Sascha at PCMag writes a charming little piece on the death of Usenet as a method of discourse and its eventual rebirth as a repository for porn, spam, and pirated warez. He recalls the days of “serious conversations” on 8-bit Atari architecture and the rise and fall of net.manners as more and more n00bs came on to mess up in-depth threads on symbolism in Bob Dylan’s Street Legal.
Is Usenet dead, as Sascha posits? I don’t think so. As long as there are folks who think a command line is better than a mouse, the original text-only social network will live on. Sure, ISPs will shut down access out of misled kiddie porn fears but the real pros know where to go to get their angst-filled, nit-picking, obsessive fix.
In a way inconceivable in today’s Web-fragmented marketplace, Usenet was where you went to talk. Conceived back in the idealistic, non-profit days of the Internet, it was—well, it is, but it mostly was—a series of bulletin boards called “newsgroups” shared by thousands of computers, which traded new messages several times a day.
Thankfully, Google has archived Usenet posts from the last three decades.
It is really an experience reading something you wrote from the early eighties – and seeing the exchanges.
Back in the day – it was like heaven to the Geeks.
The individual posts were very high quality because only a select, educated few ever participated
So kind of like Youtube comments today?
I agree. I loved reading the messages, especially anything related to tech and security
I remember staying up late and waiting for new responses.
Eventually most of the popular groups turned to crap as a result for the increase of broadband access in homes.
Ryan, I agree with your sarcasm, majority of YouTube comments are at best ignorant.
Who reads PCMag anyway? What a chump.
Let’s face it , Usenet and IRS are dead..
I use to search Google Groups (Their archive of Usenet) when I’m looking for some thing , now even that is useless as its full of porn , spam , and hacking shit.
Nothing useful there any more.
And by the way , some people say its was replaced by blogs , others will say by Twitter , Digg , Friendsfeed conversations , well , not true..
It was replaced by message boards , or online Forums.
IRS? – How I wish that wasn’t a typo.
HeHeHE..
i meant IRC
You guys are kidding right? USENET dead? WOW maybe someone should tell that to the rest of the world. Just because we here in the U.S. don’t use it all the time doesn’t mean it is not extra useful in other countries.
Crazy.
Usenet it’s not dead and cannot die. There will always be a lot who will be using it. If you don’t just because you prefer a fancy good looking forum, than go figure, the most biggest forums also have and promote Usenet use.
No pics.
No threading of messages.
And Twitter is limited to 140 characters.
Amazing there was a time when I could use my own editor to author posts (Emacs), I could leap through hundreds and hundreds of messages a day by just hitting space-bar, that messages were available for me to read even when my Unix box was offline (via UUCP), that there was a consistent, federated, identity system (although not secure and spoofable), and that I didn’t have to deal with each “group” (nowadays blog), having their own comment system for replying.
People keep trying to say that Twitter and Facebook replace email, and usenet, but for me, they still haven’t approached the functionality of UUCP/NNTP/SMTP. They’ve taken what was once, an open standard, distributed and federated, and set it up behind a proprietary walled garden, and reduced the level of discourse down to the banal and trivial.
FriendFeed rooms are probably the closest thing we have today beside phpBB, but it’s still too silo’ed for my tastes. For example, with phpBB I end up having to individually log into every BB I’m on, unlike my RN/TRN reader of the past where I just ran it and I could hit space bar to page through every new unread message since last time.
Sure, the usenet is dead, long live the usenet!
While I tend to agree that much of Usenet is being taken over by spammers and porn, Usenet remains a viable communications medium. I routinely wade through the Microsoft supported newsgroups and news servers supported by various third-party organizations to keep up with the latest developments in tools and components.
I also believe Usenet remains far more usable than any of the currently available web-based alternatives. In fact, I’ll even go so far as to say that all web-based alternatives I’ve used are failures because they are neither intuitive nor user friendly. It’s very easy for a Windows client to present a threaded view of a newsgroup with read/unread state, highlighted threads, watched threads, and so forth whereas Web clients just can’t manage the volume of data necessary to maintain such state information between sessions.
Usenet is not dead. I’d rather use Usenet because it is universally accepted and MOST ISPs still carry them.
Besides, most of us who grew up with Usenet pays a usenet provider for better quality and higher retention of newsgroups and posts.
Isn’t Google Groups not only an archive of Usenet but also a publisher/avenue to Usenet? It always seems pretty active when I go in there. Thus making it user friendly for those who aren’t comfortable with a command-line or desktop client approach.
Is IRC dead too? And it is just ghosts chatting away in there right now.
I agree with you, its not dead. Just because there are alternatives that are expanding electronic communication to a broader audience, it doesn’t mean the original audience or subset of the population using these services is in decline.
Usenet lives on because of the dichotomy, ever increasing, between the acceptable and available web and the “other web.” Sure, this “other web,” sometimes and even often contains the pirated, porn, and spammers galore. But Google Groups can only ever be its poor sister cousin, despite forays into Usenet, it forever remains widely known, public, well searched and well, ultimately, well controlled. A topside web that we see, and will continue to see, increasingly morphing into a “commercial product,” searched for by the powers that be for “offenders” who would dare to say, or post, the prohibited and disallowed. Finally, Usenet still remains like a dark ally. You never know what you will find there. Perhaps the locals there (in Usenet) will rough you up a bit. Some of them are kind of seedy and well, kind of wild. Not the people your parents told you to “hang out with.” If you cannot take the heat, I guess you better get out of the fire. And go back to your momma’s web.
Lol. All those scary geeks.