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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."
Think of the children who read alt.startrek.furrydom.localgettogethers
Just like MTV is now Youtube, USENET is now Google Groups.
Same thing, different name.
it was about alt.binaries.mp3s
Thanks to file sharing, I purchase more CDs
Thanks to the RIAA, I buy them used...
I use it all the time!
please stop posting the opinions of bloggers as fact.
Stupid headline. Usenet is still there. Stupid idiots who are slaves to only what their ISP spoon feeds them may drop off. So what.
alt.beloved.usenet.gone?.withered?.dead?
alt.black.day.is.is.ever-shall-be
alt.thoughtful.pause.pause.pause.pause
alt.brief.check.make.perform.check
alt.noble.usenet.remains!.lives!.cheers!
alt.brave.usenet.!surrenders.!bows.!gone!
alt.silly.blog.!informs.!researches.!educates
alt.dumb.blogger.drools.mashes-keys-at-random.drools
alt.credulous.slashdot.reports.dramatises.alarms
alt.trusty."alt.adjective.noun.verb.verb.verb".remains.endures.twinkles
Whence? Hence. Whither? Thither.
"Before the Eternal September, but after the Great Renaming, I learned about sex on Usenet."
No need to read any further...
Gamingmuseum.com: Give your 3D accelerator a rest.
One thing I love about reading old Usenet posts is how innocent and safe it all seemed before the Internet boom of the 1990s. People often had their full names and even phone numbers in their sigs. You could sign into a worldwide network and still be trading messages in your own little clique of a dozen or so people who shared an interest.
Then Eternal Spetember happened, and chased most of the decent discussion to quieter and more moderated email lists and web forums.
Usenet's current status as a haven for spam and pirated binar^H^H^H NOTHING ELSE is a far cry from what it used to mean to a lot of people.
Slashdot Burying Stories About Slashdot Media Owned
I'd say dumbed down interfaces. A good newsreader is much friendlier than a webforum. The problem is that you have to install it first.
"Imminent Death of the Net predicted. Film at 11."
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.
Give me Classic Slashdot or give me death!
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.
You are not alone. This is not normal. None of this is normal.
I wish there was some indication in the summary that this isn't really news. It's just a lamentation of the bygone days of Usenet. The details about ISPs dropping alt.* have already been repeatedly reported on /.
As with all the other stories on this: Boo-hoo, ISPs aren't giving away free usenet. If you really want it, find a 3rd party usenet server. If my ISP took away email, I wouldn't notice because I use a different address. Verizon took away my usenet and I didn't notice, because I use a 3rd party usenet server.
And again if you haven't read it in the comments of previous postings on this story, a 3rd party usenet server is practically REQUIRED for anonymous viewing/posting of the illicit content they are trying to prevent. The pedos all sign up with offshore providers and pay for it with anonymously mailed money-orders, and access it through anonymizing proxies. The ones who don't are quickly and easily arrested with a single warrant to the ISP. The smart ones, who survive, and are thus the big-time posters, are not and can not be prevented in this manner.
alt.binaries.* isn't killed by ISPs, it's killed by spam and superior communication mechanisms.
Coz your post is dead accurate about the whole usenet sense of humor.
I loved:
alt.fan.tonya-harding.whack.whack.whack
alt.sex.bestiality.barney.die.die.die
and all the many alt.*.whilst.wearing.rubber.knickers groups.
Not that I ever *read* any of them, but it made my heart warm knowing they existed.
Nostalgia's not what it used to be.
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.
This post brought to you by your friendly neighborhood MBA.
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.
"Leo Fender was in a 'state of grace' when he designed the Stratocaster." -- Paul Reed Smith
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.
Supporting World Peace Through Nuclear Pacification
That's actually quite doable. Making forum software that is feature-competitive with newsreaders is totally viable. That's not what concerns me.
A bigger problem (which web mail suffers from, as well) is that web forums are a way for a server operator to make decisions about the features you get (as well as how/if it is integrated with other content, whether for good (I won't go into that, here) or ill (ads)), rather than leaving those decisions to the client.
I really see it as technological step backwards.
As an exercise in absurdity, imagine if we applied the same trend to the web itself. In addition to "web mail" and "web forums", imagine "web web", where your browser window contains a widget consisting of code loaded from someone else's server, and that widget has features similar to a web browser. Oh wait, we have that: Flash and Silverlight.
As copyright owner of this comment, I authorize everyone to defeat any technological measure which limits access to it.
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.
"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.
I am a free slashdotter. I will not be modded, blogged, DRM'd, patented, podcasted or RFID'd. My life is my own.
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.
Yet here we are, on a web forum, and not on USENET.
But this isn't a universal forum. USENET encompassed any topic and was the most widely read set of forums. If you wanted an answer to a complicated technical question, it was the best place to go. If you wanted to discuss obscure music theory, it was the place to go. If you just wanted to sell your old sofa to local people, it was the place to go. It was frequented by geeks and non-geeks.
Web forums don't do that. They're all specialized and there are too many of them. Slashdot only covers topical news of interest to geeks. Web forums have always been complex to use, almost always requiring registration to write, sometimes even requiring registration to read. You'll find tens of forums all devoted to the same topic. One newsreader would keep track of all your news groups you were interested in, and you could add and remove them as you wish; what keeps tracks of the hundreds of forums I may be interested in and provides the same interface to them?
The problem with USENET dying is that there is no replacement for it! This isn't the case of horse and buggy being usurped by the automobile. It's more like playgrounds being replaced by televisions.
I think USENET started going downhill when the spammers and advertisement took over. There's still activity on USENET, it's just been declining steadily.
Personally, I never liked the Google/Dejanews twist to archive postings for eternity. In the old days (get off my lawn!) it was a place just for discussion, not to get your words down for posterity. Once I learned things were being archived and searchable, I definately felt I had to ask less stupid questions...
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
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.)
Main difference between the BSD license and the GPL license: one is from California and the other is from Massachusetts
I was a collaborative effort.
Tell your mom I said hi.
Dewey, what part of this looks like authorities should be involved?