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Another Nail In Usenet's Coffin?
Karamchand writes "Today news.individual.net in an email to its more than 250.000 registered users announced that they won't be able to continue offering free Usenet access. While it provided text-only groups many people relied on individual.net's service to take part in one of the Internet's older services.
In a time were a working news server is not a selling point for ISPs and most internet users never heard about this service, will this be another nail in the coffin of Usenet?"
No, for text usenet group access, Google Groups is fine. For binary access, well, you probably have to pay but it is worth it.
What's this Usenet thing again?
Don't take life so seriously. No one makes it out alive.
I've been hearing this, since, oh, just after The Great Renaming, which was when? '85, '86?
"I'd rather be a lightning rod than a seismometer." -Ken Kesey
...and takes with it those stupid posts to alt.drugs I wrote in college...
Check out http://www.talkaboutnetwork.com/
Those who like it, like it a lot. Enough, say, to find another Usenet feed. It just ain't that big a deal.
At the moment, I'm using the google groups beta. If they'd add reply quoted, I'd probably stick with it. As it is, I'll probably get an account with supernews or something sooner or later...
Usenet will be here for another 20 years.. These stories about the "death" of these things are hugely over-rated.
Next it'll be that AIM, Yahoo Messenger, MSN messenger are killing IRC.
There are plenty of good groups on usenet with loyal posters - it's like trying to kill fortran - it'll only happen over dead bodies..
Simon.
Web based forum software offer a lot more features than newsgroups. However they are not indexed by centralized servers like Usenet, so it's as easy to find web forums. It would be nice if the most popular forum software like phpBB, VBulletin etc, have some sort of common standard that allows them to be listed by topic, indicating some statistics like number of members, posts, activity so people can quickly choose a forum.
there are more newsgroups than ever. This is just one free service. There are still other free services -- just because one company can't compete does not mean the medium is dying.
The real "Libtards" are the Libertarians!
...and no one is around to hear it, will anyone care?
I've been using the internet since 1994 (well, 193 is you count comp-u-serve) and I remember Usenet fondly. It was a great source of information and discussion, but the signal to noise ratio got way to high. By 1999 it was eaiser to do a HotBot search to find relavent information than it was in the spam and troll infested usenet, save for a few good groups. I really doubt that anyone who got online in '97 or later ever used the usenet at all.
sorry 'bout the mess...
Note that the date of the change is April Fools' Day. Plus, nobody being serious could write "April 1th" as they did.
As long as there are people using usenet to download movies, music, tv shows, games, applications, ebooks, and just about anything else that can be posted on usenet, there will be companies willing to let us pay for that access. Maybe you won't be able to get it bundled with your ISP anymore, but I for one will always have a use for it.
You're old.
Well, what's next? You used to be able to take for granted there were public news servers out there. This service was the best one, and only offered text groups, which was all I wanted anyway. Now...I don't know. There's just no beating reading real submariners discuss the USS San Francisco (hit an underwater mountain at full speed recently) on sci.military.naval.
Shutting down free speech with violence isn't fighting fascism. It IS fascism!
I'm sure he wasn't thinking about alt.sex.stories.* when he said that. :)
"I'd rather be a lightning rod than a seismometer." -Ken Kesey
Sucks about Individual.net, but network services ain't free to provide. I'm quite happy with a Supernews account at $5.95 a month.
Nosce Te Ipsum
I've seen the term in Thunderbird but what is it? If I haven't seen it, it is very oldfashioned, so good riddance!? Seriously, if there is a better alternative, bye-bye Usenet! It just struck me - is Usenet sort of a mailing list(round robin), a forum, what? Billy
http://www.yottanews.com/ has been offering free 1GB per month accounts. There are plenty of other ones out there as well.
most internet users never heard about this service
That is a bit of an understatement.
I can't think of more than two people I know outside of academia that have ever heard of usenet or newsgroups. Use net has been dead along time. Yes, it still has many users. But theres still people out there browsing the web with netscape 4.1 too, that doesn't mean the old school netscape userbase is flourishing though.
seriously, usenet still is one of the best ways to exchange information with people on a specific subject. Some of the comp.lang ones are quite good.
Perhaps they're just proactive regarding April Fools day.
Okay, so people are now going to have to pay for a service that was once free. How is this a nail in the coffin? It seemed that Usenet was dying out until Google came along and included it via Google Groups.
Even though I knew Usenet was out there, it really wasn't until Google Groups that I started using it heavily. I'm a casual Usenet user with a post here and a post there, but most of the time I just don't want all the traffic filling up my mailbox. Having it online in a nice form and easily searchable has made it much easier to work with and find exactly what you need and it's now much more available to folks who never knew it existed in the first place. (What's this little Groups link over here? ...)
One free provider not being free any more doesn't change anything all that much other than being an inconvience for certain users.
Maybe the best thing for Usenet is to go "underground," so to speak, and have traffic die so the noise level diminishes, and at least a little bit of the former glory might return.
Effective from April 1th, 2005, all non-converted accounts will stop working.
And they want us to take this seriously?
Man, a day of awful joke stories on /. AND free usenet stops working? Worst April 1st ever...
One man's -1 Flamebait is another man's +5 Funny.
Usenet is still thriving and there still many very active groups out there, some of which actually have comments in them as opposed to "erotica", although there's still plenty of that too, of course. Better yet, now that October is nearly here at last, the signal to noise ratio should go up too. Sure, many ISPs might be giving up their own Usenet servers, but if they don't outsource to a dedicated provider like SuperNews or Giganews, you can always get an account with them yourself. Failing that, you can hunt around for one of the numerous free servers, and there's always Google Groups of course, but they often don't carry as broad a selection of groups.
UNIX? They're not even circumcised! Savages!
If the signal to noise ratio gets high, you get lots of (presumably good) signal and relatively little noise. I think that what was meant was that the signal to noise ratio got too low . . . unless spam postings and AOL newbie pollution from Usenet in the 90's is considered signal and original and thoughtful postings from individuals is considered noise.
Why not create a nice p2p client for the usenet? Everyone hosts a bit of it, maybe even their favorite parts. It could run in the background a la freenet, except without the crypto-slowness.
IMHO the valuable portion of the usenet are the various groups which answer questions re: programming and review books and the like. When I was learning C++ a while back (on my own) I found the usenet groups/archives accessible through google groups to be invaluable. I, for one, respect those guys who maintain their own archives (is there a place where I may get a copy btw?...don't trust google) Amazon and other websites basically obtain the right to distribute content; at least shut down the servers with all the reviews. The usenet is more freeform, semipermanent, and essentially honest as a ne'er do well disseminator of pure unadulterated opinion...
Movies and the like are essentially worthless compared to the opinions/ideas on usenet. I can't imagine a time when I will be unable to buy something off amazon as opposed to a download from a usenet server. So, strip out the movies, mp3s, and leave the test!
Well, how about running your own local server... And collect only what you are intrested in?
A workable idea?
---- Booth was a patriot ----
The only sad part about this story is that there may not be as many new users of USENET if ISP's aren't offering it for free. Other than that, it's just a bunch of crap.
There are new and old people on USENET constantly. Why, exactly, do you think that this ISP decied not to offer USENET access anymore...because there was no one posting there? Uhm...no. The reason that they stopped offering it is that it is a monster to maintain because of all the traffic. USENET is the most valuable and the most underrated resource on the internet. Yes, I said it, and yes, I mean it. For detailed technical information and answers to tough questions there is nowhere else to go. Product reviews, information on music you want to check out, whatever. It's all there.
Let's keep it real here, okay? Most internet users (including IT "professionals") are too dumb to figure out how to use a newsreader, and FAR too dumb to understand how to evaluate the quality of information you get from google groups. People whine about, "Ohhh, the quality of information on message boards SUCKS, you can't learn ANYTHING from them". What a load of shit. If you have a brain in your head and understand the idea of crossreferencing information before you commit changes on a server that a few thousand people are connecting to, then you can really get a LOT of information from USENET and solve a lot of tough problems quickly. I find good, solid solutions to technical problems CONSTANTLY through google groups. I don't think a week goes by that I don't search it at least 10 times for various things.
Oh, but we have web forums! God forbid people should allow their words to convey their meaning rather than having pretty pictures and fancy emoticons to cover up for the fact that they are just stupid assholes who no one wants to hear from anyway. It's such a joke when you hear people complaining about how "rough" certain web forums are. They don't even know the definition of a "troll" and they think they invented flaming. (Can I get a rolleyes smiley here?).
This is just crap, and everyone cosiging it in this post is an idiot. I'm sorry, but it's true. USENET is a one-stop-shop for all kinds of amazingly valuable information and if you don't see that, then you're missing out. Go download agent and get a clue.
As far as I'm concerned, USENET died when people started making searchable archives of it available. I had been using USENET since the 1980s, and, while it had some problems, it was a discussion forum where people discussed things freely and under their own names. USENET also was mostly a mix of academics, students, and corporate computer geeks. Binary newsgroups and postings were few, but the comp.sources newsgroups were the primary vehicle for the distribution of open source software. People got to know each other personally and even made professional contacts.
Once you had to worry about any hasty post coming back to haunt you a decade later, I stopped using it. And the influx of huge numbers of other users also made it a lot less fun for me.
I'm sure a new generation of USENET users found other uses for USENET, after the community changed and after DejaNews came into existence. But that USENET isn't the USENET I grew up with--it's already something different.
Or maybe you just use the newsserver of your ISP. Some people have forgotten that there are still ISPs who care about Usenet.
I run a web hosting/ISP company, and have offered on several occasions to install news software for my users. No takers, though. The one user I've got who responded said he just uses Google Groups these days. Why mess with NNTP when Google indexes everything anyway, I guess?
It's not just that the information content has become quite low, but that there is as much disinformation as actual positive content. Add in all the pure noise and various forms of spam, add in a little creamed troll (and I think all trolls should be pureed), and you have a pretty worthless thing.
Since so much of the negative information is political propaganda, my guess would be that the SNR hits the deepest troughs during elections, and in combination with the arrival of perpetual September, I'd guess the first time the average SNR went negative was probably in 1996 or 1998, but without doubt it was dead by 2000, whichever metric you care to use. (Two main metrics would be number of posts or volume.) I suspect it is already in permanent negative SNR territory, though there are still tiny pockets of actual information scattered hither and yon.
Why? I think abuse of anonymity is probably the single largest killer.
Freedom = (Meaningful - Coerced) Choice != (Speech | Beer^2), and sad sock puppets' bad mods avail them naught.
Funny, I remember when everyone was on about too many people on usenet were destroying it: The great AOL newbie flood.
Now too many people are killing it?
Hell, strikes me it is just getting back to normal.
7. What we cannot speak about we must pass over in silence.
You can't stop me. I'll move to an even slower, more decrepit form of communication.
Suddenly, just as Paul was about to clinch the job interview...
R T F A. news.individual.net was always a text-only service. Almost everyone who wants usenet binaries has been using pay services for years. The binaries are safe; people pay for porn and MP3s, it's the text groups that are suffering, first from spam, second from idiots posting with Outlook who ignore conventions, third from ISPs who provide spotty service; fourth from motherfuckers who use the Hipcrime tools to create huge amounts of nonsense posts to swamp groups they don't like; finally from Google with their groups interface which gets worse every time they revamp it (eg: allowing replies to ANY post, no matter it's 10 years old).
Finding alternative feeds for pay or free (got a friend at an ISP?) is never a problem it seems. Usenet news is not going to die any sooner than IRC, or IAM or Google Search. Its been around, it will stick around as long as people find it useful to communicate ideas. I find it as likely that Usenet will die as Mail will discontinue being sent via the postal systems in the world.
--- Old Time NeXThead
While it is disappointing to see ISPs dropping Usenet support doing so will hardly kill it. The awesome part of Usenet is it is a naturally distributed network of systems. It doesn't take much to carry the text-only traffic of Usenet, especially considering the price of processing power and network bandwidth anymore. Binary feeds take quite a bit more but if you want the basics the barrier of entry is relatively low.
While web-based forums have gotten very popular in the past few years they simply do not have the advantages of Usenet groups. A forum is limited by a single server/cluster's capacity in terms of both bandwidth and processing power. An angry admin, hacker, FBI raid, or backhoe can take down even the largest of web forums. It would take a lot of doing to kill a newsgroup. A couple of yahoos with spare Linux boxes could keep a group going without much effort. Forums also fall down when it comes to availability. To access a thread on a forum you need to be connected to the web. A newsgroup's posts can be downloaded once and held onto for as long as you'd like. This is a feature mailing lists also have over web forums, the entire history of the list can be stored in your local mail spool. While a forum is likely to be public accessible the sum of its content is rarely available for anyone to mirror if they have the prerogative.
Programs like Leafnode allow you to create local mirrors of feeds while Usenet-Web can process those spools to make them available to anyone with a web browser. Emoticons and oversized picture signatures are little reason to use web forums in lieu of newsgroups.
I'm a loner Dottie, a Rebel.
The problem is that you have to sign up with Firstgate to be able to pay.
Analogies don't equal equalities, they are merely somewhat analogous.
IF *ALL* companies charged for usenet, maybe ther would be less USENET SPAM.
I thought this was insightful for about 5 seconds, then realised that spammers would do exactly what they've done with mail servers (especially since any accounts they paid for would get closed immediately after they violated the TOS by spamming).
"Slashdot - News and Chat Sites Deviant". (Click "homepage" link above for details).
>and I realised: usenet was dead ....
>but why ? really someone tell me why ?
a) The Internet became mainstream.
b) Because of a), the main group using Usenet shifted from programmers/scientists/intellectuals (ergo, people actually *worth* listening to) to brainsick war veterans, (whose primary reason for using it was the fact that they were deranged and antisocial to the point where nobody offline wanted anything to do with them) sociopathic college students, paedophiles/sexual deviants of various different stripes, and the truly hard-core mentally ill individuals who inhabit groups like alt.religion.scientology and alt.conspiracy.
c) Genre/group boundaries virtually aren't respected at all these days...certainly on the alt.* heirarchy anywayz. Crossposting is probably more the exception now than the rule, which means that unless you've got a killfile a mile long, having a coherent conversation is extremely difficult.
d) The protocol has become obsolete and redundant, and has been replaced by special-interest CMS driven Web sites which generally require passwords to join. Because such sites require passwords for posting access, the forums hosted by them do not experience casual, drive-by trolling by the sorts of idiots one generally encounters on Usenet.
e) Also because of a), Usenet began to be increasingly used as a supplement to the p2p filesharing networks, which also is an application that the protocol was never designed for. Hence, not only did this result in some of the text-related traffic dropping off, it meant ISPs were now being asked to carry an obscure, dying protocol with an increasing level of large binary traffic, free of charge.
f) Again because of a), Usenet has now also been inundated with a very high degree of spam. So this, taken in conjunction with the rest of the above, have together had the result of making the protocol largely unusable, and certainly undesirable when compared to the alternatives. Even its' destributed nature has been made obselete by such advances as Yahoo groups...traffic through those go to everyone who wants it, and nobody who doesn't. The groups are also generally moderated in order to ensure intelligent/sane discussion, and to filter out spam. In other words, the available alternatives to Usenet are superior in every possible respect.