R.I.P Usenet: 1980-2008

CorinneI writes "In a way inconceivable in today's marketplace, Usenet was where people once went to talk — in days before the profit-centric Internet we have today. The series of bulletin boards called 'newsgroups' shared by thousands of computers, which traded new messages several times a day, is now a thing of the past."

Comments

Google Groups

[Shuh]

Just like MTV is now Youtube, USENET is now Google Groups.


Same thing, different name.

Re:Google Groups

[LWATCDR]

Or yahoo groups or Myspace groups or ......
Just not the same thing to be honest. The real problem for usenet and the Internet in general is that it is just to easy.
A lot of the good stuff from usenet has now migrated to mailing lists and online forums but it still isn't the same.. Ahh the good old days.

Re:Google Groups

[geminidomino]

Actually Google Groups *is* the same thing as Usenet, because that is exactly what it is, a [sic] easy to use web front end to Usenet.

That's awfully subjective. I find the GG interface to be an exercise in masochism.

Re:Google Groups

[nurb432]

While it might be a pretty modern front end to usenet it doesn't help the fact that the back end feed is slowly being strangled by spam, and now legislation.

Re:Google Groups

[Just Some Guy]

Google Groups *is* the same thing as Usenet, because that is exactly what it is, a easy to use web front end to Usenet.

Where "easy to use" means "one tenth the features of a decent newsreader, but slower and more awkward". Long live Gnus.

Re:Google Groups

[Chemisor]

> The demise of Usenet was a long time ago, and coincided with the introduction of the web-based forum.

Uh, no. It coincided with the flood of spammers who discovered that it costs nothing to post on the newsgroups and that most people use their *gasp* actual email addresses in the posts. Now if you post anything, you are guaranteed to be spammed on the newsgroup and off. At least the forums are too numerous to attack effectively and are at least somewhat moderated. They are also more anonymous as you get to use different identities, with no public email address for each one. Sure, if spam were outlawed, usenet might come back, but as for me, I haven't posted on a newsgroup in almost a decade.

Re:Google Groups

[dougmc]

Google groups is indeed the source of a lot of spam posted to Usenet. But it's also the source of a lot of non-spam posted to Usenet.

For example, about 27% of the posts to the Big-8 come from Google Groups now. If less than 27% of the spam posted to the Big-8 comes from google, then it's doing a better job of controlling it's users than Usenet as a whole. (I don't know if this is the case or not. Posts are easy to count. Classifying them as spam or not is harder.)

Either way, Google Groups is such a big contributor of noise and spam to Usenet because it's such a big contributor of _posts_ to Usenet.

No argument about the interface, however. But the retention is nice!

Re:Google Groups

[houghi]

If there is anybody who wants proof that 'Do no evil' is just marketing he must look at how Google raped dejanews.com.

It encourages top posting or no quoting at all. It pretends to own Usenet, so that people think it is the same as Usenet. It is horrible to search anything. There are way too many spam postings coming from google groups. The users are so ignorant of any Usenet netiquete, because it is promoted as a forum, which it isn't. This is so bad that many groups just killfile all GG posters. They are the new AOL users.

OTOH what they could filter out is all the binaries. That would not only stop childporn, it would make it easier for providers to actualy provide it. All the illegal content will be gone. The bit of legal binary content that is out there should be somewhere else anyway.

Re:Google Groups

[synthespian]

Google is doing all of great service in having bought the early Usenet archives. This is a human knowledge base.

Web 2.0 ftw

[aredubya74]

"Usenet was where people once went to talk â" in days before the profit-centric Internet we have today."

Internet company profits have zero to do with the decline of USENET as a discussion forum. In its heyday, it was the only Internet-wide forum. It's been supplanted by web forums of every conceivable niche. Web 2.0 beat it out, plain and simple.

Re:Web 2.0 ftw

[Hatta]

Except that no Web 2.0 forum comes close to matching the features that any decent USENET client had 15 years ago. Things like real threading, filters, kill files, etc.

Re:Web 2.0 ftw

[squiggleslash]

I don't think either explanation really matches reality. Usenet started to seriously deteriorate to the point most people I knew who were regulars started to drop it around 1995-1998. At that time, while there were web forums, they were still in the teething stage and no replacement for Usenet. That, for me, is the time Usenet "died". It began to be re-invented as a binaries distribution network shortly thereafter.

Why did it die? Spam. Spammers began to make swathes of Usenet unreadable. After a few managable carpetbombs, the serious spammers first attacked in earnest the alt.sex hierarchy (it's an interesting fact that comes as a surprise to many that back in the early nineties, alt.sex contained some of the most respected newsgroups in Usenet. alt.sex.bondage, for example, was originally started after a prank revealed massive interest in such a group, and it became one of the more respected groups thereafter.) The groups became unusable within two years, with a few migrating to "safer" areas out of the alt.* hierarchy. After that the rest of Usenet started to get similarly hit.

A few attempts were made to protect Usenet, from serious attempts to hold ISPs to account for their users (which caused more damage than it helped, as the legitimate customers of those ISPs were cut off from Usenet too and as a result drifted away, reducing the S/N ratio even further) to attempts to introduce various forms of moderation that, ultimately, also caused more damage.

People just gave up. Even the spammers started to give up after a few years largely because it wasn't worth their time any more, but by that time Usenet was dead anyway.

What's dying today isn't Usenet, at least not the network in operation back from 1980. It's a binaries distribution system, the one that took over from the mid-nineties onwards.

And frankly, I don't know about you, but I don't care about that one.

Re:Web 2.0 ftw

[jandrese]

A lot of the more respectable groups started moderation systems back when the spam onslaught started, but they were afterthoughts on a system not designed for them. The problem with moderator systems is that it requires a small handful of trusted moderators, and what do you do when they grow tired of the subject and leave? Electing a small group of moderators (technically, it's rarely an election, they're usually self appointed) always seems to start the slow death of a newsgroup.

It's really a shame because as people have pointed out, the tools built into your average usenet client completely blow away most web forums for features, especially with threading, scoring, tracking, etc... Plus, the Usenet is fast, being a simple text protocol with built-in multicasting you can support communities of millions with virtually no drain on your personal resources. Web forums frequently crash and burn when they start to become popular because the centralized hardware requirements and the fact that you have to run a database means that once you start getting more than a few readers per second you have to start looking at specialized solutions or lose your community to database overload crashes and general slowness. Unfortunately, it is this feature that guarantee that any two bit joker with an internet connection could clobber a group with spam.

As it is so often true in life, we can't have nice things because some jackass will always try to mess it up.

Re:Web 2.0 ftw

[tkinnun0]

Yet here we are, on a web forum, and not on USENET. Makes you wonder whether those features were just a crutch to get around USENET's design flaws.

Re:Web 2.0 ftw

[dougmc]

Ease of use is very debatable. Adding a new Usenet group is far easier for me than finding a new forum, registering, learning it's interface and quirks, etc.

As for accessibility, OK, at least until your favorite forum's server loses power. Or forgets to pay it's registrar bill. Or the admin decides to shut it down. Or decides he doesn't like you and blocks you.

yellow journalism at it's worst

[Anonymous Coward]

please stop posting the opinions of bloggers as fact.

Re:yellow journalism at it's worst

[SQLGuru]

A rumor repeated often enough eventually becomes fact......or at least a Wikipedia edit.

Layne

Bullcrap

[fnj]

Stupid headline. Usenet is still there. Stupid idiots who are slaves to only what their ISP spoon feeds them may drop off. So what.

Re:Bullcrap

[saschasegan]

No, I'm pining for the really good ol' days before the binaries groups suffocated the rest of Usenet.

Re:Bullcrap

[saschasegan]

As other posters have pointed out, there have been multiple causes for the decline of Usenet as a social and discussion forum. The appearance of Web 1.0 and 2.0 fora, the automated spam plague of the 1990s, the way younger people seem to like photos and video in their social messaging, etc etc etc.

But I think the way Usenet became a massive carrier for warez and pr0n binaries made it a liability for ISPs in a way it wouldn't have been otherwise. The way the binaries groups tend to dominate byte traffic also leads/led ISPs to see Usenet as, basically, a gigantic flow of binaries with some tiny text stuff tacked on. They didn't like what they saw.

You see the same problem with P2P. There's nothing inherently illegal or evil about P2P, as we all know, and it has many excellent uses. But enough P2P traffic is/was pirated movies/music that the whole protocol gets tarred with the brush, and then you have ISPs cracking down.

I know a lot of posters here have been celebrating that handful of third party news servers, but to me one of the big pluses of Usenet was its extremely decentralized nature. Because it was on every ISP, because it was local to everyone, nobody could really control it. It was as close as we get to "public space" on the privately run Net. If everyone's using Giganews, then they're just basically using a proprietary bulletin board system that happens to use NNTP as a protocol.

Pffft, been dying for years.

[RyuuzakiTetsuya]

I worked in ISP support for years and USENET was dying well before child porn was a nail in it's coffin. Probably has something to do with message boards with much friendlier interfaces, or that ISPs never went out of their way to try to explain what usenet is.

Either way, the newsgroup support call was kind of a rare thing, like finding a Yeti or something.

people stopped caring, and now it's going away as essential from an ISP POV. There are still ways to get NNTP feeds, so it's not completely toast.

Plenty of big 8 and alt groups get traffic still

[dtolman]

If they end up dropping the binary groups... who cares? Google hasn't announced that they are dropping their mediocre (but useful) usenet client service. There are plenty of usenet groups still active - usenet may be in decline.. but hasn't that but true for so long already its practically a joke? Lets face it - there is still a need for readily available, easily searched (and filtered), unmoderated discussion groups.

Uh...

[snarfies]

From TFA: "It's the porn that's putting nails in Usenet's coffin."

That would seem to fly in the face of everything I know about both human nature and the internet.

For me, the reasons my (once extensive) Usenet usage dropped off was 1) insane amounts of spam, and 2) ease of use of torrents (at least with regards to binaries).

Re:Usenet thrives for those willing to pay

[imsabbel]

You are part of the problem

This article is sensationalist crap

[JustNiz]

Usenet is alive and quite well. Actually I was on it this morning (before I read this article).
The fact that less-informed internet users don't generally know about it is IMHO a good thing.

Isn't it ironic

[Mononoke]

This show of force by the morality police is actually going to help the pornographers make more money. How? Virtually all of the pornographic images posted to the .binaries groups were stolen from pay-to-view pornography sites, thus devaluing the images. Some of those who have had their 'free' source cut off will spend what it takes to continue their viewing habits.

Prohibition didn't work then, and it still doesn't work.

Don't bother reading the article...

[fprintf]

Don't bother reading the article. It is a non-interesting opinion/blog piece with very little supporting data.

My own little anecdote, I was on usenet (rec.windsurfing) earlier today. If it wasn't for the overwhelming spam, I'd continue to use some of the other groups as the people who are left are a pretty committed and knowledgable group.

2 points

[circletimessquare]

1. the government anti-child porn crusade did not kill usenet. alt.binaries bloat, child porn included, killed usenet

2. if the government is more precise in what they shut down (ie, if they shut down just alt.binaries), then the effect will be counterintuitive: usenet can experience a rebirth

it wouldn't be that hard to remove all encoded material from usenet. just set up a simple rule and restrict by size. once you do that, and usenet becomes text only again, usenet can be reborn to satisfy what made it so great in the first place. its social networking lite

Bob

[bobjr94]

Funny, I was on there yesterday, some of the groups had 100,000 posts since the day before. When they say the newsgroups are dead, they are incorrect. They should have said real discussions on the newsgroups are moving to yahoo groups or google or specific forms or web sites. Actually that move to web based discussions happened about 4 or 5 years ago. So this article is rather late and meaningless.

USENET will be around for a long time to come

[killmenow]

Hell, Gopher isn't even dead.

Hmm...Giganews and other services are still there

[sgant]

Oh, and look, they have all the alt.* forums there too!

So, unless the entire Usenet network gets taken offline..which is unlikely, then no, it's far from dead.

Re:Hmm...Giganews and other services are still the

[Lord Apathy]

Holy Shit! Usenet is dead. For some reason my Xnews, open right now, seems to not have noticed.

Death Of Usenet has been predicted since its birth. Nothing to see here.

Mourning the end of September...

[argent]

This bloke isn't mourning Usenet, he's mourning the end of the September that Never Ended.

Usenet's biggest problems really started when AOL joined Usenet. The other ISPs followed on from that... people said that September ended when AOL left... not so, it won't end until the last big ISP is gone. Then maybe it'll be time for Usenet 2.0...

First Ammendment rights

[dpilot]

If we wanted to don our tinfoil hats, we could come up with an alternative reason for killing Usenet, instead of kiddy porn or the mafiAA.

Usenet may be one of the few remaining places on the Internet that might pretend to have First Ammendment protections. Here at Slashdot there are discussion forums, but Slashdot has some form of control/culpability for them despite any disclaimers. If I were to post the Secrets of Scientology here, the Church of Scientology would certainly be after me, but they'd first go after Slashdot to get those secrets removed. (Of course then they're inviting the Streisand Effect, and they'd have to remember the Wayback Machine, but I'm sure they'd try.) But the essence is that Slashdot is a commercial entity hosting contributed content on its servers. The same can be said about pretty much any weblog out there.

The same cannot be said of Usenet. There is no single choke point for Usenet, like there is for a weblog. There is no single point to send a C&D letter to. Furthermore, it's fully possible that the author on Usenet is carefully anonymous, and is therefore untracable. Even finding the original feedpoint may be problematic, and require serious geek assistance.

On the other hand...

I was there on "Green Card Day". I remember seeing it the first time, then seeing it again in the next group that I followed, then again and again.... There may be something inherently unworkable about mixing anonymity with complete freedom speech. I suspect our founding fathers thought that we'd use our free speech more wisely than I do. I still believe that it is at times important to be anonymous, while at the same time retaining first ammendment protection, but I also believe that claiming those dual rights is FAR more important than Viagra or Nigerian bank accounts. I have no idea what a solution might be, other than to make some "cost of anonymity" great enough to prevent spam, but have no idea how to do that.

Re:Hmm...Giganews and other services are still the

[click2005]

"The year of linux on the desktop"..
"The next search engine to beat google"..
"Windows is dead"..
"Usenet is dead"..

It seems like more and more people are making more and more outrageous predictions & claims.

I guess with all the noise out there people need a way for their blog to stand out.

If they're wrong its a case of "oh well, maybe next year" but if they're right they'll claim they're prophetic or something and use it to get more advertizing/readers/whatever... and yet nothing changes, the internet goes on.

Hold on.. http://tech.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=08/07/31/1316257 OMG!! the internet is gonna end.

Re:Hmm...Giganews and other services are still the

[salmosri]

If you read the article you'd realize the writer was speaking "metaphorically"

it's hard to completely kill off something as totally decentralized as Usenet; as long as two servers agree to share the NNTP protocol, it'll continue on in some fashion. But the Usenet I mourn is long gone, anyway, or long-transformed into interlocking comments on LiveJournals and the forums boards on tech-support Web sites.

Apparently decent reporting is DEAD at PcMag....

[moxley]

What a horrible article with a sensationalistic title. The only good thing I can say about that article is that at least the writer understands the technical aspects of usenet, unlike some of the articles I have seen lately. Claming "Usetnet is dead" is what makes him an idiot. I hope usenet is dead..FOR HIM.

I love the newsgroups and have used all aspects of them daily since the mid 90s. When I discovered binaries in 1998 I couldn't believe how ingenious it was. I have had a premium news service for the past 5 years and it's the one bill I pay every month with joy...Usenet is not dead - it's only gotten better. But they WANT to kill it.

If the ISP want to discontinue them they're stupid. It only bothers me in so much as I feel that is the first step in a campaign to ruin them, but due to the way usenet works, it would be a difficult task and would basically require removing all freedom on the internet (which is something these groups want, that is their goal - make no mistake about it - the corporate/governmental groups that are pushing this sort of thing want to turn the net into some bastardized bowlderized version of a three-way cross between early AOL, the home shopping network and MSNBC. Fuck that.

Re:Hmm...Giganews and other services are still the

[paeanblack]

For some reason my Xnews, open right now, seems to not have noticed.

But have you checked the date? It's finally October 1st!

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eternal_September

Re:Netcraft is wrong; we need hard data

[synthespian]

It probably went down, because there's a whole generation that thinks PHP forums and Google will help you find *all* the answers when, in fact, early internet engineers were pretty smart guys and designed something in which you would go to one place to concentrate your searches. Furhtermore, the posting would be replicate to all servers.

Personally, I think googling for a technical answer in particular regarding programming languages is a PITA. Too many forums to search for. Usenet makes it much simpler, but witness the moronity level when Ubuntu and Apple don't propagate their mailing list to Usenet (which just about every other self-repecting OS crowd does - Debian, FreeBSD, etc.)

Dark Usenet?

[Lord Apathy]

When I started on Usenet, right after the flood waters receded, you had to know someone to get a feed from them. I used to get my daily usenet fix over a 2400 bps modem to an amiga 500 running dnews 1.13, I think. I was a collaborative effort.

Maybe in the future usenet can be reborn but with in a closed system again. You have to know someone to get a feed from.

Re:this was never about porn

[barzok]

The ends justify the means. Thank you, Mr. Cuomo.

Just yesterday, Cuomo was out posturing and making sure he was strengthening his political future.

The office asked Internet providers both small and large to strip their servers of child pornography Web sites and child pornography newsgroups, which are a major supplier of illegal images. ...

If companies don't voluntarily comply, Cuomo said in his announcement Wednesday, legal action will be taken by his office. ...

One of the Rochester area's largest Internet service providers, Frontier/Citizens Net, declined to sign the agreement, Cuomo said, adding that he sent a letter to Frontier and LocalNet, which also declined to sign the agreement, stating that his office will take legal action against those companies that do not voluntarily comply.

Explain to me how the hell this is "voluntary". This is the same things as the "mandatory volunteer work" that many high schools are requiring now. It's not voluntary if you'll be punished for not doing it!

"I made the case that I believe they can be held responsible... child pornography is illegal," Cuomo said.

Then let's start holding all those ISPs responsible for copyright infringement RIGHT NOW because they're still making it possible to do it. Or will he wait until it's feasible to put the brakes on the most public, most easily-blocked methods and THEN make it a mandatory voluntary program?

Re:Hmm...Giganews and other services are still the

[einer]

Wait... So they're preventing AOL'ers and their big ISP ilk from accessing USENET? Is this a return to the golden age?

This is awesome for usenet.

Re:Usenet is dead...

[zmollusc]

Oh please please please let the spammers realise that the informed aren't their target audience, and leave too.