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RichardKennaway comments on Open Thread April 8 - April 14 2014 - Less Wrong Discussion
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Spam started on Usenet. The Canter & Siegel visa spam! The anatomically correct chocolate heart! Ah, memories.
So yes, a lot of it was overrun by spam for a while, but countermeasures were developed, and eventually the spam was brought down to the level we see today. My impression is that Usenet faded because blogging and web forums were invented, and most people voted with their feet. And then public access to the Internet exploded, the general public never even knew there was such a thing, and USENET faded into an obscure backwater of old-timers, which has probably contributed to it lingering on for as long as it has, under the benign neglect of Google and whatever sysadmins still run nntp servers. I've just looked into rec.arts.sf.fandom and it's still going, but I recognise nearly all of the posters' names, which implies that it's the same people as it was years ago, perhaps thinned by age. I've nothing against them, but I'm not going back.
Is USENET still USENET, even? That is, are there still nntp servers propagating the messages to "thousands of machines throughout the entire civilized world"? Or does everyone go to Google Groups to use it?
USENET developed as it did because of the technological and social environment of the time, and faded when that environment changed. No-one would invent it today, except in the form of a heavily decentralised and encrypted medium for secret discussion.
Yes, it's still possible to use Usenet independent of GG.
For example, in the early 2000s, I was doing a lot of reading of early Web/Internet sociology, nerd culture, etc, got very curious about what Usenet was really like (I understood all the basics and a lot of details like scoring files, but there's nothing like using something to get a feel for it) and discovered my local ISP had a NNTP server up for a decent chunk of Usenet (the main omission being the bin hierarchy). A few hours of meddling with Thunderbird and later, mutt...
It worked reasonably well and I understood why it was so dominant in its day, but spam was still a big problem compared to regular mailing lists and if my ISP didn't have a server up, I'm not sure how I would have gotten onto Usenet at all - there are few free servers these days.
Still works pretty well for that. A fascinating example from 2005+: https://web.archive.org/web/20130119025623/http://dee.su/uploads/baal.html
Indeed. I regularly participate in some groups. While just a shadow of its former self, USENET (the text part, never mind the binary groups – those are much used for ahem, redistribution of multimedia content) is still alive and certain groups are rather vibrant.
While the number of ISPs and universities that carry USENET declined almost to zero, several public news servers (aioe, ethernal-september) moved to fill this niche.
What's the relationship between Usenet and Google Groups nowadays? I thought that at some point Google rebadged much of Usenet forums as Google Groups?
It's something like that. As I understand it, Google Groups runs thousands of normal email mailing lists with no connection to Usenet, but it also offers a bidirectional gateway to Usenet - GG'll show Usenet posts that it can download or which it has copies of in its huge archive, and it'll let GG users post to Usenet as well.
So, basically, Google forked Usenet? X-)
'Extend, Embrace, Extinguish.'
For anyone who has never read USENET and is wondering what it was, I could say it was a completely decentralised collection of discussion forums in which every message posted was automatically replicated to every other participating machine, with nobody in charge of the whole thing, because before the web and broadband and instant global communications that was the only way you could implement a global discussion forum.
But that isn't what it was.
This is what it was.
The technology is still there, still running, but like an aged relative with a glorious career now over, it's not what it was.
One sad minor consequence is that A Fire Upon The Deep is less funny and interesting now that most/all new readers will have no personal experience with Usenet.