way of life. We regulary exercise our ability to eject people who get drunk and rowdy. If you don't, you get chaos, injuries, or worse.

Usenet, unfortunately, has no ejection mechanism.

Comment removed

[account_deleted]

Comment removed based on user account deletion

public and text only

[hey]

The best things about Usenet:
- its public ... no one company owns it
- its mostly text only so it can be searched

I use Usenet....

[UrGeek]

...only when I can find a small group, with an esoteric topic, of dedicated people. The smallness goes under the radar of the mass marketers and the esoteric nature keeps out most of the trolls and dullards. I will not pollute this friends by revealing them here to the Slashdot effect but if you learn to search the topics of your choice, you too many find a nice little corner of Usenet space that you may enjoy.

But gawd, there is SOOO much noise!

Certain Parts of Usenet are still useful

[polin8]

comp.* in general is spam light, and what spam there is is easy to filter out. you don't see too many valid

HOW DO I MAKE $$$$$ WITH A TERNARY OPERATOR!!!!!!!
posts.

Its all a matter of what you use usenet for, lots of excellent discussions take place in numerous groups. If your in *.warez or *.erotic.* and you whine about spam, well, your just too dumb to bother with ;)

The next generation Usenet system will require you to read the faq before posting to a group, and make you take a test on the faq.

USENET's problem was solved by Slashdot

[LinuxParanoid]

The problem with USENET was the signal-to-noise ratio got worse as the number of users grew.

The first solution was moderation, but this placed too much of a burden on a single volunteer for all but the narrowest topic groups and the most dedicated volunteers.

The brilliant concept that Slashdot introduced (as far as I've been able to determine) was distributed moderation-- a mechanism to distribute this moderation load among more than one person. An approach that was hard to conceive of under NNTP made a lot more sense with a database-backed website.

If you compare the number of postings made to the top 3 most-posted-to newsgroups from the 1995 USENET statistics (which have not, to my knowledge, been updated since), to the size of discussions held on Slashdot, the number of posts per day absorbed by Slashdot had eclipsed anything on 1995 USENET back in 2000 when I last looked into this issue.

I consider "distributed moderation" a huge advance in online community development.

Corrections to my notion of history are welcome.

--LP

Re:USENET's problem was solved by Slashdot

[sjonke]

Unfortunately it would seem that Slashdot has not solved the troubling problem of butt kissing the choir.

Re:USENET's problem was solved by Slashdot

[Anonymous Coward]

I consider "distributed moderation" a huge advance in online community development.

And I consider it the ruin of /.

It reinforces the viewpoint of the majority and squeezes out non-conforming views. Over time, you end up with a "community" that spends its time agreeing with itself. For me, the most valuable posts on /. are found at the 0-rating level, while the 4s and 5s are usually mindless pap.

See, the difference between web-boards like /. and Usenet is that each individual Usenet user can control his experience of a newsgroup by choosing who or what to filter out. With web-boards, you get the moderation that's decided by by owner of the board and the only choice you have is to like it or leave it.

Until sites like /. permit users to filter out the high-rated posts (and without requiring silly registration to boot), Usenet will still be far superior.

Re:USENET's problem was solved by Slashdot

[Anonymous Coward]

I agree with the /. moderation in theory, but the abuse here has shown it doesn't work in practice. Too often, you see good posts from unregistered users marked as -1's and ridiculous rehashes from registered users as +2 or better. Maybe not showing the posting user's info to the person moderating would help. Otherwise, the moderators tend to punish the unregistered users who are often experts in a field and don't often post except when there's a topic that they know a lot about.

Have faith, Usenet is like the CB radio craze

[weave]

Anyone older than 35 should remember the CB radio craze from around 1976. Before the mid 70s, CB radio was almost the exclusive hangout for truckers. Then it got popular and went to hell. The FCC removed the requirement for a token license, they expanded it from 23 channels to 40, and it was all garbage. Idiots would key their mic next to an FM radio to drown out others (we'd call it spamming today), no one would do a customary and polite "breaker" to ask permission to talk, and others would buy "heaters" to boost their signal to illegal levels. It became a big mess.

It became so bad that it became useless. You could barely get a response from across the street, let alone the next county like you once could. People got fed up, left, newer technologies like cell phones replaced the need to use CB like a phone, etc, etc...

Now it's back to a more civil sane level, full of mainly truckers keeping themselves company during that long haul.

See ya on the flip side good buddy, keep the rubber side down.

So, I actually think usenet is getting better. Newbies don't bother with it. Just ask your average net user about it, they don't have a clue. Others who use usenet just use it for binaries. The text groups are actually becoming almost useful again!

So keep your mouth shut. Let usenet groups become the hangout for hardcores again. The idiots can hang out on their various noisy useless user-friendly web discussion boards -- like slashdot for example. :)

Answer

[limekiller4]

catfood writes (quoting Spafford):
"Regularly, there are postings of questions that can be answered by the newusers articles, clearly indicating that they aren't being read."

This is because when you're a newbie, it is sometimes impossible to (a) not know what the right question to ask in the first place and (b) realize that people have anticipated your question and if they have, where to find it. Further, people are generally not interested in weeding through a few dozen pages of text in order to find out their question is not covered in any of it. Much easier to simply ask. He's railing against human nature on that one.

But I understand, appreciate and agree with everything else.

catfood then adds:
"Is Usenet still useful? Is it worth maintaining?"

Are you kidding? Have you been to alt.binaries.cd.image any time lately?

Oh! You mean for actual coversation. Well then... The answer to that is "hell no." I stopped around 1997 when I returned after a 18-month hiatus only to find the exact same people arguing. Worse, it was about the exact same thread.

I went to talk.religion.buddhism the other day for Christ' sake and read a few threads of people being complete assholes. I said to myself, "if this is the current state of the Buddhist group..."

Guns, Germs, Steel, and USENET

[Rimbo]

In Diamond's book Guns, Germs and Steel (funny, we had a Jared Diamond article just yesterday)...

He talks about how growth of a community leads to a change in how the community has to be managed. At a certain point, you need a centralized government to manage the interactions between people, because you no longer have a community.

USENET actually allowed a much larger community than had ever been possible before, before things broke down and the need for some kind of governance emerged. On the other hand, you can't kill someone over USENET. It's not real life.

What happened to USENET was inevitable. It is not a critique of human nature to say so; this is what happens when societies reach a certain size when there is no governing force to maintain order.

Re:These complaints are news?

[jafiwam]

"Regularly, there are postings of questions that can be answered by the newusers articles, clearly indicating that they aren't being read."

In addition to the stupid users, the comment above is a self-fullfilling prophesy. The users that read the documentation never ask the questions and therefore never show up on the radar until they are advanced users. So that statement is not true insofar it is so self-referencial as to be meaningless. So it basically says; "The manuals or FAQs are clearly not being read by the people that ask the questions concerning answers already in the FAQs." Of course!

The people that read the FAQs simply do not ask the questions.

As the number of users goes up, the number of stupid questions goes up; that class of people you can see that ask the questions goes up (they are noticed because they are annoying) along with the class of users who do not ask the questions (who are not annoying because they know the basic stuff).

So the old guard notices the stupid clueless newbies that ask dumb questions, but don't notice the people who simply appear with half a clue that have something to bring to the table.

Of course it's still useful!

[AB3A]

If Usenet weren't relevant and useful few would make so much effort to reproduce it in other forms, such as e-mail lists or Slashdot.

Are there flaws in NNTP? I think it could be improved with some form of authentication to help guarantee that the source address of a post can't be forged.

However, the beauty of Usenet is that anyone can post there. Yes, that's also the flaw.

The problem is that we're all seeking quality answers and interesting discussions, but nobody can agree on just what we need to do to achieve that result. Even if there were no off-topic posts and everyone behaved like ladies and gentlemen, there would inevitably be people who want to read more basic information and people who want to read more advanced techniques.

Not having to rely on people to set the agenda is what makes Usenet so engaging to me. It's fast, it's a big free-for-all, and yes, there's lots of nonsense and wrong information. The best solution is to do what most people are simply too lazy to bother with: build a healthy kill-file and a substantial watch list. One person's troll is another person's jester.

I have grown used to rude behavior on the Internet. Anonymity can lead to this sort of thing. However, the same anonymity is what enables many to speak what's on their mind. While this can result in a very low signal to noise ratio, it also results in very candid experiences and ideas.

It's worth the effort to find those ideas and ferret them out of the background noise. Nobody can do that for you. That's what is so great about Usenet.

There's a worse downside than that

[John Miles]

Those web forums usually aren't archived by Google (or anyone else), so they have no sense of permanence. Newbies ask the same questions over and over, not because they're clueless newbies, but because any knowledge posted on web forums is effectively lost to posterity.

I really hate to see Usenet replaced by a million different proprietary variations of UBB. Usenet, along with its centralized Deja/Google archive, was a good idea, and we should've stuck with it and made it work.

Re:There's a worse downside than that

[shannara256]

Newbies ask the same questions over and over, not because they're clueless newbies, but because any knowledge posted on web forums is effectively lost to posterity.

It is my experience that clueless newbies do not know about groops.google.com, so they will post the same questions in any medium

He was differentiating between clueless newbies and non-clueless newbies. On newsgroups, non-clueless newbies can find the answers to their questions, and so don't need to ask them over and over. On bulletin boards, because there is no permanence, they have to ask the common questions over and over. Because of this, on BBs there is no effective difference between the clueless and the clueful.

It takes two to tango ...

[pyramid termite]

... and to fight, as the old saying goes. My observation, as a former alt.flamer, Meower and veteran of the alt.life.sucks/Skippy/HipCrime wars is that for every clueless newbie, there is a self-righteous experienced idiot who will burn a newsgroup down to the ground around him in flames rather than just use a killfile, sit on his hands and ignore the wretches. And before you blame troll sources such as Meow or "Aol'ers" or "Altopia posters" or "Web TV'ers", note that most of the flame wars I've read in various newsgroups are not newbies or trolls vs newsgroup regulars, it's interior faction X vs interior faction Y.

The mechanics of how these things work is interesting -
1. Poster A has been posting in alt.* for a good long time.
2. Poster B posts a flame, a troll, or just an unpopular opinion that Poster A objects to, in flaming language.
3. Escalation.
4. Poster A becomes a net.lawyer and net.cop and attempts to first, convince Poster B that he is "off-topic", abusive, or not part of the "community" and attempts to cut off B's net.access by complaint letters to B's ISP.
5. a)This often fails, in which case B finds out about it and the entire controversy continues to fester, with charges and countercharges of censorship and "law" breaking. b) It succeeds and B either learns a lesson - or gets a more secure account from netcopping and proceeds to start a personal vendetta against A.

The results are predictable - useful discussion decreases and noise increases.

Web boards, strangely enough, don't have this problem as much - seeing as it's one or a few people responsible for admitting people into the site, rules and enforcement tend to be more clear cut and not as controversial and varied - Slashdot, for example, isn't dependent on whether ISP X has a looser TOS than ISP Y. Furthermore, it's up to the administrators, not any Tom, Dick or Harry who wants to send a complaint E-mail to the offender's ISP. No one, even if they've been at a web board for X years is under the illusion that it's "their" webboard and they have the right to "enforce" their personal interpretation of rules.

In short, it's not just trolls and newbies that have impacted Usenet negatively - it's also the self-righteous and the intolerant.

Memories

[dsplat]

Ask yourself whether either of these phrases mean anything to you. If so, you know that Spaf merely recognized the problem earlier.

• Green Card Lawyers
• The September That Never Ended

The system is broke, not people

[Cranx]

Why is when folks try to induce others to do things a certain way, no matter how often they are reminded that their system is not natural for people to use (at least in the fashion they envision), they cling to the notion that the problem is with the people using it and not the system itself?

This is the nature of people. If you want something better than this, you're free to search it out, but standing around stamping your feet insisting that everyone behave is pointless.

What is it people expect from Usenet? Write it down on paper and make a list of "properties" that you folks (whomever that would be) would like to get out of Usenet -- then imagine you're holding a pool that represents the entire population of the world and say to yourself "how do I get just these certain types of people to post on Usenet and no one else?"

For starters, the answer is simply to close off Usenet to the public. If you want a certain set of behaviors, you need to be able to enforce your rules (which are, in the context of human nature, unnatural and arbitrary). Perhaps create tiers, in which only those who have graduated from the lower tiers may participate in the upper tiers. The public at large (including all the porn and get-rich-quick schemes) can post at the bottom, and as people prove themselves, move them up through the tiers. Use certified PGP signatures to enforce posting rights.

You have a wide-open system. You have people acting like humans act, and will always act. If you want something different than what you get with Usenet, go build it.

Re:Spaf...

[Ataru]

But regulars are often worse than the spammers. Once people get to be regulars, they have no problem with writing endless off-topic, mind-numbing crap. They often enjoy putting "OT:" in the subject line as if to say, "hi, this has nothing to do with the subject of the newsgroup, and hence is against the charter, but I'm a regular, so that shit doesn't apply to me, so anyway..." and on with some boring stuff that happened to them that morning.
Or the war in Iraq. I don't think I have seen a single unmoderated newsgroup that hasn't been full of pro/anti war flamefests over the last few months. Er, hello, is it "off" or "topic" that you are having difficulty with?
And what the fuck is it with people that reply to spammers and trolls? Spammers aren't listening, trolls just feed off it, and you just reduced the signal to noise ratio. Well done pal. <slaps head>
I'd understand if usenet was invented last week, and people were just getting used to it. But it's twenty years old and people really should know better.
Does anyone remember Bertrand Meyer's Self-Discipline for usenet? Putting '[++]' (etc) in front of your subjects? It was a nice idea but it never caught on, nor did I ever expect it to. Basically, sadly, ultimately, undeniably, a large proportion of usenet posters are idiots.
And yet I can't understand why. Most people you meet in person, when pressed, can put up a reasonable argument. You could have a reasonably entertaining evening debating with them. But on the internet, everyone knows you're an asshole.
I used to think that the internet, in bringing us unprecedented global communication, would lead to a more peaceful world. How naive was I? Now we don't just hate people from other nations, we hate just about anybody with a typing finger.
And why do people rant so much? Oh, wait...

Re:Spaf...

[Ataru]

If I only read one newsgroup, and had no other source of interesting stuff, then you might have a point. As it is, you don't. My Iraq example was clear enough. If I wanted to hear arguments about the war I would go to the appropriate newsgroup. Or go outside.
So, what part of "off topic, against the charter, don't post" do you not understand?
It isn't tolerated on moderated newsgroups, or mailing lists, and those fora have much higher SNR.