Resurgence is not its way - my god man, have you ever looked at the terror of running the typhoon usenet server software? Nobody wants that job. Rather an astonishing amount of overcomplications...
And I doubt this will lead to a resurgence in Usenet.
Resurgence is not its way - my god man, have you ever looked at the terror of running the typhoon usenet server software? Nobody wants that job. Rather an astonishing amount of overcomplications invented just sending text around. It's 2023, we know things about the internet and code design now. There's this gargantuan open source ecosystem just sitting here, and it's getting pretty good. LLMs may even take some of the grunt work out of code and make it more fun again.
Reddit was the second iteration of usenet. We're still waiting on the third one.
Usenet did not fail, I don't think; it was incredibly successful for a long time, and then got replaced by other things as it's users aged out and new people with different expectations came onto...
Usenet did not fail, I don't think; it was incredibly successful for a long time, and then got replaced by other things as it's users aged out and new people with different expectations came onto the scene. It's okay for things to end, especially when they're not businesses and thus have no employees whose livelihoods depend on them.
I would have titled this "Why Usenet Ended", or "Why Fewer People Use Usenet Today". Otherwise, a good article.
I still miss certain features of Usenet from it heyday. Being able to return to threads and know which parts I read and which I didn’t, which comments were added, etc — it felt like conversations...
I still miss certain features of Usenet from it heyday. Being able to return to threads and know which parts I read and which I didn’t, which comments were added, etc — it felt like conversations were meaningful and long running rather than just something that you drop into, leave a comment, and only return if a notification of a reply reminded you to come back. Perhaps part of that was due to the fact that there were far fewer of us using the Internet at the time, making the pace of conversations a bit slower. Modern discussion sites all feel like they feed the short attention span in comparison, though some of the actual forum sites still have that feel — one site that I use has a conversation thread that has been going on for over 10 years now.
Reddit Gold will highlight new comments. I only know that because someone asked Reddit Enhancement Suite to add the same feature, and the devs have a rule against stepping on the toes of Gold.
Reddit Gold will highlight new comments. I only know that because someone asked Reddit Enhancement Suite to add the same feature, and the devs have a rule against stepping on the toes of Gold.
RES does have a that feature though, or at least on that is effectively the same. I get a popup notification asking if I want to hide already read comments when I return to a thread.
RES does have a that feature though, or at least on that is effectively the same. I get a popup notification asking if I want to hide already read comments when I return to a thread.
Yeah, I’ve seen that as I had gold for a few years since I’d previously purchased Alien Blue. They gave everybody who owned the app at acquisition a few years of Gold
Yeah, I’ve seen that as I had gold for a few years since I’d previously purchased Alien Blue. They gave everybody who owned the app at acquisition a few years of Gold
Usenet failed because of two things: People moved onto webforums, and spam. Webforums were more focused, and they were the new thing. They did the same essential thing that Usenet did, and sites...
Usenet failed because of two things: People moved onto webforums, and spam.
Webforums were more focused, and they were the new thing. They did the same essential thing that Usenet did, and sites like reddit are the same. People move on to new things.
Spam killed what the declining userbase left behind. On some of the ones that I used to post in, at least 50% of the posts were spam when I stopped using them.
As to the looks, people will post where the people are, even if the interface is garbage. If there are people posting interesting things, they will stick around. And ease of use is kind of a red herring. News readers were widely available that took care of all the back end stuff. Web browsers used to include a news reader.
The failing of many reminiscences of Usenet is that they're entirely or largely from a user perspective. What's forgotten is that someone needed to host newsgroups, and that that prospect became...
Exemplary
The failing of many reminiscences of Usenet is that they're entirely or largely from a user perspective. What's forgotten is that someone needed to host newsgroups, and that that prospect became increasingly untenable.
Usenet died a death of a thousand cuts, though I'd argue four were the deepest and most lethal:
It got spammed to death.
It lost control over its culture, and that culture was crucial to its functioning.
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.
There was no viable business model for providing the service.
All of those are significant, but I would (and did) argue that points 3 & 4 were the final nails in the coffin. Anti-spam measures and tightly-curated / moderated newsgroups could survive despite the spam, but with firms willing to brave the very real legal and financial risks, and without any other viable financial support, Usenet fell to a mix of mailing lists and early online blogging / forum software (phpBB, Slashdot, and others).
There've been several attempts to revise or update Usnet (most notably Usenet II),. Those ... have also failed to take hold. (Though in fairness: social media is extremely fickle, many apparently well-structured, and occasionally well-capitalised, attempts have similarly foundered, and the limelite often moves on with time.) Gaining traction and viability is a mix of luck, timing, and execution (mostly getting out of your own way).
Reddit can be seen as a response to points 1, 3, and 4. Reddit offers reasonably good spam defences, it has evolved protections against legally-problematic content (with some large bumps along the way), and it's attempting to develop advertising as a business angle. And has had some success at all of these.
There were other factors as well. One of the more significant, and a challenge for any client-mediated (as opposed to server-based) protocol is that different client behaviours matter and may give rise to incompatibiilties.
Where I witnessed this most glaringly was in email. During the 1990s I participated in a technical discussion where participants joined from Unix, Vax, Mainframe, and PC systems (and possibly others). Simple reply-acknowledgement and quoting practices differed widely and often clashed badly. I don't recall if Microsoft's email platform at the time (this pre-dated Outlook) clashed with Unix conventions, but hot holy hell did IBM's Lotus Notes Mail. And it was Annoying As Heck.
Usenet ... didn't seem to get bitten by this too badly, or at least not until Web-based gateways to Usenet became commonplace. Though, come to think of it, email gateways also existed, and that mailing list was mirrored to a Usenet group, so yeah...
The other factor of course was the emergence of more centralised alternatives, almost all Web based, to Usenet. By the late 1990s, phpBB and similar online fora were becoming the centre of discussions, and community sites such as Slashdot emerged. Those in significant part acted on the user-side of the equation. Where Usenet itself was increasingly a wasteland and feeds were hard to find, Web fora were easy, no-installation (the first SaaS models), and contained noxious behaviours far more effectively.
But the real focus is on the business case: if there's no profit, and unlimited downside risk, commercial enterprise will flee, at which point widespread usage becomes highly improbable. Distributed protocols and networks (Mastodon, the Fediverse, etc.) should keep this in mind. A possible alternative is to follow Usenet's initial foundation: independent institutions (e.g., higher education), but that seems at best a limited and niche category.
As others have noted, spam killed Usenet pretty heavily. The spam became worse over time until it was too much. By this point, plenty of web forums were around, Slashdot was already up as one of...
As others have noted, spam killed Usenet pretty heavily. The spam became worse over time until it was too much. By this point, plenty of web forums were around, Slashdot was already up as one of the early central hubs for mostly tech talk. It was time to move on.
Amarok's point of Reddit being the second coming of Usenet is spot on. The joke of "there's a subreddit for everything" is pretty accurate. That we're waiting on Usenet 3.0 is also true. That said, let's think about history and how things have gone with forums. I'm expecting Usenet 3.0 to be some time. We've gone through cycles of expansion of forums followed by consolidation. Usenet and Reddit were obviously the two largest consolidations and Reddit's held that for a good while. Seems like we're already expanding a bit and as people change, some will move on. We'll probably have to go through a round of expansion like with did with the start of the internet and the early web forums before we see our Usenet 3.0.
Resurgence is not its way - my god man, have you ever looked at the terror of running the typhoon usenet server software? Nobody wants that job. Rather an astonishing amount of overcomplications invented just sending text around. It's 2023, we know things about the internet and code design now. There's this gargantuan open source ecosystem just sitting here, and it's getting pretty good. LLMs may even take some of the grunt work out of code and make it more fun again.
Reddit was the second iteration of usenet. We're still waiting on the third one.
Usenet did not fail, I don't think; it was incredibly successful for a long time, and then got replaced by other things as it's users aged out and new people with different expectations came onto the scene. It's okay for things to end, especially when they're not businesses and thus have no employees whose livelihoods depend on them.
I would have titled this "Why Usenet Ended", or "Why Fewer People Use Usenet Today". Otherwise, a good article.
I still miss certain features of Usenet from it heyday. Being able to return to threads and know which parts I read and which I didn’t, which comments were added, etc — it felt like conversations were meaningful and long running rather than just something that you drop into, leave a comment, and only return if a notification of a reply reminded you to come back. Perhaps part of that was due to the fact that there were far fewer of us using the Internet at the time, making the pace of conversations a bit slower. Modern discussion sites all feel like they feed the short attention span in comparison, though some of the actual forum sites still have that feel — one site that I use has a conversation thread that has been going on for over 10 years now.
Reddit Gold will highlight new comments. I only know that because someone asked Reddit Enhancement Suite to add the same feature, and the devs have a rule against stepping on the toes of Gold.
RES does have a that feature though, or at least on that is effectively the same. I get a popup notification asking if I want to hide already read comments when I return to a thread.
Yeah, I’ve seen that as I had gold for a few years since I’d previously purchased Alien Blue. They gave everybody who owned the app at acquisition a few years of Gold
Usenet failed because of two things: People moved onto webforums, and spam.
Webforums were more focused, and they were the new thing. They did the same essential thing that Usenet did, and sites like reddit are the same. People move on to new things.
Spam killed what the declining userbase left behind. On some of the ones that I used to post in, at least 50% of the posts were spam when I stopped using them.
As to the looks, people will post where the people are, even if the interface is garbage. If there are people posting interesting things, they will stick around. And ease of use is kind of a red herring. News readers were widely available that took care of all the back end stuff. Web browsers used to include a news reader.
The failing of many reminiscences of Usenet is that they're entirely or largely from a user perspective. What's forgotten is that someone needed to host newsgroups, and that that prospect became increasingly untenable.
Usenet died a death of a thousand cuts, though I'd argue four were the deepest and most lethal:
It got spammed to death.
It lost control over its culture, and that culture was crucial to its functioning.
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.
There was no viable business model for providing the service.
See: https://old.reddit.com/r/dredmorbius/comments/3c3xyu/why_usenet_died/
All of those are significant, but I would (and did) argue that points 3 & 4 were the final nails in the coffin. Anti-spam measures and tightly-curated / moderated newsgroups could survive despite the spam, but with firms willing to brave the very real legal and financial risks, and without any other viable financial support, Usenet fell to a mix of mailing lists and early online blogging / forum software (phpBB, Slashdot, and others).
There've been several attempts to revise or update Usnet (most notably Usenet II),. Those ... have also failed to take hold. (Though in fairness: social media is extremely fickle, many apparently well-structured, and occasionally well-capitalised, attempts have similarly foundered, and the limelite often moves on with time.) Gaining traction and viability is a mix of luck, timing, and execution (mostly getting out of your own way).
Reddit can be seen as a response to points 1, 3, and 4. Reddit offers reasonably good spam defences, it has evolved protections against legally-problematic content (with some large bumps along the way), and it's attempting to develop advertising as a business angle. And has had some success at all of these.
There were other factors as well. One of the more significant, and a challenge for any client-mediated (as opposed to server-based) protocol is that different client behaviours matter and may give rise to incompatibiilties.
Where I witnessed this most glaringly was in email. During the 1990s I participated in a technical discussion where participants joined from Unix, Vax, Mainframe, and PC systems (and possibly others). Simple reply-acknowledgement and quoting practices differed widely and often clashed badly. I don't recall if Microsoft's email platform at the time (this pre-dated Outlook) clashed with Unix conventions, but hot holy hell did IBM's Lotus Notes Mail. And it was Annoying As Heck.
Usenet ... didn't seem to get bitten by this too badly, or at least not until Web-based gateways to Usenet became commonplace. Though, come to think of it, email gateways also existed, and that mailing list was mirrored to a Usenet group, so yeah...
The other factor of course was the emergence of more centralised alternatives, almost all Web based, to Usenet. By the late 1990s, phpBB and similar online fora were becoming the centre of discussions, and community sites such as Slashdot emerged. Those in significant part acted on the user-side of the equation. Where Usenet itself was increasingly a wasteland and feeds were hard to find, Web fora were easy, no-installation (the first SaaS models), and contained noxious behaviours far more effectively.
But the real focus is on the business case: if there's no profit, and unlimited downside risk, commercial enterprise will flee, at which point widespread usage becomes highly improbable. Distributed protocols and networks (Mastodon, the Fediverse, etc.) should keep this in mind. A possible alternative is to follow Usenet's initial foundation: independent institutions (e.g., higher education), but that seems at best a limited and niche category.
tptacek at HN largely validates my understanding of the provider-side in this comment: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36200045.
As others have noted, spam killed Usenet pretty heavily. The spam became worse over time until it was too much. By this point, plenty of web forums were around, Slashdot was already up as one of the early central hubs for mostly tech talk. It was time to move on.
Amarok's point of Reddit being the second coming of Usenet is spot on. The joke of "there's a subreddit for everything" is pretty accurate. That we're waiting on Usenet 3.0 is also true. That said, let's think about history and how things have gone with forums. I'm expecting Usenet 3.0 to be some time. We've gone through cycles of expansion of forums followed by consolidation. Usenet and Reddit were obviously the two largest consolidations and Reddit's held that for a good while. Seems like we're already expanding a bit and as people change, some will move on. We'll probably have to go through a round of expansion like with did with the start of the internet and the early web forums before we see our Usenet 3.0.