Re: 2013, the Year of Usenet by Randall Wood

[Boolworm Cowboy]

2013, the Year of Usenet
Posted by Randall Wood on Wednesday, December 4. 2013

http://www.therandymon.com/index.php?/244-2013,-the-Year-of-Usenet.html

2013 was the year of Usenet. For me, at least. And here's what I
learned.

You might not even remember Usenet. What for my generation was a
glimpse of the amazing power of the Internet isn't even known to the
new generation of Web 2.0 youngsters: if this article is too long for
you, this is the tl;dr conclusion: the Internet is generational, and
the new generation isn't better, it's just different.

Usenet allowed you total anonymity, which was its strongest and
weakest characteristic. Enforced anonymity allowed anyone to discuss
anything, and if one "personality" got ruined, you could create
another one and start over. A whole generation associated the Internet
with the ability to live a second life under an assumed identity. Once
you got used to it, it was hard to imagine collaborating online in any
other way.

These days, Usenet is dead, they say, in near unison. It made the list
of "Detroits of the Internet" and your average 25 year old Netizen has
no idea it ever existed. But when it came time to build a forum for
the Dictator's Handbook, I decided to leverage Usenet technology
anyway. Its original strengths remain a benefit to anyone interested
in discussing tyrannical governments: anonymity, replication across
multiple servers so there's no single "website" to be blocked, low
bandwidth permitting easy access even from 3G cellphones or dial up,
and no single point of ownership.

I first built an INN server with no peering, so posts stayed local.
Then I opened it up as a new hierarchy and peered with other servers
to let the posts actually distribute across Usenet. Then I subscribed
to a for-pay Usenet server and poked around looking for places to
advertise the dictator hierarchy.

Usenet is best enjoyed through a provider that applies rigorous spam
filters (I use Individual.net). Arguably, anonymous spammers ruined
Usenet years ago, shitting in the pool until it was too polluted to
visit anymore. Good filters fix the problem, but did so too late to
save Usenet as a platform. I found a couple of local sites with a lot
of activity by a dedicated core of Usenet fans, but I found many more
where the most recent post was ages ago, and consisted of someone
asking if the group was alive or dead. And there was tons of
Detroit-style wasteland, particularly in the Alt hierarchy, where new
groups were created with relative freedom and then abandoned. Then,
the distributed nature of Usenet made it impossible to collectively
delete those groups.

Usenet enjoyed a brief resurgence distributing binaries - images,
video, warez - but even that era faded when the major ISPs stopped
carrying Usenet for fear of pedophiliac stuff (and its legal
ramifications) or due to dropping use. But even there alternative
sites do the job far better: Imgur and Reddit come to mind. Web forums
overtook Usenet a decade ago: to the user it was convenient to stay in
a browser, and that in turn facilitated images and eventually flash
video and the rest. But more importantly, because each forum had an
owner they were less prone to Usenet's tragedy of the commons in which
the communal sense of the platform led to the equivalent of graffiti
and smashed swing-sets in the community park. But web forums suffered
many of the same ills, and the spammers learned how to fine-tune
scripts to robo-post their dreck all over PHP-run forums as well.

Finally, web forums mostly succumbed to Facebook, which imposed the
rule of real names in discussion. And this led to a debate with no
clear answer: do real names lead to better quality conversation? I'm
not sure it does, and I'm absolutely convinced it's the wrong way to
stimulate discussion about dictatorships and autocratic leaders. In
fact, the autocrats have learned to mine and benefit from Facebook in
ways thought impossible in more naive days. And that led me back to
the beginning of internet communication - Usenet - with a renewed
appreciation that goes beyond simple nostalgia. Seems there's still a
place for it in the world.

So is Usenet a wasteland? Not totally, but it's pretty bleak out
there. Too many newsgroups are emaciated shadows of their former
selves. Maybe it's my generation, but I find the ability to remain
anonymous to be essential. And I love the architecture and
philosophical underpinnings of the Usenet platform. But that
philosophy exposed an ugly side of humanity, for what it's worth.
Lastly, maybe it's just my generation, that finds elegance in text
forums distributed in a way you can download the messages and respond
over the luxury of a darkened room, a hot coffee, and a keyboard. It's
an experience the mobile Internet generation may never understand.

[Robert Miles]

On 6/10/2014 7:37 AM, Boolworm Cowboy wrote:
> 2013, the Year of Usenet
> Posted by Randall Wood on Wednesday, December 4. 2013
>
> http://www.therandymon.com/index.php?/244-2013,-the-Year-of-Usenet.html

I've found a way that is likely to extend the life of the Usenet:

Make the NoCeM software available for operating systems other than
Linux (and possibly UNIX). It hides most of the spam, regardless of
which news server it was posted from.

I tried to do this; I was able to download the source code and try
to compile it under Windows. However, the compile failed - one of
the files that should have been included was missing.

Making it easier to install newsreaders would also help.

[Boolworm Cowboy]

Well, it also help if they cleaned out the dead newsgroups. I find mountains of newsgroups with outdated messages, and that's why people feel. USENET
is dead. When you run across messages from 1995, it makes you think USENET is dead.

Regards,

Bookworm Cowboy
Lakeland, Florida