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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."
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
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.
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"Internet is so huge and pointless that for some people it is a complete substitute for life
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...)
Agreed Deja/Google Groups are fantastic. But, there is a down side to it. The problem is that if everyone is simply using Google Groups and then going elsewhere, such as yourself, then no one is posting to the groups. That means that Usenet will soon become Uselessnet.
Granted, there are still many people who presently post but that number is definitely declining. The total number of posts is still maintained as spammers move to fill the void.
To try to maintain the value of Usenet I still regularly post to many groups but, I don't follow the groups. What I mean is that I post solutions to the problems I encounter and thereby use Usenet as a storage medium for my personal knowledgebase articles. The posts are as clear and detailed as possible and usually follow the following format:
Problem Summary: Brief by accurate and complete description of the problem. Think keywords and how you would have searched Usenet for the answer to the problem like error codes and specific error messages.
Mitigating details: Such as Hardware and configuration details that did or could have an impact on the actual problem. Software versions specific details about teh problem etc...
Solution: Detailed explanation of what you found the problem to be. Why the problem occured and referrences to relevant knowledge bases that deal with this specific problem. Finally, exactly what you did to fix the problem including snippets of config files etc...
The most important thing is to make the post as clear and detailed as possible without confusing the issue. Try to remember that you may encounter this problem again and that you may not remember what you were thinking when you posted the solution 3 years prior. Don't just say, if your system won't boot the fsck the drive. You may be using a toally different operating system in the future and may remember very little of Linux. Instead give detailed steps of the operation and include complete commands that were used. If everyone does this effectively then Usenet will remain an incredibly powerful resource for years to come.