- Reddit didn't do anything to Usenet. Reddit postdates Usenet's glory days by over a decade.
- Sears, a dying company, bought K-Mart, and they died together. K-Mart didn't do anything to Sears.
- Walmart didn't do anything to K-Mart except sell stuff cheaper and work on its supply chain. Wikipedia article says this: "Unlike its competitors Walmart and Target, Kmart failed to invest in computer technology to manage its supply chain."
I would argue that Facebook had a much bigger impact pulling users there.
As did multiple independent web forums (based on phpBB etc.) which allowed closed communities and moderation and we're more approachable for beginners.
"I should briefly mention Google buying the Deja News archive, promising to revitalise Usenet, and then promptly abandoning it. Cheers Google. Choogle."
Oh wow, I totally forgot about that. I remember it being a really big deal at the time, and now I barely even remember.
Here, Google pulled one from the Microsoft playbook: embrace, extend, extinguish.
Google bought DejaNews, rebranded it into Google Groups (embrace) and then proceed to Googlify it, making it less and less Usenet-y and more and more Google specific (extend), until only the Google-specific mailing lists remained (extinguish).
It certainly smacks of being someone's promo project where they moved on to other things after the migration and the project fizzled out without leadership.
Google was pretty much considered the "good guys" back then. It only started with AdWords a year earlier and was barely breaking even at the time. Loong way from "corporate overlords".
Oh wow, that still exists! What a sparse and abysmal end.
I wonder if they even know it's still there? Probably doesn't use enough bandwidth for anyone to notice. Probably just a few people taking a trip down memory lane to re-read things posted 10-20 years ago.
> Thirdly was the user interface. Usenet looked dull. In a world of animated GIFs and MySpace colour schemes, Usenet didn't even have avatar images! Sure, the spartan nature meant that you could focus on a conversation - but it didn't feel as modern and exciting as the web did
"Modern and exciting" beat "being able to focus on a conversation" :(
Being able to focus is right at the top of my list of priorities. Surely I'm not the only one?
How can I focus on a threaded conversation if I can't visually see the difference between the participants? Quickly looking at an avatar is easier than reading an email address.
Having even basic HTML formatting helps lay out a post - which makes it easier to concentrate on it. But that was something eschewed by most Usenet clients and posters.
Similarly, inline images are great for illustrating a point. I don't have to lose focus by clicking on a link and going to another tab to see what's being discussed.
> How can I focus on a threaded conversation if I can't visually see the difference between the participants? Quickly looking at an avatar is easier than reading an email address.
You post this on a threaded discussion forum without avatars, one you've frequented for a decade
On hacker news I mostly never look at the usernames. It is all just hive mind. Unless someone is claiming to have won a famous math contest or something. Or if I am really mad at a post, I might look for additional context in their posting history.
> How can I focus on a threaded conversation if I can't visually see the difference between the participants? Quickly looking at an avatar is easier than reading an email address.
The from column in the thread pane view in my client[1] makes it easy to see the difference between participants, and also gives an indexed view of the entire thread. You don't get that with Hacker News or Reddit.
I would have gone with discoverability/UX. Finding and figuring out how to use a Usenet group was a complete pain. Once you’d managed the learning curve and found a group that interested you, it was great. But you can’t beat the discoverability of a Google indexed web forum.
You're definitely not the only one. I also endorse the idea of function over form, because catering to the masses has historically stood adjacent to 'lowering the bar' (choose any metric for this hypothetical).
Every place that doesn't cater to the masses seems to always be a higher quality community.
Slightly off topic, but dang, if you're reading this, I recommend making HN invite only for a month or two after the incoming reddit fiasco in July 1st. A ton of people on the major subreddits are already parroting things like "Just go to HN, it's basically the new reddit".
I don't think I'm making a hot take when I say reddit has a pretty awful community outside of the tech focused subs. But maybe I'm too concerned - I'm just worried that one of the last comfy parts of the internet will be invaded by plebs and emoji spammers.
There are plenty of good subreddits outside tech. Unfortunately, telling anyone about them risks ruining them due to how easy it is for a subreddit to blow up.
Eg, I don't see the HN UI ever be used for anything graphics related, because there's no image embedding.
This is fine for many subjects, but greatly constrains others.
It also has social effects. HN makes usernames very vague compared to say, Reddit or Slashdot. Which means that after more than 2 years on this site I still don't know any. The site is extremely impersonal to me, compared to Reddit where I can recognize regulars in some of the subreddits. Whether this is a good thing or not varies, but it certainly affects the dynamics.
> It also has social effects. HN makes usernames very vague compared to say, Reddit or Slashdot. Which means that after more than 2 years on this site I still don't know any. The site is extremely impersonal to me, compared to Reddit where I can recognize regulars in some of the subreddits.
I actually like this approach as it reduces the issue of some users dominating the conversation, thereby overshadowing others. I think it's essential to foster a level playing field for everyone when discussing topics of interest.
Pseudonymity beats anonymity. People's track records and comment history should be a factor when judging what someone says, unless we expect every comment to be a lengthy thesis.
If I see a comment from someone I know to be a relative expert on a field based on my previous interactions with them, I want to judge it as more authoritative and interesting than a rando who registered two weeks ago and has mostly commented "lol".
Claiming you could focus on the conversation with Usenet is putting on some rose tinted glasses.
By the late 90s Usenet was well into the Eternal September and inundated with spam. Unmoderated groups were a mess. There was also just the simple problem of formatting. IIRC Outlook Express defaulted to MIME/multipart posts which would cause all sorts of weirdness if someone with a text-only client quoted them and the OE user replied. Then of course there was the issue of top and bottom quoting. Many Usenet clients had truly awful UIs so a user could inadvertently quote a message's headers in a reply.
Compared to even a simple WWWBoard the experience was often lacking in terms of focus.
I mean, I used `tin` as my newsreader until somewhere between 2010-2015. It wasn't quite a hellscape of unusability if one was using a text only client.
I should have clarified the GUI newsreaders. I'd be willing to bet a very small amount of money that around 2000 the majority of newsreaders in use by real humans (not spam bots) were Outlook Express and Netscape.
There were some good GUI newsreaders but Outlook Express was a shit show. I remember OE was what my ISP had NNTP documentation for and nothing else.
> Thunderbird was still pretty popular around then as well
Thunderbird didn't come out until the early 2000s. The predecessors were Mozilla mail & news and Netscape Communicator. Seamonkey[1] is an offshoot of the former once Mozilla split mail and news into Firefox and Thunderbird.
> By the late 90s Usenet was well into the Eternal September and inundated with spam. Unmoderated groups were a mess. There was also just the simple problem of formatting. IIRC Outlook Express defaulted to MIME/multipart posts which would cause all sorts of weirdness if someone with a text-only client quoted them and the OE user replied. Then of course there was the issue of top and bottom quoting. Many Usenet clients had truly awful UIs so a user could inadvertently quote a message's headers in a reply.
I didn't really start lurking and posting on usenet until the late '90s and while those problems occasionally cropped up, they really didn't interfere with the main discussion threads in the groups I was a regular in. I only stopped regularly using it by the early/mid 2010s because all the other regulars in the groups I was in ceased posting.
Largely agree with the author's viewpoint. Compared to the Web and Web forums it was very hard for new people to pick up.
Even for people who had mastered the software the lack of ability to get rid of bad people was a problem. One "Kook" could single-handedly jam up server groups ( eg https://www.geocities.w/donfool/ ).
The interface however was still pretty unmatched to this day unmatched. You could and did get threads of 1000 posts from 100 people that were perfectly threaded, readable and referred to points in previous posts.
The requirement for each ISP to run their own server was a problem. If you wanted binaries then you would need a relatively expensive server (or group of servers) plus quite a lot of bandwidth.
Usenet served its purpose at a point in time and then faded into obscurity, though it keeps chugging away in a niche, appealing to some.
It's like saying that IRC failed.
What forum community, social network or media platform has been permanent and outlasted everything else? It seems that on every social network, people migrate, people abandon platforms, and losing critical mass can be fatal to the platform, and then it just passes on to the next one, having served its purpose; did MySpace "fail" or did it simply cede the crown to Facebook?
I remember Usenet fondly, though perhaps through rose-colored glasses. It was already full of trolls, flamewars, disruption and discord. Yet I cut my teeth there as a young sysadmin. I listened at the feet of experts, literal prominent experts in the field, who had spare time to just freely share their knowledge, because the Internet was an R&E community! I learned a lot about reputation and trust in the digital age. I gained "Internet street smarts" there.
I believe that it shaped a lot of people's lives, for better or worse, and that's not a failure by any measure.
Yep. Protocol-backed stuff on the Internet "fails" the way civilizations "go into decline" in the board game Small World; they aren't removed from the board, but they no longer serve any purpose other than taking up space that the active civilizations haven't taken over yet.
Exactly, it's protocol-backed, and that's the beauty of free, open source software and standards. As long as anyone care to maintain the client and/or servers, or even if very old code still works, you have a viable service. It's not a monolith that's beholden to the whims and fortunes of a single corporation that can just shut it down. Consider the enormous outcry when a single company has to shut down an entire platform, like a popular MMO or something, and then compare that to what happens when an IRC network has a schism, like the Freenode controversy: yep there was drama, but everyone took their toys and migrated to an identical network and now we have two.
I come from MUDding communities myself, and there is no shortage of old and crusty wizards who cling to their MUD servers and have kept them open, going on 30 years now! Clients come and go, Internet standards change, and social network fads happen, and we're still playing a game that doesn't bother supporting TLS, MFA, Unicode, or graphics. MUDs never failed, they simply achieved posterity and faded from sight.
> Thirdly was the user interface. Usenet looked dull. In a world of animated GIFs and MySpace colour schemes, Usenet didn't even have avatar images! Sure, the spartan nature meant that you could focus on a conversation - but it didn't feel as modern and exciting as the web did. NNTP software was fragile.
There's a wide variety of ways to self-moderate content. Andd you can block whole servers from your account as well.
And if stuff is terrible, you can report to your instance's admin (if you're not running your own). And barring that, you can also report to their instance's admin.
Given enough harassment or badness, servers can block harassing servers.
Around the time frame of the beta versions of agent coming out in early 1995, the Windows world really surpassed unix for internet usability. Obviously netscape was netscape but agent vs tin, mirc vs ircii, or eudora vs pine, the windows software getting churned out was peak usability as far as I am concerned.
It could do NNTP feeds integrated with e-mail, an outgrowth of previous work on IE3-era Windows News and Mail (which was an architectural masterpiece - a Windows Explorer view of a folder full of messages, populated from the mail and news feeds)
I wish we had something like that in Gnome - processes that sync my IMAP mails to local Maildir-like folders (dynamically populated, with download-on-open, perhaps) and a view that shows e-mails. Same for iCal feeds - make it a way to view specific kinds of content.
But USENET is still being used and there are many people still using it. And there are places where you can signup for free access, this is one but there are many others:
One thing to remember, you never see a post from your teenage self on USENET being dragged up by your employer causing you to be fired or loose out on a job. Why, privacy still exists on USENET.
Also I guess he never heard of killfiles :) These days I have a rather large one compared to what I had many years ago. See a post you do not want to see anymore, add it to your killfile and maybe the person who sent it.
> One thing to remember, you never see a post from your teenage self on USENET being dragged up by your employer causing you to be fired or loose out on a job. Why, privacy still exists on USENET.
Google at one point did a very good job at indexing usenet posts and including them in their search results. If I searched for the name I used when posting to usenet, I would get hundreds of results of posts I made. But if I try searching now, very few results from usenet come up (perhaps because of the age of the posts).
> Also I guess he never heard of killfiles :)
I'm actually surprised he didn't mention that in his article.
That seems like it’s reversing cause and effect, though. If lots of ISP customers were using their nntp servers, ISPs would have been quite likely to maintain them in order to be competitive.
This is (part of) the correct answer, yet it is way down the list of upvoted answers.
The story is:
1) There were a number of independent ISPs, but oligarchic forces, in addition to the Verizon/AT&T last mile monopoly consolidated things so that Verizon/AT&T became the ISP for most people, with limited competition.
2) Once consolidated, Verizon and AT&T killed their news servers. This mostly happened in 2008. The old Internet which was more open and peer-to-peer became a platform with end users limited mostly to web clients, consuming from big corporate upstream web servers.
3) This was helped along by various places in the US government, which blessed or even applied pressure to kill off the old peer-to-peer nature of the Internet, particularly Usenet, for the current model of big corporate web servers to end user customers.
Of course the public relations announcements were all of this was done for the litany of reasons companies and the government do anything - to protect customers/children/whatever, fight against the forces of evil etc.
Because it was expensive to run such servers. Imagine dedicating 50-100 Mbps of constant bandwidth just to Usenet, and then explaining to management that 99.9% of Usenet was alt.binaries. We outsourced for a while, but even that cost was difficult to justify and none of our customers would admit to wanting it.
I've used Usenet quite extensively in its heyday. At one point I even ran a Usenet site with dozens of peers and thousands of users. All on a very beefy (for its time) Sun E450.
In my opinion Usenets greatest strength was also its downfall. It is a distributed system without central authority over who could connect to the network or firm control over groups and their contents. To connect to it as a peer, you just had to find at least one Usenet site willing to exchange messages (peer) with you. Usually that wasn't a problem. ISPs, universities, organizations of all kinds were running their own servers, offering Usenet client access to their customers and members for no additional charge.
In a distributed system without central authority, innovation is exceedingly hard though. The protocols and features were basically set in stone. Taking the concept of offering discussions among users to a centralized or closed system made it possible to innovate very fast and offer superior features to the users.
As the article pointed out, that wasn't the only protocol which got picked up that way and innovated upon until it displaced its origins.
Since Usenet is still frozen feature wise were it was 30 or more years ago, I don't see a revival coming anytime soon.
> without central authority over who could connect to the network or firm control over groups and their contents
Moderation. In public forums, everything else is trivial and moderation is the invisible stinking hairy elephant in the room. To the question "why isn't there a decentralized open protocol free software X" the answer is moderation. Think or it as the discreet but efficient bouncers without which a sufficiently popular public place cannot maintain a welcoming atmosphere. Newsgroups became sufficiently popular, death by inadequate moderation ensued.
There were plenty of well moderated newsgroups actually.
A moderated newsgroup had all messages going through the moderator's system, with their programs deciding whether or not the message should be forwarded to the rest of the newsgroup. This doesn't necessarily mean that a human read all messages either.
Some of the oldest flamewars I've participated in are about moderated vs unmoderated USENET newsgroups. It amuses me that we're still debating the issue today.
What kind of moderation programs were people using then? Word filters? I can't imagine anything that isn't both easy to circumvent and likely to catch innocent posts merely quoting a "bad" word.
I don't think a "kill file" was the same as "moderation".
A kill file is "User X is tired of seeing User Y, so X stops reading posts from Y". Everyone else can still read Y.
A moderator is "Moderator is tired of seeing User Y, so Y cannot post to Newsgroup anymore". A much stronger action.
---------
Its been a few decades since I was part of any Usenet though. So maybe I'm mis-remembering the lingo. Or are you saying that the moderators used kill-files that somehow applied to the whole newsgroup?
Because... the later would make sense. But I really don't know how things worked back then.
The machinery for a moderated newsgroup works by the news server you post an article to having a list of moderator email addresses for moderated groups. Instead of posting your article the server emails it to the moderator. The mod will then either just discard it, or else post it to their own news server with an Approved header to say it's moderated (and these days some crypto signing stuff). Then the post gets propagated as usual.
The "approve/deny/edit" stuff is handled by moderation software, which in principle can do anything you like.
There's a third layer: the servers. Newsgroups relied on servers propagating messages to other servers as well as delivering them to end users, and they could have various types of filters.
The same sort of model exists in modern distributed systems like Mastodon/ActivityPub. I can block a user from another server or an entire server individually, or my server admin can block them from communicating with anyone on my server.
What's missing that I think will be required for anything that gets popular enough is a means of sharing blocklists automatically, preferably with some machine-readable details so that they're useful even when servers have different rules (e.g. I want to subscribe to bans from Foo if the ban is for hate speech, but not for porn).
I wasn't "tech awakened" at this time, so I simply didn't know which programs were used.
What I can say is that plenty of spammers would have one or two posts on Newsgroups, before the mods would catch them and ban their email address.
Depending on the Newsgroup, I'm sometimes "new users" would have all of their posts reviewed before their posts were forwarded to everyone else. But after being added to some kind of whitelist, they could say whatever they wanted (well, until a flamewar caused them to go over the line and get banned).
So similar tools as moderators use today on Reddit / IRC / whatever. Or at least, it felt like that to me. Maybe it differed in implementation, but the overall effect was the same.
It wasn't like programmers were less creative or productive than they are now. The languages were fully capable of doing anything on a server you could do now. It was mostly C. Programmers were creative and smart, just like now, and could implement anything, albeit ground-up since there were fewer existing building blocks to reuse.
A lot of sophisticated anti-spam software depended on some sophisticated anti-anti-spam showing up first, and there is a lot more of that now for sure.
The type and quality of moderation is up to the moderation team. Might be automatic, might involve a review by a human for each post.
As someone else already mentioned, there are groups which were configured to be moderated but have no moderators at all to approve posts. Either they disappeared or there never were any. To participate in these groups you have to set the "Approved:" header in your post yourself. Obviously that would also be the way to circumvent the moderation process for any other moderated group. The countermeasure is that the moderators send out a cancel control message which instructs all the newsservers receiving it or at least those who honor cancel messages, to delete this specific message.
I support free speech except in some circumstances where curtailing it makes almost everyone's lives better.
Where I support it to the most extreme: criticizing the government.
Where I want it most throttled: my own living room, so I can have some peace and quiet.
I think most functioning adults have a similar spectrum of allow / deny and aren't absolutists on the topic.
And, I mean... I don't think we need to look deep into the history of the Internet to see that becoming the dominant pattern. USENET failed. Email without spamblockers failed. Every forum either eventually adopts moderation policies or goes underground where barely any casual user hears of its existence.
The user interprets lack of censorship as damaged and routes away from it.
They are free to buy a living room and criticize away. My living room, I am allowed to determine whom to allow and whom not to allow in. And I would like to find online spaces where the loser spam (both commercial and ideological) are kept out, so I can find the speech I am interested in. Why is this desire felt as oppressive by so many?
It is often NOT the users of the platforms that want censorship, it is users of another platform, targeting something they do not like on the internet, and then going after underlying structures be it ISP's, DDOS services, Domain Registrars, Hosting providers, Credit Card Processors, etc etc etc
We have plenty of examples of this on the internet, where it is not the users of the sites that want something censored, but 3rd party actors using systemic pressure on critical infrastructure to effect the censorship
You have this utopia where someone puts up a gardening forum and the users or even the owner of the forums says "We do not allow talk about Politics here"...
Where in reality someone sets up a political forum, someone posts something, then someone on Twitter, Facebook, Insta, etc gets offended and starts a campaign to have CloudFlare, or AWS ban them.
Yep. It's a pretty clever approach, and I for one am in hindsight surprised that it took this long for people to realize that the system is a network and is therefore vulnerable to network dependency attacks.
This is not necessarily a bad thing. Nazis, for example, deserve no platform and if companies decide to revoke service when they discover they're serving Nazis that's their prerogative. It can be abused, especially given that the largest players in the space are going to trend sensitive to controversy... But the internet has become embedded deeply enough in our lives that people can no longer enjoy the pretty fantasy of the neutral service provider; IBM got away with it in World War 2 and that's generally pointed to as a moral failing these days.
If people are calling for enforced neutrality, they're really calling for government regulation (who else would enforce the neutrality?) which is its own can of worms.
Then you have the problem of labeling everyone that disagrees with you a "nazi" for example just because they favor strong border laws, and immigration controls, or oppose social justice and ESG "capitalism" or other such things
Or the true crime of having a difference of opinion with a trans person...
>>This is not necessarily a bad thing.
yes it is a bad thing, it will always be a bad thing, even if doing to to actual nazi's not the new age defination of "nazi's" which seemly is anyone that happened to vote for Trump, or holds conservative political positions.
>>If people are calling for enforced neutrality, they're really calling for government regulation
yes and no, depends on what we are talking about
Are we talking about an already heavily regulated industry like banking. This yes 100% I am calling for enforced neutrality. JP Morgan Chase, nor MasterCard should be able to refuse business to someone for the protected political speech.
Services like AWS, or CloudFlare.... No I would not call for supported regulation but then we come full circle back to loss of cultural support for Free Expression
There was a time were the ACLU would defend the KKK's right to speak, We should return to those days, where the axiom was "I disagree with you but I will defends your right to say it"
If we at the point was the population is pushing for AWS to de-platform competitors of Twitter because of disagreements over politics we are not far removed from government censorship
The reality is you would likely support both, as you clear abhor actual free speech
This is also why Elon's purchase of Twitter was so critical and 100% support his efforts.
> The reality is you would likely support both, as you clear abhor actual free speech
Broadly speaking, I'm a fan of the marketplace of ideas. That marketplace includes boycotts, callouts, and choices by private individuals to provide or revoke a platform for someone else to speak in their space. Freedom of the press has never implied that everyone gets a free press.
> which seemly is anyone that happened to vote for Trump, or holds conservative political positions.
Hacker News isn't really a great venue for that kind of discussion. But there's a reason the pushback on him and his supporters has been so strong relative to previous politicians. He and his supporters actually do represent something fundamentally caustic to the American body politic. https://www.bu.edu/articles/2022/are-trump-republicans-fasci...
>>That marketplace includes boycotts, callouts, and choices by private individuals to provide
Which means I am sure you support the ongoing boycotts happening to BudLight and Target? Or are boycotts only for one side?
> Freedom of the press has never implied that everyone gets a free press.
The problem here is when the government subsides the people that makes the press, regulates the people that makes the press, and limits the who and produce presses it ceases to be a free market, and becomes a regulated market
One can make the case, that since the internet was started by the government (dod) and regulated for decades by the government (Dept of Commerce Via ICANN), and tons of subsidies ISP;s have gotten and continue to get, locations where the internet is a government service, and tons of other factors that the idea that the internet is a purely free market is clearly a false narrative
One often used for convince when it meets peoples political goals, and then the second that freedom is not aligned with their goals anymore.
Further when it comes to consumer boycotts, you have to actually be a consumer, 99% of the people that have effective policy changes at CloudFlare and AWS have never spent a single dime at either of those services.
Today cancel culture is something more than just a boycott, it is something new not seen before in human civilization, and it is a huge threat to not only freedom of expression but freedom in general
> Which means I am sure you support the ongoing boycotts happening to BudLight and Target? Or are boycotts only for one side?
Of course I do. Nobody should feel compelled to buy a beer they don't want to buy.
> 99% of the people that have effective policy changes at CloudFlare and AWS have never spent a single dime at either of those services.
I think I need a citation for that. I used to work for a cloud company and there is a lot of back room negotiation that people don't realize happens. My default suspicion is that product advocates and product managers received real clear signal from people with money to spend that they were going to spend it elsewhere.
> Today cancel culture is something more than just a boycott, it is something new not seen before in human civilization
No, shunning is actually very old. It is the way communities small and large dealt with unacceptable behavior in their midst. Nobody is compelled to associate with somebody they don't want to.
What did change is that for a brief period of time, the existence of the internet, it's relative obscurity, and the pseudonymity it provided convinced a generation that they had subverted the old cultural norms. What we are witnessing is a reification of those cultural norms to the new technology. The USENET day is dead. The techno utopia was tried and found very wanting. Old patterns are reestablishing themselves, though with more voices at the table because ultimately, you can't actually stop the signal.
The former president was kicked off of somebody's microblogging service and responded by creating his own. That's how it's supposed to work.
Before you wrap yourself too tightly in the 1st Amendment to the Constitution of the U. S., perhaps it would be helpful if you defined what “free speech” means to you. Because repeatedly typing “no true Scotsman…” doesn’t do much to move the conversation along, and definitions obviously differ.
For example, I feel that you can say what you like, just not in my living room. Free speech does not guarantee an audience.
That is the often cited copout that has no meaning.
"I feel that you can say what you like, just not in my living room" is a pointless axiom that provides nothing of value to the conversation.
The debate becomes infinitely more complex when you step 1 inch outside of the "living room" context and start talking about Public and Private companies operating platforms on a global scale all under a infinitely complex set of regulations, subsidies, and other factors
" I feel that you can say what you like, just not in my living room" seems to me then you want to translate that into "Reddit, twitter, etc can choose what people say in their living room", the problem is they do not have a living room, and attempting to make that analog is ridiculous
What you are calling free speech is boring to the audience. Usenet died because the endless unfiltered spam and shit posting was boring compared to slashdot and then reddit and then here.
What if someone followed you around and just kept saying "You're a cunt. You're a cunt. You're a cunt." over and over?
Any time you're not on private property. "You're a cunt".
Is that free speech?
I mean, I'm allowed to be on public property. I'm allowed to say whatever I want. Exercising those two rights means I'm allowed to follow you around and call you a cunt.
You'd probably try to say "No, that's harassment". Aye, but now you've agreed there should be limits on speech.
If they have that kind of time, and no life I would find that rather amusing...
I am sure they would tire of it long before I would get offended by it. and I can assure you I would could, and have responded far more decisive and penetrating insults...
If there's one thing we've learned from the last two-decades-odd of the Internet being ubiquitous, it's that one cannot, in fact, outlast the harassers. They organize and they take shifts. They can keep the harassment going as long as it takes. They can keep it up until you are dead. And they can do it at scale.
That's why cutting off their ability to do it through various channels is so important.
When people say that there should be no restrictions on speech, it's usually about content, not manner. No free speech absolutist would think it's acceptable to tell someone "you're a wonderful person" through a 600 dB speaker (if it was possible to construct such a device). If I scream at you so loudly that it liquefies your organs, I don't think that the fact the sound happened to form words makes the act any less harmful. Why should it be any different with harassment?
Not sure how the "Freedom from consequences" bit enters the conversation here.
"Free Speech" that has consequences from the government isn't free speech. The "Freedom from consequences" has to do with private entities reacting to your speech. For example, asking you to leave the premises or getting banned.
Is it possible to separate free speech from free consequences? I'm not sure it can be. From your house, to government, to nature, doesn't every person/place have their own set of compromises/laws/rules for every set of conditions? Are you saying there should be no laws or no moderation, anywhere, at all? I don't think you mean to. Also, should 'online' be distinct/exempt from all other human endeavours, where rules don't apply? Anywhere there is a line between individuals and governments regarding free speech, and indeed law, then neither free speech, or law, exist truly. But it is difficult to give an example of a country where this is not so.
I am reminded of the other hot potato 'privacy'. The 'Solid Project' has an interesting way of dealing with that, which may also have a positive effect on how free speech evolves.
> Are you saying there should be no laws or no moderation, anywhere, at all?
I wanted to address this first. Nowhere did I mean to imply that I think there shouldn't be limits on speech or no moderation. There should certainly be some speech that is illegal (Calls to violence, harassment, etc), and web platforms absolutely have a right to moderate.
But, I think everyone can agree that the right to free speech granted by the First Amendment does mean that you can criticize the government, for example. If someone tries to claim "Yes, you have the right to criticize the government, but the government can arrest you for it! Freedom of speech does not mean freedom from consequences!", then I would have to ask that person what they think "Freedom of speech" means, and what a "right" means, because to me, a "right" means either "You are allowed to do the thing and the government must not interfere or retaliate" (ie, free speech) or "You must be allowed access to the thing, and the government must provide it for you if you can't provide it yourself" (ie, a lawyer when you are on trial).
The notion of "You have the right to something, but the government will punish you for it" is just completely non-sensical.
But...all this only applies to government. Private entities are another matter entirely. They have the right to remove content and users however they want. Your freedom of speech does not trump their right to decide what gets displayed on their platform.
Private entities can also react however they want. If you go on a racist tirade on Twitter, your employer has a right to fire you, because having an extreme racist in the workplace is just asking for trouble.
Billy Joel's rule: "You are free to speak your mind, but not on my time."
That is, sure, you can speak to whoever wants to listen. You can't make anyone want to listen, though - including, you can't make a forum want to listen. It wants to talk about gardening, and you want to talk about the latest Covid conspiracy theories? Great, knock yourself out, talk about your conspiracy theories - but not on the gardening forum.
See, I support free speech. I support their freedom to talk about gardening without having to wade through a bunch of conspiracy theory posts. "Post anything anywhere" reduces actual communication - willing speakers finding willing listeners - because the listeners give up rather than wade through a bunch of garbage that they don't care about. I support their freedom to talk about gardening without getting drowned out.
But here the question is who is doing the controlling
Usenet is a open protocol, not a forum that someone owns. So if you support moderation on open protocol then you support most likely systemic, or worse government censorship. Not someone controlling their own property
With Usenet there was plenty of tools (just like with email today) to block spam, content, users etc at the client level if an individual did not want to see certain speech.
With time those tools would have improved just like they have with email
> So if you support moderation on open protocol then you support most likely systemic, or worse government censorship.
Feel free to stop telling me what I support. You're lousy at it.
If a protocol is open, that doesn't mean that my servers are. I'm moderating my servers, not the protocol or the traffic carried using the protocol. (In the same way, you don't control who drives by your house, but you control who's allowed in the door.)
I don't want systemic censorship of speech (including by ISPs). I don't want government censorship of speech. But I support the right of servers to say "I'm not carrying that". And I support the right of a community to have a space that is public to that community, and yet to keep stuff that they don't want out of it. And I support the right of those who don't agree to go form their own community, and to decide for themselves what the rules are for their community. And all of this can happen on open protocols without systemic or government censorship.
Specifically on usenet, you could have, say, alt.hobby.gardening, and have it get overrun by spam, and have alt.hobby.gardening_moderated start up with moderation to keep the spam out. And if you don't like it, and want to post your conspiracy rants, go post them on alt.hobby.gardening with all the spam that nobody reads. Knock yourself out. Or go start alt.hobby.gardening_conspiracy, or whatever. But let the gardening nuts have their space without your rants.
Your summary is incorrect, and insulting. That is not how it happened. The old academic usenet was more than content to discuss sensitive topics. The problem with post-September usenet was spam.
Small groups were ok. As soon as a group had any reasonable traffic, the spammers moved it. Since the spammers didn't care about conversation, they didn't need to maintain stable identify and evaded killfiles. They could quickly drowning out the topic with 10x ads. Not wanting this is not about being uncomfortable - it was about swimming in 90% garbage ads.
Usenet went from students posting at a modest number of elite schools, .mil sites, and a relative handful of tech companies--often under their real name--to the Eternal September and beyond. Like many problems with the Internet over the years which occurred because systems that grew up on the assumption of mostly trustworthy actors.
> Your summary is incorrect, and insulting. That is not how it happened. The old academic usenet was more than content to discuss sensitive topics.
I see no insult towards you, or anyone else in particular. In fact, to the opposite, others here are saying Usenet died due to lack of content moderation - aka other people enforcing their will on others.
> The problem with post-September usenet was spam.
Now I know you're just guessing. The 'September that never ended' was when AoL peered with internet gateways to bring everyone on the AoL network to the internet, along with knowing little about computers or anything. "Me too" was around then, as a derogatory comment of what an AOLer would say. Even Weird Al in "All about the Pentiums" had a line to put them down like Old Yeller.
Usenet really died in 2007 winter-2008 Spring, when all major ISPs killed their subscriber Usenet servers. They never officially stated why, but grumbles that made it out in the systems engineering folk were that it was alt.binaries were eating up loads of bandwidth, and much of it was 100% piracy.
Spam was a thing, but most of us used good NNCP clients that removed a good 90+% of spam. And having lived through when Usenet was ubiquitous, I fully reject your hypothesis.
And you might want to consider taking conversations here more impersonally. Feeling "insulted" over a comment that was directed to nobody in particular isn't healthy.
Towards the late 2000s, alt.binaries was irrelevant to consumer ISPs etc, as it was not available. It was trivial for any systems engineer to exclude alt.binaries.* from their news server, and most did.
> Usenet really died in 2007 winter-2008 Spring, when all major ISPs killed their subscriber Usenet servers. They never officially stated why
It was because the attorney general of New York (Andrew Cuomo) made a deal with major ISPs to restrict access to child pornography[1]. ISPs decided to drop their usenet service in response.
"Moderation" is a terrible excuse used by the corporate types as a reason to stick in their safe walled gardens.
We had moderation on Usenet. It was simple, but damn, did it work. We had plonka lists (client selected ignored users), keyword scoring, server level scoring, some anti-spam. There was EARLY work in Bayesian filters built in to clients, but was too late for the "big event". (When ISP's everywhere killed Usenet servers, for what is pretty surely assumed as anti-piracy.)
But lets look corporate moderation. It's done in secret, with vague rules that may or may not be stated, and by content moderation farms that use and abuse people. https://www.wired.co.uk/article/facebook-content-moderators-... . Or worse yet, you fool people in faux-ownership (reddit) and get them to do your moderation for you. Well, that is unless you do a bad job and get your subreddit banned for "low/no moderation".
I'd much rather see everything, and craft my own blocklists as I see fit. You know, just like Mastodon. Sure, there's some fediblocks at admin-level over pervasive content from a single server. But aside admin tasks, its pretty damn sweet. And it's loads better than the shit that happens over on Twitter, Reddit, or Facebook.
We, the technologically literate, are not the target audience. Client-side filtering requires awareness of client-side filtering. How many Reddit users want that ? Facebook users ? Oh, maybe they want to fine-tune their scoring rules library or tweak they bayesian filters - so much fun ! And lacking social intelligence, client-side filtering fails against organized harassment. By the way, who is liable for infractions to the local law ?
Enter the party, meet regulars, meet new faces, enjoy a drink and don't even think about safety. Sure, you can manage it yourself for a birthday party at your home but at larger scales even the wild rave party thrown in an abandoned hangar out there will have some form of institutionalized enforcement, even if they are not corporate security.
Yes, that means that successful large public places tend towards bland - the same reason why successful edgy underground dives are small affairs and their character can't survive growth.
> We, the technologically literate, are not the target audience.
Highly disagree. It's the early adopters of ANY platform, hardware, or whatever that drive real organic demand and adoption. And those early adopters ARE exactly that: technologically literate.
Alienating that group is how you get relegated to the "Digg v4" area of history.
> How many Reddit users want that ? Facebook users ? Oh, maybe they want to fine-tune their scoring rules library or tweak they bayesian filters - so much fun !
How many Facebook or Reddit users even HAVE the capability of client side anything? The big threads are that Reddit's killing most API access unless you pay a pound of flesh. And Facebook does enough horrible things in their coding that makes it impossible to even screen-scrape. The text "Sponsored" shows up as shittery like "essprnodo".
For those gated islands, you'd need their permission to really do any sort of client side anything.
Places like Mastodon make blocking trivial. Ive shared that link, and no, you don't need to know about Bayseian weights or whatever new mod scheme you want to make. Its there, the initial functions are easy-peasy, and the API hooks are there to add whatever you want.
> And lacking social intelligence, client-side filtering fails against organized harassment.
And that already is a major problem on the corporate side. Reddit calls it "brigading". HN has chill-down scripts to defuse flamewars. Twitter, Facebook, and Reddit all have mass-reporting as harassment. There's even current 4Chan threads to organize just that. Sure seems like an unsolved problem, not just "unsolved for federated systems".
> By the way, who is liable for infractions to the local law ?
Irrelevant. Someone in another area could read content that is illegal to them. That's *their* responsibility, not mine. As long as I follow the laws in my jurisdiction and where my server is located, I'm fine. And 17 USC 512 covers me as long as I do good-faith DMCA process.
> <example of comparing physical real world with raves/alcohol/drugs with online "dangers">
And in your latter half, your other problem is that you're equating online "safety" with in-person bodily safety with alcohol and drugs. Those 2 aren't even remotely the same, and its laughable that you'd try to compare them.
If someone is coming on to you in a sexual manner, and your "No" isnt effectively heard or acknowledged, you have a big problem. If someone uploads a bad image (say, animal torture, for something abhorrent), you can block the user, the server, report the user to their/your server admins. You can also choose not to show images. It's terrible, but physical assault is no comparison to a bad image or terrible text.
There's no reason a private/paid service addon to a client can't work for filtering. Been thinking similarly for Mastadon, in that you can pretty easily have a gated experience, and get top ranking for Android/iOS client use with a monthly service that includes filtering with relatively sane defaults, but toggle-able filtering/reporting.
You can use fdroid, webapps or side-load the "full" unfiltered client but the experience for the normies would be that paid app experience. And I say paid app to avoid the pitfall that is advertising fed results.
> Client-side filtering requires awareness of client-side filtering. How many Reddit users want that ? Facebook users ?
Facebook[1] and Reddit[2] both have a block user feature. It's a very rudimentary version of the killfile that usenet clients have. If users didn't want features like that, then they wouldn't be available on either platform.
> client-side filtering fails against organized harassment.
Usenet killfiles were advanced enough that you could easily filter out messages even from organized campaigns. For example, filtering it based on a number of conditions such as group header, from header, a unique header, certain keywords in the body, etc.
Moderation isn't only about removing bad content, it's about removing content that's not necessarily bad but is unwanted. /r/gaming and /r/games are entirely different subreddits, with different content focuses and different communities because of their moderation. If I really wanted junk food content consumption I can go to /r/gaming. If I want to see news about video games I can go to /r/games. How do you accomplish that with client side filtering? /r/games has Indie Sunday where developers can post their own games on Sunday without competition from news about the massive AAA games everyone's already heard of. How do you accomplish that with client side filtering?
Good point. The majority of my Usenet memories revolve around meta discussions. What is and what is not supposed to be posted. Mid 2000s and people still had flamewars about whether a four line signature was to heavy.
Most meta discussions (beyond the basic etiquette and moderation, which were mostly worked out in the 1980s already) don't have objective answers, just subjective preferences. The solution is to keep aggressively iterating on splitting subreddits/communities/categories of users, until quality interaction is maximized. Obvious example: one category of user wants to discuss politics via memes, another category wants to discuss in long-form essays, another in threaded discussions, Canadians want to discuss Canadian politics without being flooded with US stuff, and plenty of others not at all i.e. they want any political posts off-topic and banned. The obvious way to keep all these groups maximally happy is to split into different groups.
Corporate/algorithmic moderation is almost entirely about removing "bad" content. You're talking about community moderation, which works exactly the same in decentralized systems.
> the "big event". (When ISP's everywhere killed Usenet servers, for what is pretty surely assumed as anti-piracy.)
I thought this was due to the deal[1] that Andrew Cuomo (New York's attorney general at the time) made with major ISPs to restrict access to child pornography. Many major ISPs discontinued their usenet service in that time period.
This is the key problem with decentralised systems. They simply can't innovate as quickly as centralised systems.
We saw this with usenet and we also saw it with IRC. IRC really is what slack was, 30years ahead of it. However, IRC has so many essential missing features it never caught on - push notifications, saving your state when offline, admin controls, etc. I know some of these were solved with extensions and workarounds (having a shell connect to irc an then you connect to the shell for persistence for example) but it's a huge hack. This compares to Slack or Teams where they can push a back and front end update to millions/billions(?) of users in a very short space of time to add additional functionality.
This is another reason why all the decentralised 'blockchain' things would have struggled (on top of many others).
I think this argument is seductive but wrong because it ignores an invisible elephant in the room: funding.
Decentralization is a business problem, not a technical problem. Engineers tend not to see this because we're engineers and so we see technical problems first.
Usenet had no economic model. All the problems you list are solvable if there were funding available to solve them.
Free volunteer developer work tends to stop at the level of polish with which developers are comfortable, which is usually command line interaction and fairly manual processes. Developers generally have to be paid to develop new features and polish those features for the general audience, which is why there are precious few open source systems used by anyone other than developers.
Those that do exist tend to be subsidized by huge companies for the purpose of "commoditizing your compliments" or as tools to herd users into an ecosystem that has upsell opportunities built into it. Examples: Chrome, any open source client for a SaaS service, etc.
Non-profits can fund to some extent, but the truth is that polished feature-rich easy to use software is extraordinarily expensive to produce. A system that a developer can create in their spare time might cost millions to render usable to non-developers. Computers are actually very hard to use. We just don't see this because we're accustomed to it. Making them easy to use is a gigantic undertaking and is often far more difficult and complex than making something work at the algorithmic level.
Centralized systems with built-in economic models like SaaS or commercial software tend to triumph because they can fund the polish necessary to reach a wider audience. A wider audience means exponentially larger network effects. See Metcalfe's Law.
Cryptocurrency could have offered an alternative model but failed for entirely different reasons: perverse incentives that attract scammers. In crypto by far the most profitable thing to do is build a fake project that can appear just credible enough to attract retail buyers onto whom you can dump your tokens. There is no structural incentive to stick with a project and really develop it because all the money is made up front through the initial offering. This also ruins the ecosystem because "the bad chases away the good." Scammers make legitimate people not want to go anywhere near crypto, transforming the whole ecosystem into a "bad neighborhood."
I'd add, polish often means different things to different people. For example, failure planning and risk management often only happen when there is funding.
> Decentralization is a business problem, not a technical problem. Engineers tend not to see this because we're engineers and so we see technical problems first.
> Usenet had no economic model. All the problems you list are solvable if there were funding available to solve them.
You hit the nail on the head. Usenet was very much a "back channel" in its early history, with school and corporate IT people setting up feeds on the quiet. Indeed, it began outside the Internet, using dialup UUCP links to exchange news and mail.
Email addresses were "bang paths" where you had to route your mail to its destination. If your outside mail gateway was foovax, an outgoing address might be like "foovax!decwrl!ihnp4!uiucuxa!example" instead of "example@uiucuxa.uiuc.edu". In posts, it was a convention to specify your email address path from one of the famous well-connected sites.
One of the biggest early players was (surprise) Bell Labs. If the name "ihnp4" rings a bell to you, you might be as old or older than me. :) That was a central hub for the UUCP network, both news and mail. I wonder if any AT&T bean counters knew about it back in the day, or, getting back to the original point, how many bean counters found out about Usenet in their respective companies and forced it out?
The old chestnut "The Net interprets censorship as damage and routes around it" referred specifically to USENET if I recall correctly; it is often mis-applied to the Internet itself or to other services. But it referred to the notion that since USENET servers just routed their stash of stories to any node that requested them, censorship was functionally a non-starter; if you (the node owner) wanted content that some other node owner was squelching, you could request it from another node.
But it turns out that model had some major flaws. Nowadays, one could say the 'net interprets lack of censorship as offensive and migrates away from it. If there's one thing the experiments after USENET (from Slashdot to Mastodon) suggest, it's that people on average want some control (and don't on average want the burden of being their own moderator for every damn bitstream that comes down the pipe).
In the 90s I used to edit out CSAM related groups, from the downloaded list in Netscape's built in NNTP client. Customers who were surfing usenet for the first time were reasonably horrified by the group names.
After a time I got unhappy about this and went to see if I could determine a physical hosting location of the content. I don't recall the particulars, just that I came up with an AT&T subsidiary - something polkadot - sitting at a Canadian address, near the US border.
I wasn't willing to reach out to the FBI blindly and couldn't locate anyone who know anyone in the bureau. I knew someone who knew the head of the [state] Family Association and that person was well connected politically. After some back and forth I gave up on the whole thing. That guy was fairly obsessed with stamping out homosexuality and couldn't be bothered with abused children. I moved on.
> In the 90s I used to edit out CSAM related groups, from the downloaded list in Netscape's built in NNTP client.
This list gets downloaded from whatever server you configure and is then local to your machine. Editing it would only affect what you see on your own client.
> After a time I got unhappy about this and went to see if I could determine a physical hosting location of the content.
Usenet is a distributed system - every server that didn't filter the group was hosting the content. They were typically viewed as common carriers.
(It sounds like you were tracing your own ISP's server?)
On that note some from upstate New York may remember that the attorney general tried to garner votes by raiding and seizing servers from a few local ISPs (Dreamscape, RIP), which in the end didn't work out.
> I wasn't willing to reach out to the FBI blindly and couldn't locate anyone who know anyone in the bureau.
The FBI was quite well aware of the content on Usenet and very adept at navigating it in its heydey. They used it in a number of investigations to track down producers including breaking into trusted rings that communicated with PGP encrypted communications on Usenet. You wouldn't have informed them of anything they didn't know.
> Editing it would only affect what you see on your own client.
I know. I mentioned I was editing list on clients' (plural) PCs.
> Usenet is a distributed system - every server that didn't filter the group was hosting the content.
Right. I had found a physical address of hard drives containing the data. That it wasn't the only location of the data might not have mattered to an LEO. It all depended on how many gold stars this type of bust generated (at that time).
Hindsight recognizes here that the odds were against LEO being particularly interested. External political pressure may have changed that.
> It sounds like you were tracing your own ISP's server?
Multiple clients, multiple ISPs. IIRC I determined that AT&T was supplying NNTP to all of them.
> On that note some from upstate New York may remember that the attorney general tried to garner votes by raiding and seizing servers from a few local ISPs (Dreamscape, RIP), which in the end didn't work out.
When one grandstands in the press, one takes one's chances. Quiet LEO actions work a differently shuffled deck.
> The FBI was quite well aware of the content on Usenet and very adept at navigating it in its heydey.
Absolutely. However, the one action they never, ever, ever took was anything at all against the corporate hosts and suppliers of that data. There are many strong possibilities for this, some understandable and some corrupt.
Possibly slightly off-topic:
Are there any free (as in speech) web-based NNTP front-ends that are relative ly up to date, and still maintained?
On my home server I can pull up my email, texts, and RSS feeds in a web browser. It would be nice to do the same with newsgroups, instead of having to run Pan (even though I get the same feeling of nostalgia from its UI as the author does).
> This website is powered by DFeed, an NNTP / mailing list web frontend / forum software, news aggregator and IRC bot. DFeed was written mostly by Vladimir Panteleev. The source code is available under the GNU Affero General Public License on GitHub: https://github.com/CyberShadow/DFeed
1) It couldn't serve ads in a controlled manner. The lack of monetization made sure that most people paid for usenet access allowing 'free' http driven apps to take over.
2) Most ISPs didn't provide much information if they had a NNTP server users could use, and NNTP readers didn't come with most users computers. HTTP did.
3) It wasn't exciting to new users. Web went from mostly text to multimedia as internet connection speeds increased.
> Most ISPs didn't provide much information if they had a NNTP server users could use, and NNTP readers didn't come with most users computers. HTTP did.
Until Outlook Express was replaced by Windows Mail, most users computers did come with a NNTP client.
Nope. Dropbox is NFS with an asynchronous client with lots of local persistent cache.
> WhatsApp groups are just ListServes
That's a huge oversimplification.
All in all, I wish I have built something that was the backbone of internet discussions for decades. Truth is, we all moved on. At one time, newsgroups was the only space where we could have threaded discussions. Now we have lots of other, more targeted, options.
All the issues the author mentioned could be fixed. We can use AI to rate comments (at the client), and build a decentralized reputation system (maybe a good use for blockchain, finally).
I’d add barriers of entry. Not high, but way higher that anything that is publicly readable on the internet and therefore indexed on Google.
I can discover interesting subreddits by pure chance by following a google search on a question I have. Or following a link on a blog
There’s no chance of that happening on Usenet. For most users, search/discovery is a web thing (web search, links) and there’s no link from the web to usenet. Therefore if you don't know anything interesting on usenet you can't easily discover it. Any interesting post/discussion cannot be simply linked on a tweet (or, for that matters, on IRC). Usenet is completely insular. A web forum is not.
Were I a Usenet enthusiast, that would be my 1st priority. Public archives of most important hierarchies (comp.* for example), indexed on Google, easily linkable.
When I first started using usenet in the early 90s, I spent days going through the entire list of newsgroups my provider had. IIRC it was somewhere around 6000 groups at the time. Found all sorts of interesting things that way. To your point, that's not exactly a scalable solution and not one that most people would do :)
I'd counter that though with the aspect of one stop shopping, which e.g. Reddit also has. One thing that kept me on Usenet far longer than most was that with one app (my newsreader) I could access limitless topic specific forums. Instead of having to go to a bunch of different sites, each with their own logins & quirks, etc. To this day I still prefer applications like that, for instance it is something I really appreciated about Twitter until recent changes.
> I can discover interesting subreddits by pure chance by following a google search on a question I have. Or following a link on a blog
> There’s no chance of that happening on Usenet.
You could the list of newsgroups for phrases that could lead you to an interesting group. Other times, someone in the group may mention the other group if you mention your interest in a comment. At least, that's how I found a lot of different newsgroups when I was regularly reading and posting to usenet.
Apart from pron clogging up bandwidth, alt.binaries became a good vector to distribute viruses, child pron, and a bunch of other things that ISPs, and their dial-up customers, were becoming increasingly concerned about. Its openness in an increasingly more dangerous, scammy, and criminal world was always going to be its own undoing. There must have been a stage where Pamela Anderson took up most of the world's storage and bandwidth just from synchronising usenet feeds.
This is true. Pretty much all alt.binaries though and there is an interesting ecosystem of tools, forums and providers that you need to be aware of in order to access content.
Warez, and porn. Neither of which are easy to defend when an ISP is looking to address the costs of a Usenet feed. Towards the end, we had close to 100 Mbps full time just for the feed, as I recall. Then we outsourced it to cut that cost. But then management decided none of our customers needed alt.binaries and we dropped it altogether. The effect on churn was negligible.
Totally agree with this. Why would any commercial ISP want to offer this as a service?
There was very little upside and massive potential liabilities because they were storing and supplying unmoderated content that in the very best case was pirated music and movies.
It didn't fail, it's just that GUI chat UIs like AOL and later web forums were more visually attractive, and were able to incorporate graphics. Usenet relied on uuencode for any sort of binary attachment which was a pain in the ass. There was also a high degree of snobbishness that made it unwelcoming to new users, who naturally went to other fora where they weren't treated like children.
The other problem was spam. Usenet had excellent moderation/blocking capabilities for the time ('welcome to my killfile' was the last thing many trolls heard from a person), but relied on a general consensus that spam is cancer. Then Laurence Canter and Martha Siegel single-handedly broke usenet in one afternoon nearly 30 years ago, and I still feel annoyed whenever I think of them. People like this exemplify everything that is toxic about capitalism.
I presumed it was spam. It was a system designed for maybe 1 million non-commercial users The presence of large numbers of users and commercial users were unmanageable. I used it quite extensive in 1992-6, but after that it was a mostly inferior, and the surviving groups I followed became closed mailing lists.
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[ 2.3 ms ] story [ 314 ms ] thread- Sears, a dying company, bought K-Mart, and they died together. K-Mart didn't do anything to Sears.
- Walmart didn't do anything to K-Mart except sell stuff cheaper and work on its supply chain. Wikipedia article says this: "Unlike its competitors Walmart and Target, Kmart failed to invest in computer technology to manage its supply chain."
I don't understand the analogy at all.
As did multiple independent web forums (based on phpBB etc.) which allowed closed communities and moderation and we're more approachable for beginners.
AOL's CD mailers, or microsoft/apple including an http browser in their operating systems.
Here, Google pulled one from the Microsoft playbook: embrace, extend, extinguish.
Google bought DejaNews, rebranded it into Google Groups (embrace) and then proceed to Googlify it, making it less and less Usenet-y and more and more Google specific (extend), until only the Google-specific mailing lists remained (extinguish).
Edit: see https://web.archive.org/web/20010226023947/http://groups.goo...
So Google came in and saved it.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Google_Groups#Deja_News
It's like reddit as the source for LLMs today.
So Google neglecting USENET could be about preventing competitors.
I wonder if they even know it's still there? Probably doesn't use enough bandwidth for anyone to notice. Probably just a few people taking a trip down memory lane to re-read things posted 10-20 years ago.
This appears to be inspired by the BBC show 'Look Around You'.
https://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/Look_Around_You
"Modern and exciting" beat "being able to focus on a conversation" :(
Being able to focus is right at the top of my list of priorities. Surely I'm not the only one?
Having even basic HTML formatting helps lay out a post - which makes it easier to concentrate on it. But that was something eschewed by most Usenet clients and posters.
Similarly, inline images are great for illustrating a point. I don't have to lose focus by clicking on a link and going to another tab to see what's being discussed.
You post this on a threaded discussion forum without avatars, one you've frequented for a decade
I also have my own CSS for HN which makes it much more pleasant (for me) and I I've started using https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30668137
For one simple generic blobs generated based on the sender's address, using some service like gravatar or X-Face header.
https://www.emacswiki.org/emacs/XfacesSupport
I remember them being used by some Usenet posters in the 1990s.
The from column in the thread pane view in my client[1] makes it easy to see the difference between participants, and also gives an indexed view of the entire thread. You don't get that with Hacker News or Reddit.
[1] https://i.imgur.com/i226q2c.png
Every place that doesn't cater to the masses seems to always be a higher quality community.
Slightly off topic, but dang, if you're reading this, I recommend making HN invite only for a month or two after the incoming reddit fiasco in July 1st. A ton of people on the major subreddits are already parroting things like "Just go to HN, it's basically the new reddit".
I don't think I'm making a hot take when I say reddit has a pretty awful community outside of the tech focused subs. But maybe I'm too concerned - I'm just worried that one of the last comfy parts of the internet will be invaded by plebs and emoji spammers.
Eg, I don't see the HN UI ever be used for anything graphics related, because there's no image embedding.
This is fine for many subjects, but greatly constrains others.
It also has social effects. HN makes usernames very vague compared to say, Reddit or Slashdot. Which means that after more than 2 years on this site I still don't know any. The site is extremely impersonal to me, compared to Reddit where I can recognize regulars in some of the subreddits. Whether this is a good thing or not varies, but it certainly affects the dynamics.
I actually like this approach as it reduces the issue of some users dominating the conversation, thereby overshadowing others. I think it's essential to foster a level playing field for everyone when discussing topics of interest.
Also if you use old reddit usernames in reddit are as impersonal as they are here because of no discernible avatars.
If I see a comment from someone I know to be a relative expert on a field based on my previous interactions with them, I want to judge it as more authoritative and interesting than a rando who registered two weeks ago and has mostly commented "lol".
By the late 90s Usenet was well into the Eternal September and inundated with spam. Unmoderated groups were a mess. There was also just the simple problem of formatting. IIRC Outlook Express defaulted to MIME/multipart posts which would cause all sorts of weirdness if someone with a text-only client quoted them and the OE user replied. Then of course there was the issue of top and bottom quoting. Many Usenet clients had truly awful UIs so a user could inadvertently quote a message's headers in a reply.
Compared to even a simple WWWBoard the experience was often lacking in terms of focus.
There were some good GUI newsreaders but Outlook Express was a shit show. I remember OE was what my ISP had NNTP documentation for and nothing else.
Thunderbird didn't come out until the early 2000s. The predecessors were Mozilla mail & news and Netscape Communicator. Seamonkey[1] is an offshoot of the former once Mozilla split mail and news into Firefox and Thunderbird.
[1] https://www.seamonkey-project.org/
The main problem OE had was the quote wrapping problem that other clients didn't. The other was that it defaulted to top posting IIRC.
I didn't really start lurking and posting on usenet until the late '90s and while those problems occasionally cropped up, they really didn't interfere with the main discussion threads in the groups I was a regular in. I only stopped regularly using it by the early/mid 2010s because all the other regulars in the groups I was in ceased posting.
Maybe not usenet itself, but NNTP gateways can be used to browse mailing lists.
Even for people who had mastered the software the lack of ability to get rid of bad people was a problem. One "Kook" could single-handedly jam up server groups ( eg https://www.geocities.w/donfool/ ).
The interface however was still pretty unmatched to this day unmatched. You could and did get threads of 1000 posts from 100 people that were perfectly threaded, readable and referred to points in previous posts.
The requirement for each ISP to run their own server was a problem. If you wanted binaries then you would need a relatively expensive server (or group of servers) plus quite a lot of bandwidth.
Usenet served its purpose at a point in time and then faded into obscurity, though it keeps chugging away in a niche, appealing to some.
It's like saying that IRC failed.
What forum community, social network or media platform has been permanent and outlasted everything else? It seems that on every social network, people migrate, people abandon platforms, and losing critical mass can be fatal to the platform, and then it just passes on to the next one, having served its purpose; did MySpace "fail" or did it simply cede the crown to Facebook?
I remember Usenet fondly, though perhaps through rose-colored glasses. It was already full of trolls, flamewars, disruption and discord. Yet I cut my teeth there as a young sysadmin. I listened at the feet of experts, literal prominent experts in the field, who had spare time to just freely share their knowledge, because the Internet was an R&E community! I learned a lot about reputation and trust in the digital age. I gained "Internet street smarts" there.
I believe that it shaped a lot of people's lives, for better or worse, and that's not a failure by any measure.
I come from MUDding communities myself, and there is no shortage of old and crusty wizards who cling to their MUD servers and have kept them open, going on 30 years now! Clients come and go, Internet standards change, and social network fads happen, and we're still playing a game that doesn't bother supporting TLS, MFA, Unicode, or graphics. MUDs never failed, they simply achieved posterity and faded from sight.
Forté Agent was a masterpiece. Change my mind.
Now let's not forget my 40-line ASCII-art sigfile.
Yes.
Also, my social network feeds could benefit from a killfile feature ...
There's a wide variety of ways to self-moderate content. Andd you can block whole servers from your account as well.
And if stuff is terrible, you can report to your instance's admin (if you're not running your own). And barring that, you can also report to their instance's admin.
Given enough harassment or badness, servers can block harassing servers.
It could do NNTP feeds integrated with e-mail, an outgrowth of previous work on IE3-era Windows News and Mail (which was an architectural masterpiece - a Windows Explorer view of a folder full of messages, populated from the mail and news feeds)
I wish we had something like that in Gnome - processes that sync my IMAP mails to local Maildir-like folders (dynamically populated, with download-on-open, perhaps) and a view that shows e-mails. Same for iCal feeds - make it a way to view specific kinds of content.
It was the one client that never fixed their quoted text wrapping bug IIRC.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/X-Face
I think there was even a color version of x-face? Oh yeah, found it. A 48x48 base64 encoded PNG image.
https://www.emacswiki.org/emacs/GnusFace
I don't know what other Usenet clients supported that. The x-face header was already not widely supported.
Yes, this is the number 1 reason.
But USENET is still being used and there are many people still using it. And there are places where you can signup for free access, this is one but there are many others:
http://www.eternal-september.org/
One thing to remember, you never see a post from your teenage self on USENET being dragged up by your employer causing you to be fired or loose out on a job. Why, privacy still exists on USENET.
Also I guess he never heard of killfiles :) These days I have a rather large one compared to what I had many years ago. See a post you do not want to see anymore, add it to your killfile and maybe the person who sent it.
Google at one point did a very good job at indexing usenet posts and including them in their search results. If I searched for the name I used when posting to usenet, I would get hundreds of results of posts I made. But if I try searching now, very few results from usenet come up (perhaps because of the age of the posts).
> Also I guess he never heard of killfiles :)
I'm actually surprised he didn't mention that in his article.
They were trying to minimize any kind of customer support by humans, the number one cost center for any digital company.
Lucky for them that the like of Google and Reddit externalized mail and forum services.
The story is:
1) There were a number of independent ISPs, but oligarchic forces, in addition to the Verizon/AT&T last mile monopoly consolidated things so that Verizon/AT&T became the ISP for most people, with limited competition.
2) Once consolidated, Verizon and AT&T killed their news servers. This mostly happened in 2008. The old Internet which was more open and peer-to-peer became a platform with end users limited mostly to web clients, consuming from big corporate upstream web servers.
3) This was helped along by various places in the US government, which blessed or even applied pressure to kill off the old peer-to-peer nature of the Internet, particularly Usenet, for the current model of big corporate web servers to end user customers.
Of course the public relations announcements were all of this was done for the litany of reasons companies and the government do anything - to protect customers/children/whatever, fight against the forces of evil etc.
In my opinion Usenets greatest strength was also its downfall. It is a distributed system without central authority over who could connect to the network or firm control over groups and their contents. To connect to it as a peer, you just had to find at least one Usenet site willing to exchange messages (peer) with you. Usually that wasn't a problem. ISPs, universities, organizations of all kinds were running their own servers, offering Usenet client access to their customers and members for no additional charge.
In a distributed system without central authority, innovation is exceedingly hard though. The protocols and features were basically set in stone. Taking the concept of offering discussions among users to a centralized or closed system made it possible to innovate very fast and offer superior features to the users.
As the article pointed out, that wasn't the only protocol which got picked up that way and innovated upon until it displaced its origins.
Since Usenet is still frozen feature wise were it was 30 or more years ago, I don't see a revival coming anytime soon.
Moderation. In public forums, everything else is trivial and moderation is the invisible stinking hairy elephant in the room. To the question "why isn't there a decentralized open protocol free software X" the answer is moderation. Think or it as the discreet but efficient bouncers without which a sufficiently popular public place cannot maintain a welcoming atmosphere. Newsgroups became sufficiently popular, death by inadequate moderation ensued.
If 4chan "breaks cover" into the mainstream in the way that, say, Facebook has, it will make for some very entertaining Congressional hearings.
A moderated newsgroup had all messages going through the moderator's system, with their programs deciding whether or not the message should be forwarded to the rest of the newsgroup. This doesn't necessarily mean that a human read all messages either.
Some of the oldest flamewars I've participated in are about moderated vs unmoderated USENET newsgroups. It amuses me that we're still debating the issue today.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kill_file
A kill file is "User X is tired of seeing User Y, so X stops reading posts from Y". Everyone else can still read Y.
A moderator is "Moderator is tired of seeing User Y, so Y cannot post to Newsgroup anymore". A much stronger action.
---------
Its been a few decades since I was part of any Usenet though. So maybe I'm mis-remembering the lingo. Or are you saying that the moderators used kill-files that somehow applied to the whole newsgroup?
Because... the later would make sense. But I really don't know how things worked back then.
The "approve/deny/edit" stuff is handled by moderation software, which in principle can do anything you like.
IIRC group-wide moderation was handled per-post in that every post was approved by hand.
Definitely not. The kinds of "mistakes" I've seen in moderation back then suggests that the process was highly automated.
Moderated Usenet is way more similar to modern Reddit than people probably realize.
The same sort of model exists in modern distributed systems like Mastodon/ActivityPub. I can block a user from another server or an entire server individually, or my server admin can block them from communicating with anyone on my server.
What's missing that I think will be required for anything that gets popular enough is a means of sharing blocklists automatically, preferably with some machine-readable details so that they're useful even when servers have different rules (e.g. I want to subscribe to bans from Foo if the ban is for hate speech, but not for porn).
What I can say is that plenty of spammers would have one or two posts on Newsgroups, before the mods would catch them and ban their email address.
Depending on the Newsgroup, I'm sometimes "new users" would have all of their posts reviewed before their posts were forwarded to everyone else. But after being added to some kind of whitelist, they could say whatever they wanted (well, until a flamewar caused them to go over the line and get banned).
So similar tools as moderators use today on Reddit / IRC / whatever. Or at least, it felt like that to me. Maybe it differed in implementation, but the overall effect was the same.
A lot of sophisticated anti-spam software depended on some sophisticated anti-anti-spam showing up first, and there is a lot more of that now for sure.
The type and quality of moderation is up to the moderation team. Might be automatic, might involve a review by a human for each post.
As someone else already mentioned, there are groups which were configured to be moderated but have no moderators at all to approve posts. Either they disappeared or there never were any. To participate in these groups you have to set the "Approved:" header in your post yourself. Obviously that would also be the way to circumvent the moderation process for any other moderated group. The countermeasure is that the moderators send out a cancel control message which instructs all the newsservers receiving it or at least those who honor cancel messages, to delete this specific message.
Free speech is not about letting you post your conspiracy theory in the wrong group
I support free speech except in some circumstances where curtailing it makes almost everyone's lives better.
Where I support it to the most extreme: criticizing the government.
Where I want it most throttled: my own living room, so I can have some peace and quiet.
I think most functioning adults have a similar spectrum of allow / deny and aren't absolutists on the topic.
And, I mean... I don't think we need to look deep into the history of the Internet to see that becoming the dominant pattern. USENET failed. Email without spamblockers failed. Every forum either eventually adopts moderation policies or goes underground where barely any casual user hears of its existence.
The user interprets lack of censorship as damaged and routes away from it.
> Where I want it most throttled: my own living room, so I can have some peace and quiet.
This is a category error. What if someone wants to criticize the government in your living room?
Because they're the spam being kept out.
It is often NOT the users of the platforms that want censorship, it is users of another platform, targeting something they do not like on the internet, and then going after underlying structures be it ISP's, DDOS services, Domain Registrars, Hosting providers, Credit Card Processors, etc etc etc
We have plenty of examples of this on the internet, where it is not the users of the sites that want something censored, but 3rd party actors using systemic pressure on critical infrastructure to effect the censorship
You have this utopia where someone puts up a gardening forum and the users or even the owner of the forums says "We do not allow talk about Politics here"...
Where in reality someone sets up a political forum, someone posts something, then someone on Twitter, Facebook, Insta, etc gets offended and starts a campaign to have CloudFlare, or AWS ban them.
This is not necessarily a bad thing. Nazis, for example, deserve no platform and if companies decide to revoke service when they discover they're serving Nazis that's their prerogative. It can be abused, especially given that the largest players in the space are going to trend sensitive to controversy... But the internet has become embedded deeply enough in our lives that people can no longer enjoy the pretty fantasy of the neutral service provider; IBM got away with it in World War 2 and that's generally pointed to as a moral failing these days.
If people are calling for enforced neutrality, they're really calling for government regulation (who else would enforce the neutrality?) which is its own can of worms.
Then you have the problem of labeling everyone that disagrees with you a "nazi" for example just because they favor strong border laws, and immigration controls, or oppose social justice and ESG "capitalism" or other such things
Or the true crime of having a difference of opinion with a trans person...
>>This is not necessarily a bad thing.
yes it is a bad thing, it will always be a bad thing, even if doing to to actual nazi's not the new age defination of "nazi's" which seemly is anyone that happened to vote for Trump, or holds conservative political positions.
>>If people are calling for enforced neutrality, they're really calling for government regulation
yes and no, depends on what we are talking about
Are we talking about an already heavily regulated industry like banking. This yes 100% I am calling for enforced neutrality. JP Morgan Chase, nor MasterCard should be able to refuse business to someone for the protected political speech.
Services like AWS, or CloudFlare.... No I would not call for supported regulation but then we come full circle back to loss of cultural support for Free Expression
There was a time were the ACLU would defend the KKK's right to speak, We should return to those days, where the axiom was "I disagree with you but I will defends your right to say it"
If we at the point was the population is pushing for AWS to de-platform competitors of Twitter because of disagreements over politics we are not far removed from government censorship
The reality is you would likely support both, as you clear abhor actual free speech
This is also why Elon's purchase of Twitter was so critical and 100% support his efforts.
Broadly speaking, I'm a fan of the marketplace of ideas. That marketplace includes boycotts, callouts, and choices by private individuals to provide or revoke a platform for someone else to speak in their space. Freedom of the press has never implied that everyone gets a free press.
> which seemly is anyone that happened to vote for Trump, or holds conservative political positions.
Hacker News isn't really a great venue for that kind of discussion. But there's a reason the pushback on him and his supporters has been so strong relative to previous politicians. He and his supporters actually do represent something fundamentally caustic to the American body politic. https://www.bu.edu/articles/2022/are-trump-republicans-fasci...
Which means I am sure you support the ongoing boycotts happening to BudLight and Target? Or are boycotts only for one side?
> Freedom of the press has never implied that everyone gets a free press.
The problem here is when the government subsides the people that makes the press, regulates the people that makes the press, and limits the who and produce presses it ceases to be a free market, and becomes a regulated market
One can make the case, that since the internet was started by the government (dod) and regulated for decades by the government (Dept of Commerce Via ICANN), and tons of subsidies ISP;s have gotten and continue to get, locations where the internet is a government service, and tons of other factors that the idea that the internet is a purely free market is clearly a false narrative
One often used for convince when it meets peoples political goals, and then the second that freedom is not aligned with their goals anymore.
Further when it comes to consumer boycotts, you have to actually be a consumer, 99% of the people that have effective policy changes at CloudFlare and AWS have never spent a single dime at either of those services.
Today cancel culture is something more than just a boycott, it is something new not seen before in human civilization, and it is a huge threat to not only freedom of expression but freedom in general
I am unclear why people do not get that.
Of course I do. Nobody should feel compelled to buy a beer they don't want to buy.
> 99% of the people that have effective policy changes at CloudFlare and AWS have never spent a single dime at either of those services.
I think I need a citation for that. I used to work for a cloud company and there is a lot of back room negotiation that people don't realize happens. My default suspicion is that product advocates and product managers received real clear signal from people with money to spend that they were going to spend it elsewhere.
> Today cancel culture is something more than just a boycott, it is something new not seen before in human civilization
No, shunning is actually very old. It is the way communities small and large dealt with unacceptable behavior in their midst. Nobody is compelled to associate with somebody they don't want to.
What did change is that for a brief period of time, the existence of the internet, it's relative obscurity, and the pseudonymity it provided convinced a generation that they had subverted the old cultural norms. What we are witnessing is a reification of those cultural norms to the new technology. The USENET day is dead. The techno utopia was tried and found very wanting. Old patterns are reestablishing themselves, though with more voices at the table because ultimately, you can't actually stop the signal.
The former president was kicked off of somebody's microblogging service and responded by creating his own. That's how it's supposed to work.
For example, I feel that you can say what you like, just not in my living room. Free speech does not guarantee an audience.
"I feel that you can say what you like, just not in my living room" is a pointless axiom that provides nothing of value to the conversation.
The debate becomes infinitely more complex when you step 1 inch outside of the "living room" context and start talking about Public and Private companies operating platforms on a global scale all under a infinitely complex set of regulations, subsidies, and other factors
" I feel that you can say what you like, just not in my living room" seems to me then you want to translate that into "Reddit, twitter, etc can choose what people say in their living room", the problem is they do not have a living room, and attempting to make that analog is ridiculous
If you want to publish your own speech, buy your own server
Any time you're not on private property. "You're a cunt".
Is that free speech?
I mean, I'm allowed to be on public property. I'm allowed to say whatever I want. Exercising those two rights means I'm allowed to follow you around and call you a cunt.
You'd probably try to say "No, that's harassment". Aye, but now you've agreed there should be limits on speech.
I am sure they would tire of it long before I would get offended by it. and I can assure you I would could, and have responded far more decisive and penetrating insults...
That's why cutting off their ability to do it through various channels is so important.
At that point, the "speech" is objectively harmful.
> Why should it be any different with harassment?
Free Speech absolutionists act as if words on their own are not harmful, such there's no such thing as verbal harassment.
Look at the sibling comment [0]. phpisthebest actually claims that being followed and told "You're a cunt" repeatedly would be amusing.
[0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36202392
Free Speech is just that. It's not freedom from consequences too.
"Free Speech" that has consequences from the government isn't free speech. The "Freedom from consequences" has to do with private entities reacting to your speech. For example, asking you to leave the premises or getting banned.
I am reminded of the other hot potato 'privacy'. The 'Solid Project' has an interesting way of dealing with that, which may also have a positive effect on how free speech evolves.
I wanted to address this first. Nowhere did I mean to imply that I think there shouldn't be limits on speech or no moderation. There should certainly be some speech that is illegal (Calls to violence, harassment, etc), and web platforms absolutely have a right to moderate.
But, I think everyone can agree that the right to free speech granted by the First Amendment does mean that you can criticize the government, for example. If someone tries to claim "Yes, you have the right to criticize the government, but the government can arrest you for it! Freedom of speech does not mean freedom from consequences!", then I would have to ask that person what they think "Freedom of speech" means, and what a "right" means, because to me, a "right" means either "You are allowed to do the thing and the government must not interfere or retaliate" (ie, free speech) or "You must be allowed access to the thing, and the government must provide it for you if you can't provide it yourself" (ie, a lawyer when you are on trial).
The notion of "You have the right to something, but the government will punish you for it" is just completely non-sensical.
But...all this only applies to government. Private entities are another matter entirely. They have the right to remove content and users however they want. Your freedom of speech does not trump their right to decide what gets displayed on their platform.
Private entities can also react however they want. If you go on a racist tirade on Twitter, your employer has a right to fire you, because having an extreme racist in the workplace is just asking for trouble.
That is, sure, you can speak to whoever wants to listen. You can't make anyone want to listen, though - including, you can't make a forum want to listen. It wants to talk about gardening, and you want to talk about the latest Covid conspiracy theories? Great, knock yourself out, talk about your conspiracy theories - but not on the gardening forum.
See, I support free speech. I support their freedom to talk about gardening without having to wade through a bunch of conspiracy theory posts. "Post anything anywhere" reduces actual communication - willing speakers finding willing listeners - because the listeners give up rather than wade through a bunch of garbage that they don't care about. I support their freedom to talk about gardening without getting drowned out.
Usenet is a open protocol, not a forum that someone owns. So if you support moderation on open protocol then you support most likely systemic, or worse government censorship. Not someone controlling their own property
With Usenet there was plenty of tools (just like with email today) to block spam, content, users etc at the client level if an individual did not want to see certain speech.
With time those tools would have improved just like they have with email
Feel free to stop telling me what I support. You're lousy at it.
If a protocol is open, that doesn't mean that my servers are. I'm moderating my servers, not the protocol or the traffic carried using the protocol. (In the same way, you don't control who drives by your house, but you control who's allowed in the door.)
I don't want systemic censorship of speech (including by ISPs). I don't want government censorship of speech. But I support the right of servers to say "I'm not carrying that". And I support the right of a community to have a space that is public to that community, and yet to keep stuff that they don't want out of it. And I support the right of those who don't agree to go form their own community, and to decide for themselves what the rules are for their community. And all of this can happen on open protocols without systemic or government censorship.
Specifically on usenet, you could have, say, alt.hobby.gardening, and have it get overrun by spam, and have alt.hobby.gardening_moderated start up with moderation to keep the spam out. And if you don't like it, and want to post your conspiracy rants, go post them on alt.hobby.gardening with all the spam that nobody reads. Knock yourself out. Or go start alt.hobby.gardening_conspiracy, or whatever. But let the gardening nuts have their space without your rants.
Small groups were ok. As soon as a group had any reasonable traffic, the spammers moved it. Since the spammers didn't care about conversation, they didn't need to maintain stable identify and evaded killfiles. They could quickly drowning out the topic with 10x ads. Not wanting this is not about being uncomfortable - it was about swimming in 90% garbage ads.
Usenet went from students posting at a modest number of elite schools, .mil sites, and a relative handful of tech companies--often under their real name--to the Eternal September and beyond. Like many problems with the Internet over the years which occurred because systems that grew up on the assumption of mostly trustworthy actors.
I see no insult towards you, or anyone else in particular. In fact, to the opposite, others here are saying Usenet died due to lack of content moderation - aka other people enforcing their will on others.
> The problem with post-September usenet was spam.
Now I know you're just guessing. The 'September that never ended' was when AoL peered with internet gateways to bring everyone on the AoL network to the internet, along with knowing little about computers or anything. "Me too" was around then, as a derogatory comment of what an AOLer would say. Even Weird Al in "All about the Pentiums" had a line to put them down like Old Yeller.
Usenet really died in 2007 winter-2008 Spring, when all major ISPs killed their subscriber Usenet servers. They never officially stated why, but grumbles that made it out in the systems engineering folk were that it was alt.binaries were eating up loads of bandwidth, and much of it was 100% piracy.
Spam was a thing, but most of us used good NNCP clients that removed a good 90+% of spam. And having lived through when Usenet was ubiquitous, I fully reject your hypothesis.
And you might want to consider taking conversations here more impersonally. Feeling "insulted" over a comment that was directed to nobody in particular isn't healthy.
It was because the attorney general of New York (Andrew Cuomo) made a deal with major ISPs to restrict access to child pornography[1]. ISPs decided to drop their usenet service in response.
[1] https://www.cnet.com/tech/tech-industry/n-y-attorney-general...
https://www.techdirt.com/2022/11/02/hey-elon-let-me-help-you...
Sounds just like Elon Musk!
We had moderation on Usenet. It was simple, but damn, did it work. We had plonka lists (client selected ignored users), keyword scoring, server level scoring, some anti-spam. There was EARLY work in Bayesian filters built in to clients, but was too late for the "big event". (When ISP's everywhere killed Usenet servers, for what is pretty surely assumed as anti-piracy.)
But lets look corporate moderation. It's done in secret, with vague rules that may or may not be stated, and by content moderation farms that use and abuse people. https://www.wired.co.uk/article/facebook-content-moderators-... . Or worse yet, you fool people in faux-ownership (reddit) and get them to do your moderation for you. Well, that is unless you do a bad job and get your subreddit banned for "low/no moderation".
I'd much rather see everything, and craft my own blocklists as I see fit. You know, just like Mastodon. Sure, there's some fediblocks at admin-level over pervasive content from a single server. But aside admin tasks, its pretty damn sweet. And it's loads better than the shit that happens over on Twitter, Reddit, or Facebook.
Enter the party, meet regulars, meet new faces, enjoy a drink and don't even think about safety. Sure, you can manage it yourself for a birthday party at your home but at larger scales even the wild rave party thrown in an abandoned hangar out there will have some form of institutionalized enforcement, even if they are not corporate security.
Yes, that means that successful large public places tend towards bland - the same reason why successful edgy underground dives are small affairs and their character can't survive growth.
Highly disagree. It's the early adopters of ANY platform, hardware, or whatever that drive real organic demand and adoption. And those early adopters ARE exactly that: technologically literate.
Alienating that group is how you get relegated to the "Digg v4" area of history.
> How many Reddit users want that ? Facebook users ? Oh, maybe they want to fine-tune their scoring rules library or tweak they bayesian filters - so much fun !
How many Facebook or Reddit users even HAVE the capability of client side anything? The big threads are that Reddit's killing most API access unless you pay a pound of flesh. And Facebook does enough horrible things in their coding that makes it impossible to even screen-scrape. The text "Sponsored" shows up as shittery like "essprnodo".
For those gated islands, you'd need their permission to really do any sort of client side anything.
Places like Mastodon make blocking trivial. Ive shared that link, and no, you don't need to know about Bayseian weights or whatever new mod scheme you want to make. Its there, the initial functions are easy-peasy, and the API hooks are there to add whatever you want.
> And lacking social intelligence, client-side filtering fails against organized harassment.
And that already is a major problem on the corporate side. Reddit calls it "brigading". HN has chill-down scripts to defuse flamewars. Twitter, Facebook, and Reddit all have mass-reporting as harassment. There's even current 4Chan threads to organize just that. Sure seems like an unsolved problem, not just "unsolved for federated systems".
> By the way, who is liable for infractions to the local law ?
Irrelevant. Someone in another area could read content that is illegal to them. That's *their* responsibility, not mine. As long as I follow the laws in my jurisdiction and where my server is located, I'm fine. And 17 USC 512 covers me as long as I do good-faith DMCA process.
> <example of comparing physical real world with raves/alcohol/drugs with online "dangers">
And in your latter half, your other problem is that you're equating online "safety" with in-person bodily safety with alcohol and drugs. Those 2 aren't even remotely the same, and its laughable that you'd try to compare them.
If someone is coming on to you in a sexual manner, and your "No" isnt effectively heard or acknowledged, you have a big problem. If someone uploads a bad image (say, animal torture, for something abhorrent), you can block the user, the server, report the user to their/your server admins. You can also choose not to show images. It's terrible, but physical assault is no comparison to a bad image or terrible text.
Unless you serve people from the EU or sell things to US customers like bitcoin.
You can use fdroid, webapps or side-load the "full" unfiltered client but the experience for the normies would be that paid app experience. And I say paid app to avoid the pitfall that is advertising fed results.
There should be no reason why a service can't provide that feature natively.
Facebook[1] and Reddit[2] both have a block user feature. It's a very rudimentary version of the killfile that usenet clients have. If users didn't want features like that, then they wouldn't be available on either platform.
> client-side filtering fails against organized harassment.
Usenet killfiles were advanced enough that you could easily filter out messages even from organized campaigns. For example, filtering it based on a number of conditions such as group header, from header, a unique header, certain keywords in the body, etc.
[1] https://www.facebook.com/help/168009843260943
[2] https://support.reddithelp.com/hc/en-us/articles/214548323-H...
I thought this was due to the deal[1] that Andrew Cuomo (New York's attorney general at the time) made with major ISPs to restrict access to child pornography. Many major ISPs discontinued their usenet service in that time period.
[1] https://www.cnet.com/tech/tech-industry/n-y-attorney-general...
We saw this with usenet and we also saw it with IRC. IRC really is what slack was, 30years ahead of it. However, IRC has so many essential missing features it never caught on - push notifications, saving your state when offline, admin controls, etc. I know some of these were solved with extensions and workarounds (having a shell connect to irc an then you connect to the shell for persistence for example) but it's a huge hack. This compares to Slack or Teams where they can push a back and front end update to millions/billions(?) of users in a very short space of time to add additional functionality.
This is another reason why all the decentralised 'blockchain' things would have struggled (on top of many others).
Decentralization is a business problem, not a technical problem. Engineers tend not to see this because we're engineers and so we see technical problems first.
Usenet had no economic model. All the problems you list are solvable if there were funding available to solve them.
Free volunteer developer work tends to stop at the level of polish with which developers are comfortable, which is usually command line interaction and fairly manual processes. Developers generally have to be paid to develop new features and polish those features for the general audience, which is why there are precious few open source systems used by anyone other than developers.
Those that do exist tend to be subsidized by huge companies for the purpose of "commoditizing your compliments" or as tools to herd users into an ecosystem that has upsell opportunities built into it. Examples: Chrome, any open source client for a SaaS service, etc.
Non-profits can fund to some extent, but the truth is that polished feature-rich easy to use software is extraordinarily expensive to produce. A system that a developer can create in their spare time might cost millions to render usable to non-developers. Computers are actually very hard to use. We just don't see this because we're accustomed to it. Making them easy to use is a gigantic undertaking and is often far more difficult and complex than making something work at the algorithmic level.
Centralized systems with built-in economic models like SaaS or commercial software tend to triumph because they can fund the polish necessary to reach a wider audience. A wider audience means exponentially larger network effects. See Metcalfe's Law.
Cryptocurrency could have offered an alternative model but failed for entirely different reasons: perverse incentives that attract scammers. In crypto by far the most profitable thing to do is build a fake project that can appear just credible enough to attract retail buyers onto whom you can dump your tokens. There is no structural incentive to stick with a project and really develop it because all the money is made up front through the initial offering. This also ruins the ecosystem because "the bad chases away the good." Scammers make legitimate people not want to go anywhere near crypto, transforming the whole ecosystem into a "bad neighborhood."
There also was no content moderation.
> Usenet had no economic model. All the problems you list are solvable if there were funding available to solve them.
You hit the nail on the head. Usenet was very much a "back channel" in its early history, with school and corporate IT people setting up feeds on the quiet. Indeed, it began outside the Internet, using dialup UUCP links to exchange news and mail.
Email addresses were "bang paths" where you had to route your mail to its destination. If your outside mail gateway was foovax, an outgoing address might be like "foovax!decwrl!ihnp4!uiucuxa!example" instead of "example@uiucuxa.uiuc.edu". In posts, it was a convention to specify your email address path from one of the famous well-connected sites.
One of the biggest early players was (surprise) Bell Labs. If the name "ihnp4" rings a bell to you, you might be as old or older than me. :) That was a central hub for the UUCP network, both news and mail. I wonder if any AT&T bean counters knew about it back in the day, or, getting back to the original point, how many bean counters found out about Usenet in their respective companies and forced it out?
IRC never caught on? IRC was extremely popular throughout the 90's and into the 2000's
Email and the web were extremely popular. Facebook is extremely popular. Very few people have ever known what IRC is.
But it turns out that model had some major flaws. Nowadays, one could say the 'net interprets lack of censorship as offensive and migrates away from it. If there's one thing the experiments after USENET (from Slashdot to Mastodon) suggest, it's that people on average want some control (and don't on average want the burden of being their own moderator for every damn bitstream that comes down the pipe).
At least, that's the goal.
https://media.ccc.de/v/36c3-11086-the_ecosystem_is_moving
After a time I got unhappy about this and went to see if I could determine a physical hosting location of the content. I don't recall the particulars, just that I came up with an AT&T subsidiary - something polkadot - sitting at a Canadian address, near the US border.
I wasn't willing to reach out to the FBI blindly and couldn't locate anyone who know anyone in the bureau. I knew someone who knew the head of the [state] Family Association and that person was well connected politically. After some back and forth I gave up on the whole thing. That guy was fairly obsessed with stamping out homosexuality and couldn't be bothered with abused children. I moved on.
This list gets downloaded from whatever server you configure and is then local to your machine. Editing it would only affect what you see on your own client.
> After a time I got unhappy about this and went to see if I could determine a physical hosting location of the content.
Usenet is a distributed system - every server that didn't filter the group was hosting the content. They were typically viewed as common carriers.
(It sounds like you were tracing your own ISP's server?)
On that note some from upstate New York may remember that the attorney general tried to garner votes by raiding and seizing servers from a few local ISPs (Dreamscape, RIP), which in the end didn't work out.
> I wasn't willing to reach out to the FBI blindly and couldn't locate anyone who know anyone in the bureau.
The FBI was quite well aware of the content on Usenet and very adept at navigating it in its heydey. They used it in a number of investigations to track down producers including breaking into trusted rings that communicated with PGP encrypted communications on Usenet. You wouldn't have informed them of anything they didn't know.
I know. I mentioned I was editing list on clients' (plural) PCs.
> Usenet is a distributed system - every server that didn't filter the group was hosting the content.
Right. I had found a physical address of hard drives containing the data. That it wasn't the only location of the data might not have mattered to an LEO. It all depended on how many gold stars this type of bust generated (at that time).
Hindsight recognizes here that the odds were against LEO being particularly interested. External political pressure may have changed that.
> It sounds like you were tracing your own ISP's server?
Multiple clients, multiple ISPs. IIRC I determined that AT&T was supplying NNTP to all of them.
> On that note some from upstate New York may remember that the attorney general tried to garner votes by raiding and seizing servers from a few local ISPs (Dreamscape, RIP), which in the end didn't work out.
When one grandstands in the press, one takes one's chances. Quiet LEO actions work a differently shuffled deck.
> The FBI was quite well aware of the content on Usenet and very adept at navigating it in its heydey.
Absolutely. However, the one action they never, ever, ever took was anything at all against the corporate hosts and suppliers of that data. There are many strong possibilities for this, some understandable and some corrupt.
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1) It couldn't serve ads in a controlled manner. The lack of monetization made sure that most people paid for usenet access allowing 'free' http driven apps to take over.
2) Most ISPs didn't provide much information if they had a NNTP server users could use, and NNTP readers didn't come with most users computers. HTTP did.
3) It wasn't exciting to new users. Web went from mostly text to multimedia as internet connection speeds increased.
Until Outlook Express was replaced by Windows Mail, most users computers did come with a NNTP client.
Nope. Dropbox is NFS with an asynchronous client with lots of local persistent cache.
> WhatsApp groups are just ListServes
That's a huge oversimplification.
All in all, I wish I have built something that was the backbone of internet discussions for decades. Truth is, we all moved on. At one time, newsgroups was the only space where we could have threaded discussions. Now we have lots of other, more targeted, options.
All the issues the author mentioned could be fixed. We can use AI to rate comments (at the client), and build a decentralized reputation system (maybe a good use for blockchain, finally).
I can discover interesting subreddits by pure chance by following a google search on a question I have. Or following a link on a blog
There’s no chance of that happening on Usenet. For most users, search/discovery is a web thing (web search, links) and there’s no link from the web to usenet. Therefore if you don't know anything interesting on usenet you can't easily discover it. Any interesting post/discussion cannot be simply linked on a tweet (or, for that matters, on IRC). Usenet is completely insular. A web forum is not.
Were I a Usenet enthusiast, that would be my 1st priority. Public archives of most important hierarchies (comp.* for example), indexed on Google, easily linkable.
I'd counter that though with the aspect of one stop shopping, which e.g. Reddit also has. One thing that kept me on Usenet far longer than most was that with one app (my newsreader) I could access limitless topic specific forums. Instead of having to go to a bunch of different sites, each with their own logins & quirks, etc. To this day I still prefer applications like that, for instance it is something I really appreciated about Twitter until recent changes.
In this day and age, that need to install one more thing (unless you're on mobile) is itself a huge barrier to entry.
> There’s no chance of that happening on Usenet.
You could the list of newsgroups for phrases that could lead you to an interesting group. Other times, someone in the group may mention the other group if you mention your interest in a comment. At least, that's how I found a lot of different newsgroups when I was regularly reading and posting to usenet.
Apart from pron clogging up bandwidth, alt.binaries became a good vector to distribute viruses, child pron, and a bunch of other things that ISPs, and their dial-up customers, were becoming increasingly concerned about. Its openness in an increasingly more dangerous, scammy, and criminal world was always going to be its own undoing. There must have been a stage where Pamela Anderson took up most of the world's storage and bandwidth just from synchronising usenet feeds.
In 2023 Usenet is solely commercially viable for alt.binaries.
edit: I guess they are. Took a second to search around the comments.
There was very little upside and massive potential liabilities because they were storing and supplying unmoderated content that in the very best case was pirated music and movies.
The spam issue was the real deal breaker imho - you either had a fully moderated group, or you had a fully unmoderated one with spam left and right.
Also, for me it was social media - web groups, however lacking the interface was, had more variety in their subjects.
The other problem was spam. Usenet had excellent moderation/blocking capabilities for the time ('welcome to my killfile' was the last thing many trolls heard from a person), but relied on a general consensus that spam is cancer. Then Laurence Canter and Martha Siegel single-handedly broke usenet in one afternoon nearly 30 years ago, and I still feel annoyed whenever I think of them. People like this exemplify everything that is toxic about capitalism.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Laurence_Canter_and_Martha_Sie...