The purpose for a PAID Usenet provider is for hosting binaries (i.e. piracy). You're paying someone for the bandwidth, and ignore or deal with the DMCA takedown notices. There is little to no reason to have a paid Usenet account just to read or post on pure text forums, and NOT download porn or other pirated content.
That was really one of the two things that killed Usenet in the 2000's. One was the rise of phpBB forums, and then Reddit. The other was the seediness of the Usenet binaries scene. As the "legit" users migrated to web-based forums, the pirates made up a larger and larger portion of those staying behind, and eventually the network effort flowed in reverse until critical mass was lost.
I deeply miss that old Usenet culture of the 1990's. In comparison to HN and especially Reddit, Usenet was far less reverent, frumpy, and up-its-own-ass politically and socially. At the same time, it's impossible to try to recreate that on a forum today, without it breaking down into nothing but alt-right hate speech. The 1990's was a fun and quirky little period of Internet sanity, made possible only by how small and outside the mainstream the Internet still was.
This may reflect the state today, but back in the late 90's and early 00's, it was not. Even for the pure text forums, you had to pay someone. In the earlier days it was included in the ISP package, so you wouldn't see the costs. Or via your university. But I distinctly remember when my university dropped USENET lots of people complained because they couldn't get free access elsewhere.
For me: I used BBS's before I used USENET. BBS groups ("conferences") were much more civil, and had much better discourse. The moderation was very effective. When I moved to USENET, it was quite chaotic by comparison. And then with the onset of spam, I went elsewhere.
Unless they dropped it _really_ early, there was dejanews/google groups, surely?
Google Groups's interface sucks by comparison.
I played a few games of Tradewars on one of these a while ago. It sure brought back the days of being a sysop of my local BBS growing up.
Everyone is playing LORD (Legend Of the Red Dragon) there.
Reddit is, I think, a better version of Usenet culture than the original.
Reddit is slow, censored, and for-profit. How could that possibly be better than what we used to have? You still get spam, bots, and flame wars, but you also have a needless popularity contest with votes and mods.
But also: message boards don't exist on a simple spectrum of "free" to "censored". There are lots of other considerations. I gave one downthread to someone who suggested newsreaders had a better UX than Reddit: that's taking for granted really basic things, like search, that were space alien tech on Usenet.
Another thing people who never used Usenet but idealize it are missing as a feature is "all the messages showing up for everybody", which is not nearly as straightforward a feature as Reddit and HN make it seem. This is something Mastodon users are discovering right now, and however annoying it is to run a single-user Mastodon server and deal with message threading, it was 10x worse on Usenet.
Also, Usenet was very much censored, in the sense that most sites would not even think about carrying most groups. In particular, alt.* and *.binaries.* would be unavailable pretty much anywhere that had "cost of bandwidth" or "reputation" concerns.
And if you repeatedly posted abusive content to any Usenet group, you can bet that your account and/or entire site would be "cancelled" from the network pretty quickly by the infamous "Usenet cabal" (see https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Backbone_cabal). Not to mention that Usenet was the entire origin for the concept of the "killfile".
Finally, the most popular Usenet hubs (say, UUnet) were very much for-profit...
Right, but that was not due to nntp, it was due to the bandwidth economics of the times. I ran a small site that only connected once a day when the phone call was cheaper. But if you have a permanent connection largely unconstrained on bandwidth, it'll be faster.
> This may, incidentally, help to explain why discourse on Usenet was generally considered to be superior to that, say, on Twitter.
But yes, that as well. When a response takes at least 2 days, there is an incentive to write well and thoroughly. The instant response chat-type forums of today encourage meaningless ping-pong responses.
> Also, Usenet was very much censored, in the sense that most sites would not even think about carrying most groups
This is a very fundamental difference between a distributed ecosystem like usenet and a centralized walled garden. A specific usenet site, as you say, might choose to not carry certain newsgroups. That is local control, not usenet censorship. Usenet as a whole still distributes it. If you want access you can just switch to a different usenet provider. You can also run your own provider! That's what makes it so wonderful. You are in control, not some single central site. There is no central site.
No, but that's mostly because NNTP yet had to be invented (RFC977 is from 1986, a good 6 years after Usenet started, and was mostly used for client access, not backbone propagation, which was usually 'whatever cnews does' over UUCP).
> This is a very fundamental difference between a distributed ecosystem like usenet and a centralized walled garden.
Yet much closer to 'censorship' than whatever goes on at your typical walled garden today. The whole idea that Usenet was some sort of egalitarian free-for-all is just wrong: if you stepped out of line, you would lose your soapbox fast, often by an entire group/hierarchy/site being cut off.
But even if it did not get that far, the last response you would ever get on a group being plonk (the sound of being added to a killfile, often side-wide) was common. Besides that, *.moderated groups were also a thing, where messages would only be published upon manual approval from the group owners.
I started on usenet in the late 80s, so my worldview always had NNTP.
> Yet much closer to 'censorship' than whatever goes on at your typical walled garden today.
This is not true at any level. Again, in a walled garden there is only one master, it's in or out, you are in or out.
Usenet is completely distributed, there is no center. Each site and each person can choose to not distribute or see certain things, but that has no influence outside their sphere of control. My site might no carry a given group, but many others do so I have choices. I might plonk you, but everyone else in the world sees your posts.
<http://article.olduse.net/[email protected]>
This would mean that part of the bang path for Bob Kummerfeld's email address was in fact a 747: "!sdchema!sydney!bob"
If the only people who can join are those who are passionate enough to read a lot of documentation and jump through a lot of hoops, yeah, the quality of discourse will be better.
Heck even /. Had better trolls in the day than what reddit has now.
P.S. For many Usenet groups, you don't need to pay anything to get access.
Used the "comp.*" heirarchy mostly, discussing technical topics and answering questions - in 1996, a publisher (Wiley!) sent me a box of books - apparently I had helped one of their authors and they wanted to thank me.
On-one-hand, I would like to try it again - OTOH, I think spam and/or bots would overwhelm it to the point of uselessness.
I'm not sure what an "indexer" is, such that you'd need to subscribe to it; is that some kind of online service like Deja News? I used to just download everything that appeared on the handful of groups that interested me, and store it locally. Then I could do local searches.
That "store locally" capability wasn't some bag of bash scripts I cobbled together; I thought all newsreaders could do that natively.
Text-only newsgroup servers are free. You only need to use/pay for indexers if you’re scouring many groups for specific keywords.
If you’re subscribing to specific text groups you don’t need to search an index for the whole net. You can just scroll to the top and read what you missed since last session
The barrier of entry is learning how to use a piece of software like Thunderbird. It’s no larger than email. If you figured that one out, you can figure out newsgroups too.
I remember when everyone was deriding “the internet” and “email” as being too cumbersome for an “average person” to figure out, having too many “hoops” to jump through to use it.
Thanks for the nostalgia, wackget
Honestly it might be worth resurrecting the protocol to run your own Usenet web UI just for weekend funsies.
Anyway, this is probably an even higher hoop to jump through.
When Usenet was big, you didn't need a paid subscription. Almost every ISP included it for free.
I never heard of an indexer.
Client software came with your operating system, or it was built in to your e-mail client, or you could download for free.
As for today — yes, how awful that you might have to pay for something. Completely terrible. It might even be half the price of a cup of coffee. Completely unacceptable to have to give someone money for something of value. Terrible.
Much better to lock oneself inside the mink-lined, free, censored, AI-curated cages of the big data corps. Not thinking is always so much easier and more comfortable than thinking.
https://blog.panic.com/unison-2/ https://panic.com/blog/the-future-of-unison/
https://www.astraweb.com is the best provider I know
A lot of the early ISPs, 1993-early 2000s, had free nntp/usenet services. The "friction" of using usenet was not any greater that the friction of launching an email client, an ftp or gopher session, or launching Mosaic.
At the time there were many easy-to-use featureful nntp clients across most computing platforms. I remember liking MT-Newswatcher quite a bit as well as Nuntius. The UI of Newswatcher was not too different from an email client or perhaps directory browser.
Screenshots from MT-Newswatcher
https://smfr.org/mtnw/screenshots.htmlReally? I'm old enough to remember when Google bought Deja, and with it suddenly came the ability to search the entire Usenet archive going back to its inception, through the Google Groups interface. Being able to search the archives of comp.lang.whatever was a great educational and productivity booster, like Stackoverflow before SO.
> You need a paid (!) subscription
30 years ago (and I'd say even 20 years ago) every ISP had their own usenet feed just like they had their own email server. It's only fairly recently this has become a bit of a barrier (although as many have noted in this discussion, free ones exist so not much of a barrier). My ISP discontinued their usenet server in 2016, fairly recently.
Installing a client is one package-install command away, not exactly a barrier.
And yeah, the best part about usenet was that there were fewer "average people" on there. The Internet was great before AoL connected everybody else to it ;)
Tell us that you didn't RTFA without saying that you didn't RTFA.
By the way, I wrote the article.
If you've been around since before Google as you claim, you should know to RTFM and RTFA.
You need a paid (!) subscription to a provider, potentially a subscription to an indexer, plus client software. All of this to access what is essentially a pure text forum.
Frankly I am not interested in jumping through hoops to access something which an "average person" would have no hope in hell of figuring out. Maybe that's part of the attraction, that only dedicated geeks will use it?