Duke To Shut Down Usenet Server

DukeTech writes "This week marks the end of an era for one of the earliest pieces of Internet history, which got its start at Duke University more than 30 years ago. On May 20, Duke will shut down its Usenet server, which provides access to a worldwide electronic discussion network of newsgroups started in 1979 by two Duke graduate students, Tom Truscott and Jim Ellis." Rantastic and other readers wrote about the shutdown of the British Usenet indexer Newzbin today; the site sank under the weight of a lawsuit and outstanding debt. Combine these stories with the recent news of Microsoft shuttering its newsgroups, along with other recent stories, and the picture does not look bright for Usenet.

Comments

A twinge of sadness at this passing

[Eternal Vigilance]

Those were good times. Thanks guys.

Re:A twinge of sadness at this passing

[twisteddk]

Agreed. I love(d) the days of the newsgroup.

But in all fairness, back then the internet was totally free. And everyone pretty much put up servers for altruistic, informational, educational or other similar non profit purposes. Today with the current economic climate and focus on spending policies, everyone is cutting down. And there just really isn't a viable business model for usenet that I can think of (not that I'm a doctorate in economy, but still).
So I guess Usenet now just goes the way of Gopher and becomes once again a prduct of love and devotion, rather than business. I kinda like usenet that way, so I dont really mind.

Does that make me a geek now ? ;)

Re:A twinge of sadness at this passing

[commodore64_love]

Usenet would be dirt-cheap to operate if, for example, Duke chose to stop carrying the binaries groups. (Like Google Groups today.) Then they'd just be handling the Text messages in groups like rec.arts.tv which requires very little bandwidth.

This is yet another example of throwing-out the whole Baby, when all you really need to do it remove the bathwater (binaries). There's no reason to completely stop carrying Usenet.

Re:A twinge of sadness at this passing

[elrous0]

Especially sad because Usenet is the first and last place you can go on the internet for truly uncensored discussion--with no moderators, with no company or organization in charge. Of course, this led to a lot of flamewars, spam, and people calling each other "fag." But it also meant that everyone always had at least one place to go where they didn't have to walk on eggshells and worry about offending the honchos in charge.

Call me silly, but I think that Usenet is something we NEED. It's the one true free speech zone on an increasingly corporatized/moderated/censored internet.

Re:A twinge of sadness at this passing

[Kjella]

But what exactly was the main point of Usenet? Well, that it was distributed and clients only go over the local link, because long distance bandwidth was precious. Today you spend the bandwidth of 100 usenet messages going half way around the world loading the front page of one online news site, so who really cares if your local ISP cuts it as long as "there are many nntp servers out there that offer text-only for free" according to you?

The whole concept of usenet is out of date, you can argue back and forth about the nntp protocol versus the http protocol but today it is far more practical to have one group on one server and have everybody access that. It guarantees that everybody sees all messages (not everything would propagate well), you can have captchas to prevent spam, moderators (without premoderation like usenet), search (without downloading everything) and so on. If people don't like a server, move the community to a different one.

Sure, it would be neat if you could standardize on a discussion protocol and use the tool of your choice but I think it'd be almost easier with a screen scraper than doing it by committee. There's honestly not that many different discussion board servers in common use.

Re:A twinge of sadness at this passing

[Hatta]

Don't blame the pirates. Pirates were doing ISPs a favor by using USENET. Something pirated over USENET only travels over the public internet once. Then every user of the ISP can download it on the ISPs network at no cost to the ISP. Kill USENET and those pirates go back to P2P where every download goes across the public internet at least once per user.

No, it wasn't pirates. It was spam. Binaries and discussion coexisted very well on USENET for many years. It was the spam that killed the discussion, and drove most people away. If people could still use USENET instead of web forums, no ISP would be killing USENET.

Re:A twinge of sadness at this passing

[IntlHarvester]

It wasn't just the spam, Usenet survived the spam onslaught of the 1990s. What put the final dagger in Usenet was the unstoppable kooks and trolls which infest the place. Seriously, the quality of discussion there just sucks, its flaming and stalking 24x7. Usenet killed Usenet.

Both spam and trolling are symptomatic of central problem of Usenet -- most people just do not want to participate in unmoderated forums. If someone had come up with a moderation option for Usenet that actually worked maybe it had a chance at survival.

combinations

[Threni]

> Combine these stories with the recent news of Microsoft shuttering its newsgroups, along with other recent stories, and the picture does not look bright for Usenet.

What if you combine those stories with the fact that there are millions more people using Usenet groups today thanks to Google's web interface? Does it look brighter than 10 years ago?

Maybe, though, Usenet is an idea whose time has been and gone. There are other ways of sharing information now, which don't suffer the same intractable problems of spam etc.

hopefully, a typical slashdot exaggeration

[catmistake]

Notable, because Duke was first, and sad, if a sign of things to come. But it's a global server peer network. Duke can't turn it off.

Re:...and there's still no comparable alternative.

[Yvanhoe]

This is my current pet-peeves : flat forum and phpBB are killing the art of internet discussion.

It's Still Open For Now

[mrpacmanjel]

Anyone (feeling brave enough) can host their own Usenet server - open protocols and that malarky is still possible.

As a massively connected "network" of information and easily understood protocol writing software to parse it is straightforward.

Maybe political pressure is being exerted to shut the Usenet servers down. Media companies are aware of it's existence and will encourage it's extinction ("good luck with that").

Modern BBS-type systems are fine but are self-contained and do not encourage sharing of information (more accurately "replication") of nodes and data.

I don't think Usenet will ever go away - people are still using gopher today and some modern browsers still support it!

As long as the underpinnings of the Internet are open and free then anyone can create there own "protocol" and transmit data.
This is a fundemental right of the Internet.

Can you imagine if all this was created by a commercial entity - we just would not have the freedom we have now.

As long as some geeks run and admin their servers - there will always be an open and free way of transmitting data.

Believe me our "governments" and corporate "sponsors" are trying to remove those freedoms.

Re:...and there's still no comparable alternative.

[Eternal Vigilance]

This is my current pet-peeves : flat forum and phpBB are killing the art of internet discussion.

Oh, how painfully, painfully true.

I feel like I've departed the internet age of letters and found myself in the age of tweets.

Re:...and there's still no comparable alternative.

[arth1]

I feel like I've departed the internet age of letters and found myself in the age of tweets.

Unfortunately, I have to agree. Not only has the communication become parodically terse, but it has also become imperative to answer as quickly as possible. If you actually re-read what you wrote, take time to correct errors, and perhaps add a new point or two, i.e. spend some time on improving your post, it won't be seen by many if any.

And I hate to say it, but I think slashdot has played its part in steering posting fora towardes this decline. Slashdot has also done some things to try to stem it, like the grading of both articles and posts, but it's an afterthought that doesn't solve the problem, but created karma whores instead.
The moderators too are unlikely to see good posts deep into a thread that isn't on the front page, no matter how good they are. So they never get moderated up to the point where others see them either.

TLDR

[illumnatLA]

TLDR...

The moderators too are unlikely to see good posts deep into a thread that isn't on the front page, no matter how good they are. So they never get moderated up to the point where others see them either.

Agreed. Or the moderators only read (at best) the first couple of sentences of a post and rate based on that rather than the content of the whole comment. The attention span seems to have gotten so short that anything more than 140 characters is indigestible.

Given the current state of mods lately, this post will be tagged 'Troll' or 'Flamebait' based solely on the first line of this comment rather than reading the point I was trying to make.

Re:...and there's still no comparable alternative.

[Opportunist]

Then vote with your feet. That's the difference between the internet and real dictatorships.

Oh, I got ahead. I always get to hear "the internet is an anarchic place". It's not. It's a collection of minuscle dictatorships. Every server its own little dictatorship. Of course, usually governed by the laws of the country it is placed in, but also subject to the whims of its owner. If you want to create a board where the discussion of fuzzy purple things is banned because you have a pathological hate of fuzzy purple things, you can just do that. People who like fuzzy purple things will have only one choice: Not to go to your board.

But that's not really the big problem. There's other boards. And, unlike real life, if you don't like the dictatorships offered to you, roll your own! You cannot really stage a revolt (there's not really a neat way to overthrow an "internet dictator", even if you did manage to break through his defenses and crown yourself the new root, he can simply act like the average schoolyard crybaby, grab his ball, or rather, server, and go home), but you can simply grab a new server and go for it.

Of course, if you act like the average armchair dictator, you will be pretty lonely in your little dictatorship. Only if you offer people a reason to come to your fiefdom, they will opt to do that. People are generally lazy, and if you offer them what they want to have, they will come to you instead of founding their own little dictatorship.

So censor if you must. If I don't like it, well, bye.

The obvious drawback of such a system is that it will invariably lead to groupthink. You will eventually end up on a server that shares your views, which will be reinforced by the others that come to this server, while people with opposing views are probably being expelled or "gently nudged" to consider leaving the server the better idea.

And yes, that even applies here at /. Groupthink is a big problem, let's be honest here. And while I generally share the group opinion (duh, I'm still here), on some topics it's hard to not fall for the fallacy of "hey, everyone agrees, I'm modded 5+ insightful, so I gotta be right".