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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."
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!
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.
My <1000 UID is with a hot chick
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.
Because web interfaces for threaded discussions suck shit. This is one area client side apps are superior.
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.
There's a growing sense that even if The Future comes,
most of us won't be able to afford it.
-- Lemmy
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.
"Learning is not compulsory... neither is survival."
--Dr.W.Edwards Deming
Comment removed based on user account deletion
The best things about Usenet: ... no one company owns it
- its public
- its mostly text only so it can be searched
...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!
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
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. :)
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.
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.
Dahlmann tightly grips the knife, which he may have no idea how to use, and steps out into the plain.
... 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.
The net will not be what we demand, but what we make it. Build it well.
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.
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...