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

[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!

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.

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.

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).

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.

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.

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.)

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.