2. It lost control over its culture, and that culture was crucial to its functioning.
3. It was too problematic for ISPs (or others) to provide ready access to it: spam, harassment, child pornography, and copyright violations all posed massive concerns.
4. There was no viable business model for providing the service.
<https://web.archive.org/web/20230603024330/https://old.reddi...>
(I'm author of that piece. It seems to hold up pretty well with insiders' views, e.g., <https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36200045>. That last link is from an earlier discussion on Usenet's demise, of which there are several in HN history: <https://hn.algolia.com/?q=usenet>)
- it was slow
- it wasn't consistent; not unusual that thread replies would be out of order
- it was text only (essentially)
- posting and downloading binary files was even slower and cumbersome)
Yes, it was highly exclusive and exclusionary, and there were definitely toxic elements to the culture, but it wasn't entirely lacking in control or discipline as occurred later.
Note that Usenet did have some effective spam controls ("Cancelmoose", the Lumber Cabal, etc.), but overall effectiveness was limited by virtue of the distributed and noncentralised nature of the protocol, as well as the lack of any true participant authentication.
Slashdot was harshing on Usenet long before Reddit was, and various online forums (as you mention) before that.
1. The clients were kind of a pain for anyone but comp.sci nerds
2. It was butt ugly. Web forums killed it, because you could make them pretty
3. Not only spam, but the troll bots just destroyed everything. I can't remember why exactly this started happening, but there were a dedicated pool of assholes spamming Usenet groups they didn't like with garbage or vile crap posing as regular contributors of the groups. When you searched for posts by someone, the first 100 pages were from these troll bots
News clients were built into most email clients and were pretty user friendly. I dont think you needed to be a nerd to use it. Web forums were also pretty ugly in the late 90s.
I think most of the ISPs that I used either had a setup program that configured it automatically along with mail/dns, or provided clear instructions on how to set it up manually.
I may be in the minority, but I actually liked Outlook Express.
It was insecure, there was no trust model and no encryption, so no proof of authorship, no proof of server identity.
It was too public. Not everyone wants their conversations out in the open.
Not widely adopted, of course.
(To some extent, there was a natural response in that anyone could cancel anything, although those ended up adding authentication. At one point people estimated that a third of traffic was spam and another third was "spam cancels".)
I think that the issue was that the enforcement mechanisms were largely social, so they broke down when it grew too large, especially when ISPs and others started running servers without engaging in the community.
Precisely. Usenet's "regulars" back in those days were generally IT staffers, with perhaps a professor or three, at any given school, or were IT staffers running news servers at their companies. The regular September flood of new kids discovering Usenet at school was annoying, but manageable.
Then the gates were thrown open wide, and netiquette got crushed under the weight of the general public. Once the crooks and con artists discovered it, it was the beginning of the end.
Transitions aren't instantaneous, and aren't always clearly visible at the time. (Look at, say, the present ... evolution ... of Birdsite, The Front Page of the Internet, and the StackExchange empire.) But in retrospect inflection points become more clear.
(This is pretty much a constant in all of history, with eras, transitions, and labeling of these coming years, occasionally centuries, after the events themselves.)
The Eternal September was one of a growing onslaught of insults to Usenet which it ultimately succumbed to. Not instantly, but in time, and inevitably.
Web crawlers indexed online forums too, so you could find the content right away through the same search engine instead of having to search the BBS discussions for hours or post a request on the local BBS and wait (days) for replies. Your technically illiterate aunt could browse the search results for posts containing the recipes she wanted from a number of disparate forums, and choose to read anonymously (and print out) or login and contribute. All you need is an email address.
This accessibility and semi-transparency created a major shift in where you go for content, effectively forcing the tech literate to follow suit as well. It fits in the general trend of democratizing the internet, and IMO was a good thing for tech. (I blame the monetizing and large commercial entities for the current state of fragmentation.)
I still login to a local BBS about once a year to say hello. Although I have a shell account now so I don't need to telnet over the net. It's still very alternative and hacker friendly.
Properly configured, these news readers feel just like email clients, with threading and signatures and all that. Yes, the configuration part is some work but you only have to do it once and then you’re set up for all of Usenet. With forums you have to find and create an account separately for each one.
NNTP worked great with dialup. You could connect and download all the new content since the last time you were online and catch-up offline without blocking the phone line. The clients were designed to work both in both online and offline mode
A bunch of pre 90s data caches got uplifted and then silently seemed to vanish. I was a box admin in the UK in the early 80s and my honey-danber database records were online for a while in the maps Usenet group. They're not responding to search any more.
But within a few years Google stopped caring about it entirely.
From my limited understanding, it's not "distributed" as you think
It's "distributed" among ISPs. It's like one of the [email protected] free emails,
To run a usenet server, you need a server with public IP with TCP port 119 open. It's like running your own email service.
This created a market for NNTP servers that provided full content for a monthly fee and sometimes even with a spam filter
AOL/compuserve/prodigy/whatever offered easy to use and understand UXs which drew a large crowd, and their large crowd was in a fairly walled off portion of the internet using foreign protocols and systems -- so they drew in their friends and so on.
same kinda thing fb does, among others, now.
when the crowd/discussion moved elsewhere that was that.
I think usenet saw a bit of a resurgence in popularity due to piracy, but the discussion has never really came back.
Usenet was great while it was a niche thing and before the advent of spam. It was distributed in the sense that most ISPs would run a server and they would mirror messages between them. You'd use your mail client to talk to your ISP's server, and messages would be like emails, but threaded somewhat like a forum. Binary files were usually uuencoded and often split across multiple chunks.
Unlike solutions run by centralised entities, it really did feel like a public square, but your ISP could and often did decide which groups they would carry. On the flip-side your ISP or university could carry its own groups which weren't replicated out to the wider internet, for local discussion.
It died for a few reasons but there were a few main reasons and mainest of those (lol) was that spammers realised they could flood it with their tripe for almost no cost, all actual conversation just got drowned out pretty fast.
It had an undeath (maybe still does?) as a way to distribute pirated material, mostly because 'normies' didn't know about it and it would fly under the radar. All the movies on torrent sites would come from groups releasing them on usenet. I guess these particular users weren't affected by spam, and weren't a target for spam because no human was trying to read the groups...
Usenet readers supported plonkfiles; spam management on usenet was easier on Usenet than with email. A GUI Usenet reader let you plonk someone with a single click. Granted, in those days, spammers were less resourceful...
Even if you just offer the ability to have 3rd party clients to your closed system you still have the problem of distributing new features, that's why there's only 1.2 browsers now
Yggdrasil is one example of this although it is an 'overlay' and not a direct protocol replacement. https://yggdrasil-network.github.io
However, yes it was theoretically possible to have a route between two NNTP servers that wasn't over a BGP-routed chunk of internet but was "something else". Including posting a tape.
But whenever people meet in unmoderated digital world, all sorts of other toxic people follow -- spammers, trolls, etc. People who don't care about the community or personal exchanges.
This makes the place toxic and unpalatable to the ones who started it and so the real people just leave and the place dies.
The real question would be why did those forums mostly died nowadays? I don't have a definite answer, but from the user viewpoints:
- Centralised services had the benefit of only creating one account (remember password managers were uncommon! People were advised only to create accounts of websites they would trust, to avoid leaking their passwords they often re-used)
- More modern UI and the "new factor"/hype definitely helped people moving
Let's not forget the move was also sometimes initiated by the webmasters, who did not want to pay and administrate it forever (Canonical example being a teenager spawning a forum about one of your hobby, then still maintaining it a decade later while having lost all interest)
In particular it died because whatever moderation it had (almost none TBH) was no barrier to bad actors, so it drowned in spam and troll posts.
Then the centralized social platforms took over with their network effects and moderation paid for from ads.
People like distributed things ideologically but practically speaking they have a ton of drawbacks. It failed because it was outcompeted by centralized solutions that could leverage their centralized power to make a better product (e.g. handle spam among other things). The decentralized aspect also means incentives can become misaligned where people who are paying for it aren't really benefiting or controlling it (i imaging alt.bibaries was not cheap to syndicate)
> follow-up question, what about freenet? Are they the same thing?
No, and generally pretty unrelated.
I keep seeing people wanting to build distributed this and distributed that. According to Wikipedia, usenet was already distributed. Why did it die?
Edit: follow-up question, what about freenet? Are they the same thing? Are they different, compatible, implementations of the same protocol? Are they incompatible but share some properties? Etc