Ask HN: I miss Usenet. Are there any modern equivalents?
Much as the title says, I really miss the Usenet days where I could contribute to a bulletin board-style forum on hyper-specific subjects.
If I remember my computing history correctly, Google ended up acquiring and eating Usenet, becoming Google Groups. I'm not sure if this is dead yet.
Arguably, Reddit fills some of this niche, but Usenet was tech-focused, generally quite professional and frankly didn't have the same clientele as Reddit does.
HN is topic-focused, rather than subject-focused.
Would be very interested to see if there's any Usenet-style project that's still alive.
279 comments
[ 2.9 ms ] story [ 243 ms ] threadTangential, but fascinating that we've binned these categories together. The latter is likely orders of magnitude more harmful to society.
Yeah looking at you Mickey Mouse.
More than once, I've had thoughts about developing some sort of discussion platform, but binned it because the thought of hosting it and having to deal with the not-fun problems of reducing spam and handling illegal content made it entirely untasteful. At least spam reduction can be done entirely on my own terms, but illegal content requires me to then coordinate with external companies or agencies, report content, figure out how to deal with and purge the content (or quarantine and hang onto it hand it over when requested), and live with the the pain of having to field DLNAs and other copyright claims.
I obviously have different feelings about piracy than I do about CSAM, but from a hosting perspective, both are just big pain points that make hosting a service where people can share non-text content a pain in the ass.
Seems to be oriented toward binaries though.
https://coderanch.com/
https://www.dpreview.com/forums
and
https://polyamory.com/
as good examples. There are a lot of dead forums out there, but there are also ones where the administrators make the effort to greet new users and make them feel welcome. For instance that last forum covers a fraught issue where emotions run pretty high but the administrators do a good job of "onboarding" new users.
I see you didn't hang out in alt.wesley.crusher.die.die.die much
Not all of the alt.* hierarchy was vapid.
Usenet was a cost to ISPs unfortunately. But, it wasn't centrally controlled or moderated either. It also was minimally technical to use, which served as a good filter.
But I guess reddit's subreddits may be the best alternative with viewership and specific groups/areas.
You know... it should be possible with tagging to take something like twitter reddit, and generate "views" that are groups. Maybe make some spec with three letters, maybe R and an S, and heck another S for the hell of it.
Balkanization and content gardens/API walls block integration of like minded content.
I don't blame the ISPs for this. At the time, you could be an ISP with what is essentially a low-end home Internet connection now, but it cost thousands per month.
What started the downfall of Usenet was Eternal September when AOL let their hoi polloi access the Big Boy Internet. The "Me-tooer" phenomenon was particularly irritating.
that, and the unfortunate but probably not unexpected flood of actual child abuse photos. this became a huge problem real fast. an ISP I worked for back in that day dropped NNTP like a hot potato when the company lawyers caught wind of the potential legal issues.
And this is the major advantage of Usenet. You can’t be silenced by a mob, which leads to freedom of expression and disparate views. Sure there is spam and flames, but one gets all the tools one needs to deal with that. There is no committee deciding what posts should be kept or deleted. We are a lot worse off today than we used to be, largely because of the centralization of discourse.
Asking the user to implement measures and keep them up-to-date is detrimental to adoption from users that are aware of curated sources. Pretending this is net-neutral is misleading.
> We are a lot worse off today than we used to be, largely because of the centralization of discourse.
Usenet was centralized in practice, so I think you mean something else. It's not clear how much the curation of content stifles discourse when creating new forums is essentially free. Either way, I would tend to disagree that curated is worse. Everyone curates to some degree, even when they are free and open discussions.
The name of the group you're thinking of was probably something like "alt.dinosaurs.barney.die.die.die."
There were also quite a few "for sale" type groups, I remember when the group for computer equipment was split into about five subgroups after it got too big.
Just editing to add - there were also a lot of regional groups, one of the earliest and probably biggest was ba.* There were also state/country level top levels and a few colleges had their own too
It all depends on the community you want to hang out in. Usenet was tech-focused because the only people who knew about it or had access were tech-focused and the community was smaller (see: Eternal September).
One of your best options are niche, smaller or heavily moderated reddit communities or web forums that share the same characteristics.
In the early days of Usenet there were very few ways to access it from the perspective of an average person. You either had to be working on one of the small number of companies that were internet connected or were at a university. That significantly restricted the available pool of people using it, and also filtered that pool.
Up through the early 90s that natural filter mechanism kept the focus of individual groups small, reduced noise, and increased signal. Over time as internet access became more widespread that signal to noise decreased, and most modern forums still have difficulty with it.
There are a few other interesting characteristics - the specific nature of the tree approach and the availability of lots of specific groups gave it some uniqueness - Today you might see a bit of that in Reddit subs, Facebook groups, and other similar platforms, albeit lacking the tree.
1. Meatspace user groups / interest groups.
2. University lecture series (the type of weekly seminar that all graduate students and faculty in a given research area attend). You can usually attend as a member of the public if you have an "in".
3. Mailing lists and discord servers for specific projects.
Unfortunately they got too caught up in the crypto nonsense but the idea was sound - good communities have to be guarded and they occasionally "lower the drawbridge" to bring on newcomers, potentially with semi-public spaces. This could be a minecraft server, a facebook group or what have you.
Since the group is motile, they aren't affected by platforms being subpar. They can avoid stagnation by bringing in newcomers, but have a way to vet incoming people too before allowing them "internal" access.
[0]: https://trust.support/feed/moving-castles
(There was also a computer at MIT called "zurich.ai.mit.edu" that you could FTP to in 1990 and download really raunchy NSFL porn. I still have scars.)
At the same time, paying ten cents to make a comment on Reddit or HN is very unappealing.
1) Start off with a trusted group of people (stakeholders)
2) Set up an invite-only system
3) Inviting someone means sharing some stake (i.e. some reputation) with them
4) To post you need some minimum amount of stake
5) With every post that's not downvoted into oblivion you increase your stake until you reach a certain equilibrium point. (So there's a limit and it's not about gaining status points.)
6) Posts that are downvoted into oblivion will cause their authors to lose some stake.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hashcash
HashCash is older than Bitcoin, and Bitcoin sybil-attack protection is basically HashCash.
The channel list in particular is way too low density.
Early Usenet was like Reddit, without the corporate (and come on, blatantly left-leaning) censorship.
I’d encourage you to post a scientific or academic survey of Reddit’s political censorship. I think it’s common that everyone believes their own ideology gets censored when it’s probably not the case overall.
https://xn--gckvb8fzb.com/superhighway84/ is a more directly nostalgia inspired clone of usenet.
every specialized sub-group now holds small portion of the web by/for themselves and only needs to interact with those of same mindset — no need to keep every single word in public forever.
but what you really missing is people of the same~ish age-group having enough time and topics to argue about
Also, HN not being subject focused works for me because I am interested in more than one subject.
One idea is if HN would introduce some tags, or categories so someone can filter if he's only interested in one subject.
What were some of the newsgroups you were interested in? When and why did you stop checking them?
[0] http://sdf.org/ [1] https://tildeverse.org/ [2] https://tilde.club/wiki/usenet-news.html [3] http://www.altexxanet.org/usenet.html
I haven't migrated from web foums to reddit or facebook groups though I'm sure there is much information in those places. I prefer that independent web forums introduce some friction to participating. You have to create an account, and some forums have limits for new members until they reach a certain post count. While the friction is small that does seem to discourage bad behavior a little.
I have easily found forums for subjects I'm interested in, but none of them are tech, so I don't know whether you'll find web forums on current tech subjects.
Usenet was a distributed set of news peering relationships, exchanging posts via NNTP. There was nothing to acquire, so that's not what happened.
Google merely set up a web interface to it, which was eventually extended to the abomination that was Google Groups. This was intended to be some sort of mix of Usenet group and mailing list, all via a web interface. In reality it was awful and I suspect development on it stopped 10+ years ago.
If anyone here knows how to get the uuencoded part of that message, I'd be interested.
I wrote the first custom NNTP client for Deja. (This was a high-performance replacement for the community, open source client.) All it did was receive and dump articles in a format for the indexer. It did some light processing, including stripping uuencode content. So uuencode never even made it into the archive.
When Google bought the Dejanews archives I thought it was good, because Google was good at search and I naively still believed that the company actually wanted to make all information accessible. It's a real shame that all of the old Usenet stuff is gone.
I will say one thing I've found strange is how spotty old posts are. Even within the same newsgroup. I can easily track down old posts of mine but sometimes stuff is spotty within a single thread. I've not seen any true rhyme or reason to what's gone and what remains.
https://www.seroundtable.com/google-discussion-search-dead-1...
https://browsermedia.agency/blog/google-kills-discussion-sea...
But what is called Groups now is something else entirely, as you said.
FYI, Google Groups are literally the “groups” of Google Workspace — every time you create a group of users to e.g. assign that group some GCP roles, that group then also gets an email address (that being the group’s global primary key), and that email address then implicitly becomes a mailing list all group members are subscribed to.
It’s actually very useful in a corporate Google Workspace context — it’s rare to need an actual mailing list given Slack et al, but they’re effectively “group email-forwarding aliases”, allowing messages to e.g. devops-billing@example.com to arrive in the inboxes of multiple people.
The technology is still up and running. Some of the people from the 90s are still there. But Usenet definitely has peaked in terms of users and postings.
Kids today will never know the pain.
How many of us attempted to automate this process :-)
[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Parchive
That said, alt.binaries was a big reason that ISPs started dropping Usenet. The other being the ever decreasing signal to noise ratio as the entire system proved to be vulnerable to spam and trolls. Yet another example of why moderation is a necessary evil if you want to scale up a discussion group.
which can be said about usenet too lol
like, even fedi/ration with mastodon &co is not enough to overcome pure network effect of twitter and reddit
Not sure what you mean by this, but they sure were not fully clad with ads and tricks to get you to pay for some virtual gifts or pro-accounts.
You're correct about the niches existing. There are little corners of the internet that exist as the neighborhood pub. Not just small FB groups and Discord channels. But I also know blogs still going strong with their 200-1000 regular commentators. The only problem is the audience for those blogs is aging. Not exactly a problem for me since I'm aging too. But does make me a little sad for their longevity because they have a problem attracting new users.
IRC is alive and kicking.
MMAcevedo (Mnemonic Map/Acevedo), also known as Miguel, is the earliest executable image of a human brain.
Now with the internet feeling like it's just Reddit, Facebook, Google, Discord, LinkedIn, and Pintrest a lot of the fun inside jokes have gone to die, and the groups are so large that no-one even looks at a username.
I've found that niche subreddits are the exception to this rule.
Most public forums back in the day would have been vastly improved if they had been done as an NNTP server with each sub-forum as a newsgroup rather than doing them with something like phpBBB on an HTTP server.
Heck, most forums today would have better threading and post organization with NNTP than they do with the popular web forum systems.
Same goes for non-chat communication within companies. Newsgroups on an internal NNTP server would be better in most ways than mailing lists for topics in which people actually need to discuss things as a group.
I ran it, and linked it to a new group. Nobody ever posted in usenet, and I suspect nobody read in there.
I beg to differ.
NNTP's lack of moderation is a bug, not a feature. Between the spam and abuse, NNTP would be an utter cesspool in today's world.
I've seen Usenet, and I've seen Reddit. I'll take Usenet.
If Usenet was as popular as Reddit, you would hate Usenet just as much.
nntp://news.grc.com
I also worked for a place in the early 2000s which used an NNTP server internally (large corp) for company communication and discussion.
It can be quite difficult to find online oases […]. HN is quite unique. Have you considered starting your own Slack, invite interesting people and build a new oasis? (Or Matrix channel.) It would take some work to get people to join, but it’s not impossible.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31582270
That is false and nonsensical. Usenet is a federated network of NNTP servers; Google just joined that with their own implementation having an awful web front end, which they proceeded to revise in even worse directions. That happened right in the middle of a decline that was happening, driven by ISPs shutting down their NNTP servers. So it might have looked like Usenet is somehow transitioning to Google. Google did also acquire a Usenet archive, and then make it impossible to use.
Anhyway, Usenet is alive and (sort of) well. There are new posts daily in newsgroups like comp.unix.programmer, comp.lang.c. Even comp.lang.lisp sees some action.
See you there!
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Hey look, comp.lang.awk has a new post, from the somewhat kooky, but topical, KPop 2GM
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I'm currently using the news.eternal-september.org NNTP server.
Note: there is spam, but not nearly as much as you see through the Google Groups interface, and that's the interface that offers no filtering features.
You need a newsreader with killfile processing. I use the terminal-based slrn (S-Lang Read News). It has a score feature for assigning scores to articles based on matches on arbitrary fields. If you give something a -9999 score, it disappears. The fields have a lot of information. You can kill based on what server someone is coming from, or what client they are supposedly using, if you want.