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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."
I'm generally not interested in particular groups for the purposes of dicussion, however, when I'm looking to troubleshoot something, I always use Google groups. I figure if I'm having a problem, someone else has probably had it too, and posted about it. Most of the time, I'm right, and I can find a solution (or find out there isn't one.)
Spaf... irate poster, or visionary?
A feeling of having made the same mistake before: Deja Foobar
all that happened was that usenet became a large enough phenomenon that it began to reflect society at large rather than a group of elite users.
all of spaf's complaints are the same complaints i can make about human behavior on any street corner of any city. or a complaint a roman could make about streetcorners in rome 2000 years ago.
the problem is not usenet.
the problem is moral idealists who don't understand human nature.
you don't change human nature as a whole by chastising and scolding the already-converted-to-responsible-behavior. you adopt your understanding of human nature to fit in with reality, and you make the technological changes to the medium to prevent it's abuse by the common rabble of the world. and if you can't do that, you get used to it.
welcome to the real world.
intellectual property law is philosophically incoherent. it is your moral duty to ignore it or sabotage it
"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."
This wasn't even news 5 years ago. Hell, this wasn't even news 10 years ago, at least to me. I agree with all of it, sure. But it's the byproduct of cultural evolution. As a community gets bigger, more stupid people move in.
best web host ever
Now I see Usenet like a button I have: "Reading Usenet is like drinking from a firehose, posting to Usenet is like shouting at people in a passing rollercoaster, and archiving Usenet is like saving used toilet paper." Usenet is like a philosophical particle accelerator which creates opinions of such energy and instability that they could not exist in nature, and a great way of being annoyed by people I otherwise never would have met.
Now a newsgroup that gets less than 100 posts a day are ones that haven't been harvested by spammers yet. I knew it was over when in a base about Nordic culture was innundated with binaries of jpegs which I am sure were not Viking artifacts or ethnologist and museum lore.
That's why I spent my time on e-mail lists and UBB/phpBB boards. Sure, we get jerks, but well-moderated forums with e-mail verification keep a lot of idiots away.
__________________________________________________ _
"Internet is so huge and pointless that for some people it is a complete substitute for life
I still find Usenet extremely useful, but if you want to avoid being overwhelmed by the garbage you have to take advantage of the filtering features provided by your newsreader. Marking threads as "ignored," creating a "bozo file," etc.
** The opinions expressed here are my own, and do not reflect those of my employers - past, present, or future**
Usenet is alive and very useful.
In particular, Usenet offers a set of very mature readers which provide way more functionality than a web browser can give, even for a forum like this..
Don't like someone's attitude-filled posts? Mod them down, all the time. Kill file them even; never see their comments again.
Getting trolled all the time? Set up regexps which kill gnucontrol threads, or any thread started by someone in your troll list.
Distracted by big sigs? Snip them off. Almost all readers will manage this (I just colourise them differently, but auto-trim
when replying.)
Even the older newsreaders, heck, especially the older readers, offer colour highlighting and mark up, making
it easy to skim a thread, noting new comments.
Usenet is actually becoming a nicer place now; the Spam has died away, attracted by the bright lights of the web and mass email. Many newbies don't know what Usenet is and can't flood the place, even in these days of mass broadband. However, the trick is finding an ACTIVE group. Some groups do have a clique sitting in them, but on any decently on-topic group there remains plenty of activity.
Lastly, Google groups. What a goldmine of trivia. And how awful to see your own past posts...
(Amusingly, I still read Usenet with the venerable Unix command line app, 'tin'. It's not perfect, but it's fast and easy to use. It just looks so archaic when running on OS X, on a TiBook...)
I used to be heavily involved with the alt.games.doom(.*) and rec.games.computer.doom.* newsgroups and I undertsand what he was talking about. I speant a tremendous amount of time kicking newbie-bashers in the teeth. Newbies are a fact of life and the only thing I've found that really works is to politely stear them to the information they need, including the resources already available.
I bailed out when I found myself spending more time yelling at people for being assholes than I was spending either getting information I wanted or helping people with questions/problems.
The arival of SPAM didn't help anything. Yeah, I was there to see Kantner and Seigel's landmark Greencard spam. I also saw, and helped difuse the infamous alt.games.doom VS Clark.Net fiasco: some tool spammed a insulting and vulgar message to every Clark.Net user with alt.games.doom as the sender. Which caused every angry responce to get posted to alt.games.doom.
Anyway, Usenet is almost useless unless you are involved with one of the more esoteric newsgroups out there. Pretty much anything in the alt* region is burried in a sewer of spam.
Boobies never hurt anyone. - Sherry Glaser.
Okay, you just taught me the first useful thing I've learned in months... "groups.google.com".
I had no idea how often I'd posted to the newsgroups and, everyone's right -- it's all total crap!
Seriously, though, when I need technical information or if I want to see what's for sale here in Austin, the newsgroups are the first place I go.
Why do I use newsgroups instead of website forums?
1. No registration, no login.
2. More users = more potential resources
3. Not at the whim of website entreprenuers
4. Lax standards as to my post's worthiness
5. Incredible delineation of topics
If I sit here longer I could come up with more reasons.
--Richard
Well, dejanews or google groups... To me, usenet is the value of google.com. None of the other search engines has this function to search through usenet posts. As a system integrator/developer, usenet is a hell of a resource, and if anything, I'm only spending *more* time on it.
It used to be that only the intelligent could make it to Usenet, as getting to Usenet was non-trivial, and Usenet was a good place. Then came AOL and the advent of the dial-up ISP self-installers with Usenet support, and any idiot could get on usenet, and usenet started to go downhill.
Fortunately, the advent of easily installed web forum software, coupled with "proprietary" per-ISP discussion areas, has created discussion "honeypots" that suck in the less intelligent users before they manage to get to Usenet. ISP's don't advertise Usenet access much anymore, and a news reader no longer appears to be a staple of ISP-distributed software. Those big-national ISP's don't want you on Usenet anyway - they want you involved in their own discussion areas that you'd lose access to if you switched providers.
I've noticed that traffic is down, but signal/noise is up. Usenet spam etc. seems to be down as well, although I can't say for sure if it's because spammers have moved on to email or because the cancelbots are just better.
So Usenet is getting back to what made it cool in the first place: Having a "higher" barrier to entry to keep out the riff-raff.
paintball
I love USENET. When I first started using it in '92, sci.* ~was~ the internet to me. The discussion level then was about the same as /. is now - the only difference is that ./ provides a nice little ratings system to separate the wheat from the chaff. After a little while online, I learned how to quickly distinguish a flamewar from a serious discussion, and learned to avoid reading the 50 page posts from Archimedes Plutonium. I found it useful, and still occasionally do (about once a month). Many of the people who used to be on USENET moved on to places like /. The question would be why? Saying that USENET has problems is like saying the Internet has problems: spam, junk, hard to find the signal amongst the noise... Nobody is suggesting dumping TCP/IP, why dump USENET? The problem isn't the tool that exists, but how people use it. May I suggest a solution: someone should write an application (open source, of course ;) which brings to USENET many of the same features which lure people to its competition: rateability, lack of address spamming, etc. The basic model was good, is good, and can be better than NEthing else out there once again!
In case you are wondering why I don't write such a thing myself, well, I don't code. I'm just a lowly nuclear physicist. I just wanted to make a useless suggestion, in the original spirit of USENET.
And, Best of all it is effectively anonymous both for sender and receiver.
Food not Bombs is a nice platitude but it breaks down when you notice that the Bombees are usually well fed
If you don't like netnews, why not start your own? It's gotta be much easier now than it was back in the days of trying to locate people in other states to hook you in to netnews, and there's nothing at all that says that any given news server has to hook in to any other given news server. You could start fresh...
Perhaps the internet encourages us to take a global focus when we should be concentrating on building smaller trusted and authenticated communities. Maybe we don't really need to talk to everyone.
I'm trying to teach myself to set people on fire with my mind... Is it hot in here?
This is all true. But I will make an ass of myself and say that the ability for anyone with the will and meager means to post their ideas is indeed a good thing. I don't want the internet to become a place where everything I read has been approved by someone, anyone. Who would do the approving?
I don't see too many adds during my browsing. I find a lot of the content worth my while comes from sites that I (or someone I am affiliated with) pays for. As for the remaining sites--a lot of which also have information worth my while--Opera won't display popup windows and banner ads really don't bother me all that much.
Information wants to be free. By that I mean free as in speach and not necessarily free as in beer all the time
Indeed, I keep running into this in various quarters. Someone will say, "this netblock spews more spam than content," or "this user posts more noise than signal to (USENET/Slashdot/mailing-list-de-jour/etc)" or the like. 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.
The problem is that too many people are convinced that rational, intelligent discourse cannot happen through a noisy vector and they get mad at those who add noise for their failure to adequately filter the medium. Oh well.
I read (and sometimes post) on rec.games.roguelike.nethack and comp.lang.java.gui and a few others and I get to know the same people posting interesting and intelligent things over and over. When I have a question, I search groups.google.com and I don't find anything I post. Most of the time I can guess who in the group will answer. So even though Usenet is huge (which it is), individual groups (minus porn, warez, etc) tend to be on a few hundred active posters scale.
Slashdot is probably the most advanced of web-based fora, but I still prefer usenet.
:) As long as there's groups with posts I'm interested in then I'll be subscribing.
When was the last time you had a discussion on Slashdot that last more than a day or two past the article being on the front page?
I like the fact that usenet is text-based. It's simple and straightforward.
I like the fact that it's client-based, rather than browser-based. I can modify the look and feel, the filtering capability and a host of other features, by changing, or re-configuring my NNTP client program. With a web-board, I'm limited to the options on the server-based board software.
I agree Slashdot's moderation is a powerful system - something I'd like to see added to usenet to make it more powerful/useful. There's nothing inherent in the protocol that would stop you extending it with something like this.
As for the volume of traffic, since when has the most popular been the best?
You young kids don't know that net.gods, as they used to be called, routinely dropped from Usenet to great concern of those involved. Yet usenet marched on.
This gave rise to the old joke: "imminent death of Usenet predicted, film at eleven".
Yes, usenet has deteriorated steadily since it's creation. No it is not dead. Traffic and users are still increasing, hard as it might be to believe. I call this the Groucho Marx effect, people confuse the drop in quality with a drop in popularity i.e. "nobody eats there anymore, its too crowded".
There are many reasons why usenet was/is sick. None of them were addressed by Spaf. Users are making the best of a really flawed medium (and by this I don't mean text, but the oddities of the group hierarchy, the difficulty of moderation, the lack of collective memory, and so on).
USENET, the Internet, all have been comercialized and abused over the years. People see a means the make money, save money, exploit, get off, etc. they will take it. It's too bad too.
Take Gopher though, it is an all but forgotten technology, but it is still around. There are still a few good gopher sites out there, and for the most part it isn't corrupted like the rest (mostly because it never became really popular).
So there you go. You want a nice clean place to go online, check out gopher. It's like the small town forgotten in time to the big city of the Internet. Surfing it is like a breath of fresh air.
"Your 'Gin n'tonic Futon Brain' sure makes you smart!"
"That's 'Positronic-photon Brain', you idiot!"
An older but fully mature technology that does not allow a lot of the crap that usenet does.
Prior to being allowed to post, you must subscribe.
Your telephone number and or other documentation are required as per the sysops discretion.
There is a fee in some cases depending on how wealthy and eccentric the sysop is.
I'm not sure if fidonet does PGP authentication of a valid server but RIME did so.
Most groups are moderated, the unmoderated groups tend to get shut off a lot due to funding issues.
A spammer, virus uploader, etal can be quickly tracked down in most cases.
I'd go on a Vegan diet but the delivery time from Vega is too long. --brownkitty
"I just don't accept this."
...] 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."
That's your perogative...
"Noise is a result of bad manners and selfishness."
but if you're going to disagree with me, you should do so, your above statement was essentially my point.
"Most people voluntarily refrain from bad manners and selfishness."
To the best (worst?) of my experience, they do NOT.
Go find an example of an intelligent discourse that happened without a) ignoring/filtering massive amounts of noise b) censoring those who were abusive or c) hiding the discourse form public access (about 100 participants is really pushing the limit, which is why USENET broke down every time a newsgroup got to a certain threshold of popularity). The examples I know of are all in one of these categories, but I'd be glad to entertain others if you can counter-propose.
"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."
That minority aren't actually a majority. How many moderators moderate to "agree" or "disagree" rather than to sort of signal from noise? For the answer to that, go check out how many pro-Microsoft comments which are otherwise quite valid comments are moderated down in an article where they are on-topic.
How many posters post a jab or insult rather than discussing?
How unreadable is Slashodt in 0/Nested/Recent mode? I can answer that one because I had moderator points today, and I insist on moderating without regard to how popular or un-rated something is, though I ignore -1s simply to get through my contribution before I need to go do more work. The signal-to-noise on an un-censored Slashdot is about as bad as USENET, which is why Slashdot has to do exactly what I said: they perform intelligent noise filtering.
"Real-life social fora (such as bars) protect themselves from antisocial egotists by, er, physical persuasion. Usenet has no such mechanisms for self protection."
And that is USENET's ultimate failing. Building a USENET with multiply-rooted trust/reputation/reviewing would be fairly easy to do as these things go, but mailing lists, weblogs and blogs supplanted a lot of the pressure to do that a long time ago.
"[... a good example from your personal history of signal-to-noise and mobs
You have a great example, but understand that that sort of behavior is common. It was the norm in globally-popular groups like soc.*, talk.*, alt.sex (ah, I remember when alt.sex was a useful newsgroup for actually discussing sex...) and many other groups even as early as 1990. Granted, most people are not so callous, but still the majority of people in an oncensored environment with 100+ participants will contribute noise in an overwhelming ratio to signal.
Then again, as communications companies start getting more restrictive about what is and is not valid communication (e.g. AOL's filtering of residential mail), I have to think that perhaps it IS time to start looking at a USENET-like beast for the modern day. There's some updating that would be unfortunate: USENET worked over store-and-forward net
Those web forums usually aren't archived by Google (or anyone else), so they have no sense of permanence.
Thats true, but BoardReader has proven to be useful in this respect.
--> Fight tyranny and repression.... read
10 years ago, we had the BLINK tag. Now we don't. That's progress.
But seriously: it sounds like you want a nice and tidy online space where everyone diligently prepares material that is meticuously reviewed by third-party editors for correctness and relevance before it is registered and indexed in a global information hierarchy devoid of marketing and mindless blathering "chatter".
Granted: the Web is not an Encyclopedia. It's organic. Sometime--like evolution itself--it can be ruthless, sloppy, and a little cruel. To be successful with it, you have to have secret knowledge, specialized tools, a bit of luck, and a damn good search engine. If you don't know how to use the Internet, you'll end up archiving your emails off of Hotmail, one-by-one. Or your inbox will be deluged with spam. Or you'll be covered in pop-ups before ever you find the really good free porn [yes , it's out there].
Log off the net, or find a way to improve it. While you sit there complaining about the past 10 years, a lot of people have done some really good things to make the Internet a better place: Google, the W3 consortium, and even Slashdot (where the editors and moderation system do a fair job of filtering content for relevancy and bringing some balance of opinion to the forefront... despite many flames to the contrary).
Jon Postel is dead, but curiosity and a desire for good engineering will continue to carry humankind into the Information Age against the waves of shameless commercialism and the reckless wrangling of unconstructive, politically-motivated dialogs.
-1, Too Many Layers Of Abstraction
Um, no, it's not. Slashdot (and every other web forum I've ever seen) is just Usenet reimplemented badly. The good Usenet clients had all sorts of nifty tools that no web-based forum has. Killfiles. Scoring. Filters. Decent threading.
The best part of the system was that it was highly distributed. There was no central server, just thousands of independent sites working together as a sort of peer-to-peer system. Ha! Take THAT, RIAA!
I'm really sorry that Usenet was largely superceded by web forums. I blame it on the lack of good integrated news support in early browsers. But hey, who knew?
As an exercise for the student, write a Slashdot-to-Usenet gateway. Be sure to preserve thread order.
Chelloveck
I give up on debugging. From now on, SIGSEGV is a feature.