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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."
his last, as opposed to first, post?
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
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!
Especially since the advent of google groups. It makes it much easier to find past posts. This gives news groups a much longer memory and, in theory, should prevent repetitive posts.
In addition, it makes USENET an extremely effective support venue. Whenever I have an unexplained error or problem with one of my machines, I just search groups.google.com and more often than not, I find that someone has had the same exact problem that I'm experiencing.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
Where else can you find free repositories of porn, sectioned off into seperate areas, from leather to hamsters? Usenet rocks.
God is real unless declared integer.
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
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.
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
"Usenet is like a herd of performing elephants with diarrhea--massive, difficult to redirect, awe-inspiring, entertaining, and a source of mind-boggling amounts of excrement when you least expect it."
- Spaf, 1992
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
When I first got on the internet in 1994, USENET was the place to be. I remember the early rumblings, tho, that segregated web-based message boards would one day overtake USENET and make it a vast wasteland. I didn't think it made any sense to purposely limit your conversations to such small focused sites, and figured it would never work.
I haven't used USENET in years now. It got too painful in the mid- to late-1990s to sort through all the spam and all the trolls and all the people posting pointless one-liners to hear themselves talk.
Granted, you still have many of the latter showing up on web-based message boards, but the spam is definitely much better controlled, and the volume of traffic is easier to handle as both a reader and a moderator.
But, man, Spafford was dead-on and years ahead of his time. I'd love to see a message board system with the kind of intelligence and grace that he used to see on USENET in the earlier days. The only way you're going to get it is on a web-based board or through a mailing list.
Too bad.
Too many cooks, perhaps.
-Augie
Hmm.
Cheers,
Ian
I'm sick of you all. I'm leaving. Inconsiderate bastards. All of you.
There are some odd things afoot now, in the Villa Straylight.
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.
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
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?
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. :)
The largest UK newsgroup; One of the largest in the world.
Almost no spam. Why? Because spammers get flamed mercilessly, their accounts get cancelled and the advertisers accounts also get cancelled. Plus the cancelbots of course.
No top posting. Why? Because newbies and OE morons get flamed mercilessly for doing it.
The FAQ does get read. Why? Because for a start, it's useful and newbies and morons get flamed mercilessly for not reading and absorbing it.
Crossposting is limited. Why? Because crossposters get flamed mercilessly for doing it.
It's the usenet equivalent of New York's zero tolerance campaign.
In short, usenet has degenerated to crap because people don't stand up for the use of their groups. Basically, don't be so fucking polite. If you don't like it, feel free to fuck off and die.
Government of the people, by corporate executives, for corporate profits.
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.
We published an interview with Spaf a little while ago and his insights still are well-worth reading and heeding. He is still very concerned about the newest users on the Internet, etiquette, ethics, and the impact of networked communication on society. You can read the interview here.