[HN Gopher] Why did Usenet fail?
___________________________________________________________________
Why did Usenet fail?
Author : edent
Score : 134 points
Date : 2023-06-05 11:39 UTC (11 hours ago)
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| sombragris wrote:
| Two points completely unrelated between them:
|
| 1. A large part of the world completely ignored Usenet. ISPs
| began offering Net connectivity in my country in the late 1990s,
| but then no one (IIRC) had an Usenet server or archive; and if
| they had one, it was largely unadvertised. Connecting to a NNTP
| server not offered by your ISP might be doable, but it could be a
| paid-for thing, not very easy and not very reliable. So, too many
| people around the world did not get into their Eternal September.
|
| 2. There are good NNTP clients (and free software ones). Claws
| Mail has good NNTP support and is actively developed, and this is
| just one example.
| webdoodle wrote:
| I enjoy reading old usenet posts of mine. The confident yet naive
| bravado almost makes me feel young again.
| zxcvbn4038 wrote:
| Usenet didn't fail at all, it just went out of fashion after
| Google killed the usenet archive. Honestly, I think if we applied
| everything we've learned about http over the past thirty years
| and applied it to an updated nntp protocol then it would be quite
| formidable.
|
| The biggest issue that never was never resolved was on one hand
| you have the people who don't want people controlling what they
| read and say - and on the other hand you have the jerks that want
| to abuse that. If you've ever logged into a darknet forum and
| someone has uploaded hundreds of autopsy photos anywhere they
| could upload photos except the "autopsy photos" area, then that
| is exactly what used to happen on Usenet. It's probably the same
| guy doing it. Though personally I think having to do the
| occasional bulk delete is worth preserving freedom of expression.
| blakesterz wrote:
| "I should briefly mention Google buying the Deja News archive,
| promising to revitalise Usenet, and then promptly abandoning it.
| Cheers Google. Choogle."
|
| Oh wow, I totally forgot about that. I remember it being a really
| big deal at the time, and now I barely even remember.
| senko wrote:
| It's even worse than that.
|
| Here, Google pulled one from the Microsoft playbook: embrace,
| extend, extinguish.
|
| Google bought DejaNews, rebranded it into Google Groups
| (embrace) and then proceed to Googlify it, making it less and
| less Usenet-y and more and more Google specific (extend), until
| only the Google-specific mailing lists remained (extinguish).
|
| Edit: see
| https://web.archive.org/web/20010226023947/http://groups.goo...
| thrashh wrote:
| Umm according to Wikipedia, Deja News was turning into a
| shopping site, going bankrupt and shutting down the Usenet
| archive.
|
| So Google came in and saved it.
|
| https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Google_Groups#Deja_News
| jghn wrote:
| Yeah. At the time I remember the sentiment being more
| "woah, this is amazing" and less "boo, corporate overlords
| taking over".
| anigbrowl wrote:
| Yeah, and then they let it sink as they have with so many
| other cool things they built.
| bentcorner wrote:
| It certainly smacks of being someone's promo project
| where they moved on to other things after the migration
| and the project fizzled out without leadership.
| senko wrote:
| Google was pretty much considered the "good guys" back
| then. It only started with AdWords a year earlier and was
| barely breaking even at the time. Loong way from
| "corporate overlords".
| jhallenworld wrote:
| It's even worse than that... USENET was one of the places
| that Google used to seed its search engine. Links from USENET
| were high quality links.
|
| It's like reddit as the source for LLMs today.
|
| So Google neglecting USENET could be about preventing
| competitors.
| joshuaissac wrote:
| > Cheers Google. Choogle.
|
| This appears to be inspired by the BBC show 'Look Around You'.
|
| https://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/Look_Around_You
| tiffanyh wrote:
| Didn't Deja become the basis for Google Groups, which still
| remains today.
| logifail wrote:
| > Thirdly was the user interface. Usenet looked dull. In a world
| of animated GIFs and MySpace colour schemes, Usenet didn't even
| have avatar images! Sure, the spartan nature meant that you could
| focus on a conversation - but it didn't feel as modern and
| exciting as the web did
|
| "Modern and exciting" beat "being able to focus on a
| conversation" :(
|
| Being able to focus is right at the top of my list of priorities.
| Surely I'm not the only one?
| giantrobot wrote:
| Claiming you could focus on the conversation with Usenet is
| putting on some rose tinted glasses.
|
| By the late 90s Usenet was well into the Eternal September and
| inundated with spam. Unmoderated groups were a mess. There was
| also just the simple problem of formatting. IIRC Outlook
| Express defaulted to MIME/multipart posts which would cause all
| sorts of weirdness if someone with a text-only client quoted
| them and the OE user replied. Then of course there was the
| issue of top and bottom quoting. Many Usenet clients had truly
| awful UIs so a user could inadvertently quote a message's
| headers in a reply.
|
| Compared to even a simple WWWBoard the experience was often
| lacking in terms of focus.
| jghn wrote:
| I mean, I used `tin` as my newsreader until somewhere between
| 2010-2015. It wasn't quite a hellscape of unusability if one
| was using a text only client.
| giantrobot wrote:
| I should have clarified the _GUI_ newsreaders. I 'd be
| willing to bet a very small amount of money that around
| 2000 the majority of newsreaders in use by real humans (not
| spam bots) were Outlook Express and Netscape.
|
| There were some good GUI newsreaders but Outlook Express
| was a shit show. I remember OE was what my ISP had NNTP
| documentation for and nothing else.
| jghn wrote:
| Yeah, I think Thunderbird was still pretty popular around
| then as well
| edent wrote:
| How can I focus on a threaded conversation if I can't visually
| see the difference between the participants? Quickly looking at
| an avatar is easier than reading an email address.
|
| Having even basic HTML formatting helps lay out a post - which
| makes it easier to concentrate on it. But that was something
| eschewed by most Usenet clients and posters.
|
| Similarly, inline images are great for illustrating a point. I
| don't have to lose focus by clicking on a link and going to
| another tab to see what's being discussed.
| iso1631 wrote:
| > How can I focus on a threaded conversation if I can't
| visually see the difference between the participants? Quickly
| looking at an avatar is easier than reading an email address.
|
| You post this on a threaded discussion forum without avatars,
| one you've frequented for a decade
| lanstin wrote:
| On hacker news I mostly never look at the usernames. It is
| all just hive mind. Unless someone is claiming to have won
| a famous math contest or something. Or if I am really mad
| at a post, I might look for additional context in their
| posting history.
| edent wrote:
| Yes - and I find it rather tedious. Why do you think that
| _every_ other major SN has avatar images? It 's because
| _most_ users find it a better experience.
|
| I also have my own CSS for HN which makes it much more
| pleasant (for me) and I I've started using
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30668137
| johannes1234321 wrote:
| The nice thing about Usenet: It's an open stadard and
| clients could show avatars.
|
| For one simple generic blobs generated based on the
| sender's address, using some service like gravatar or
| X-Face header.
| mr_mitm wrote:
| You could have your Usenet client to the same thing.
| Generate some sort of image out of the email address.
| msla wrote:
| Usenet had avatars: XFaces
|
| https://www.emacswiki.org/emacs/XfacesSupport
|
| I remember them being used by some Usenet posters in the
| 1990s.
| mbreese wrote:
| I would have gone with discoverability/UX. Finding and figuring
| out how to use a Usenet group was a complete pain. Once you'd
| managed the learning curve and found a group that interested
| you, it was great. But you can't beat the discoverability of a
| Google indexed web forum.
| dale_glass wrote:
| There are subjects where the UI matters.
|
| Eg, I don't see the HN UI ever be used for anything graphics
| related, because there's no image embedding.
|
| This is fine for many subjects, but greatly constrains others.
|
| It also has social effects. HN makes usernames very vague
| compared to say, Reddit or Slashdot. Which means that after
| more than 2 years on this site I still don't know any. The site
| is extremely impersonal to me, compared to Reddit where I can
| recognize regulars in some of the subreddits. Whether this is a
| good thing or not varies, but it certainly affects the
| dynamics.
| veave wrote:
| Usernames being vague is a feature. Comments should be judged
| by their content and not by the person who posted them.
|
| Also if you use old reddit usernames in reddit are as
| impersonal as they are here because of no discernible
| avatars.
| pavel_lishin wrote:
| Pseudonymity beats anonymity. People's track records and
| comment history _should_ be a factor when judging what
| someone says, unless we expect every comment to be a
| lengthy thesis.
|
| If I see a comment from someone I know to be a relative
| expert on a field based on my previous interactions with
| them, I _want_ to judge it as more authoritative and
| interesting than a rando who registered two weeks ago and
| has mostly commented "lol".
| maksimur wrote:
| > It also has social effects. HN makes usernames very vague
| compared to say, Reddit or Slashdot. Which means that after
| more than 2 years on this site I still don't know any. The
| site is extremely impersonal to me, compared to Reddit where
| I can recognize regulars in some of the subreddits.
|
| I actually like this approach as it reduces the issue of some
| users dominating the conversation, thereby overshadowing
| others. I think it's essential to foster a level playing
| field for everyone when discussing topics of interest.
| amadeuspagel wrote:
| As HN's success shows, there's a significant niche for text-
| only forums.
| qzx_pierri wrote:
| You're definitely not the only one. I also endorse the idea of
| function over form, because catering to the masses has
| historically stood adjacent to 'lowering the bar' (choose any
| metric for this hypothetical).
|
| Every place that doesn't cater to the masses seems to always be
| a higher quality community.
|
| Slightly off topic, but dang, if you're reading this, I
| recommend making HN invite only for a month or two after the
| incoming reddit fiasco in July 1st. A ton of people on the
| major subreddits are already parroting things like "Just go to
| HN, it's basically the new reddit".
|
| I don't think I'm making a hot take when I say reddit has a
| pretty awful community outside of the tech focused subs. But
| maybe I'm too concerned - I'm just worried that one of the last
| comfy parts of the internet will be invaded by plebs and emoji
| spammers.
| Kye wrote:
| There are plenty of good subreddits outside tech.
| Unfortunately, telling anyone about them risks ruining them
| due to how easy it is for a subreddit to blow up.
| notfried wrote:
| I know until at least recently, warez/piracy on Usenet was still
| a thing. Are there other use cases now for Usenet nowadays?
| throwawaaarrgh wrote:
| Usenet didn't fail. People are just dumb and follow trends.
| [deleted]
| rocket_surgeron wrote:
| Usenet didn't fail, you failed it.
|
| There are servers up right now. People using it at this very
| moment.
|
| Why did you leave? Digg? Slashdot?
| ubermonkey wrote:
| It didn't fail. It was a smashing, world-changing success.
| Success, though, doesn't always mean immortality.
| intrasight wrote:
| Came to say the same. Usenet was amazing - in it's time. If
| that's "failure" then lots of apps would be happy to fail.
| B1FF_PSUVM wrote:
| "Just resting."
| goodpoint wrote:
| Usenet did not fail. It was killed. It's different.
| jantypas2 wrote:
| There was another reason Usenet died -- people want other people
| to do the work. Oh, they'll pay for it to a degree, but Usenet
| wasn't plug-and-play. To make Usenet work, everyone had to
| cooperate and most people just don't want the work. AOL wasn't
| even close, but it was someone else's problem to run and
| maintain. Hostly, my own vies here, but if Reddit just had an
| NNTP bridge, people would flock to it and never know the
| differece. I remember running a node -- it was a constant battle
| to maintain space on the spools and deal with my own users. And,
| for what? It cost us money and while everyone said they wanted
| it, no one wanted to help with the work or pay for it. Add to
| that the number of groups that just want "zombie" on us, and it
| died.
| gmiller123456 wrote:
| I really hate to see the word "fail" used for something that was
| so incredibly successful, just because technology advanced enough
| to provide something better.
| margalabargala wrote:
| I agree. By that metric, some other notable failures from
| history include:
|
| - Steam locomotives
|
| - Gutenberg's printing press
|
| - The IBM PC
|
| - The original iPhone
|
| - The Ford Model T
|
| - The telegraph, and landline telephones
|
| - The cotton gin
|
| - Black powder, cannons, etc
|
| - Wind-powered boats
| ck2 wrote:
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Newsgroup_spam
| unreal37 wrote:
| Nobody made money on Usenet. It was a "cost" for all ISPs and
| eventually Google.
|
| So maybe that's why it failed.
| debacle wrote:
| Every Usenet replacement (but Craigslist and 4chan) has burned
| through hundreds of millions of VC cash only to eventually fizzle
| out.
|
| Maybe digital space and presence needs to be a social utility.
| ThinkingGuy wrote:
| Possibly slightly off-topic: Are there any free (as in speech)
| web-based NNTP front-ends that are relative ly up to date, and
| still maintained? On my home server I can pull up my email,
| texts, and RSS feeds in a web browser. It would be nice to do the
| same with newsgroups, instead of having to run Pan (even though I
| get the same feeling of nostalgia from its UI as the author
| does).
| davisr wrote:
| Yes--the DLang forums are what I'd consider the best.
|
| > About (https://forum.dlang.org/help#about)
|
| > This website is powered by DFeed, an NNTP / mailing list web
| frontend / forum software, news aggregator and IRC bot. DFeed
| was written mostly by Vladimir Panteleev. The source code is
| available under the GNU Affero General Public License on
| GitHub: https://github.com/CyberShadow/DFeed
|
| > This DFeed instance (forum.dlang.org) is a frontend to the
| DigitalMars NNTP server and mailing lists. Portions of the web
| interface (including style and graphics) are Copyright (c) by
| Digital Mars.
| teddyh wrote:
| Anything wrong with Mozilla Thunderbird?
| ThinkingGuy wrote:
| Only that it's not installed on every computer I use :)
| slooonz wrote:
| I'd add barriers of entry. Not high, but way higher that anything
| that is publicly readable on the internet and therefore indexed
| on Google.
|
| I can discover interesting subreddits _by pure chance_ by
| following a google search on a question I have. Or following a
| link on a blog
|
| There's no chance of that happening on Usenet. For most users,
| search/discovery is a web thing (web search, links) and there's
| no link from the web to usenet. Therefore if you don't know
| anything interesting on usenet you can't easily discover it. Any
| interesting post/discussion cannot be simply linked on a tweet
| (or, for that matters, on IRC). Usenet is completely insular. A
| web forum is not.
|
| Were I a Usenet enthusiast, that would be my 1st priority. Public
| archives of most important hierarchies (comp.* for example),
| indexed on Google, easily linkable.
| jghn wrote:
| When I first started using usenet in the early 90s, I spent
| days going through the entire list of newsgroups my provider
| had. IIRC it was somewhere around 6000 groups at the time.
| Found all sorts of interesting things that way. To your point,
| that's not exactly a scalable solution and not one that most
| people would do :)
|
| I'd counter that though with the aspect of one stop shopping,
| which e.g. Reddit also has. One thing that kept me on Usenet
| far longer than most was that with one app (my newsreader) I
| could access limitless topic specific forums. Instead of having
| to go to a bunch of different sites, each with their own logins
| & quirks, etc. To this day I still prefer applications like
| that, for instance it is something I really appreciated about
| Twitter until recent changes.
| shadowgovt wrote:
| One of the reasons HTTP ate the world is simply the fact that
| everyone already has a user interface program installed to use
| an HTTP-vended service.
|
| In this day and age, that need to install one more thing
| (unless you're on mobile) is itself a huge barrier to entry.
| slyall wrote:
| Largely agree with the author's viewpoint. Compared to the Web
| and Web forums it was very hard for new people to pick up.
|
| Even for people who had mastered the software the lack of ability
| to get rid of bad people was a problem. One "Kook" could single-
| handedly jam up server groups ( eg
| https://www.geocities.w/donfool/ ).
|
| The interface however was still pretty unmatched to this day
| unmatched. You could and did get threads of 1000 posts from 100
| people that were perfectly threaded, readable and referred to
| points in previous posts.
|
| The requirement for each ISP to run their own server was a
| problem. If you wanted binaries then you would need a relatively
| expensive server (or group of servers) plus quite a lot of
| bandwidth.
| Projectiboga wrote:
| ISPs had binaries until around 2007 when NYS AG Andrew Cuomo
| did a favor for big media under the headline of combating 43
| child pics.
| redprince wrote:
| I've used Usenet quite extensively in its heyday. At one point I
| even ran a Usenet site with dozens of peers and thousands of
| users. All on a very beefy (for its time) Sun E450.
|
| In my opinion Usenets greatest strength was also its downfall. It
| is a distributed system without central authority over who could
| connect to the network or firm control over groups and their
| contents. To connect to it as a peer, you just had to find at
| least one Usenet site willing to exchange messages (peer) with
| you. Usually that wasn't a problem. ISPs, universities,
| organizations of all kinds were running their own servers,
| offering Usenet client access to their customers and members for
| no additional charge.
|
| In a distributed system without central authority, innovation is
| exceedingly hard though. The protocols and features were
| basically set in stone. Taking the concept of offering
| discussions among users to a centralized or closed system made it
| possible to innovate very fast and offer superior features to the
| users.
|
| As the article pointed out, that wasn't the only protocol which
| got picked up that way and innovated upon until it displaced its
| origins.
|
| Since Usenet is still frozen feature wise were it was 30 or more
| years ago, I don't see a revival coming anytime soon.
| martinald wrote:
| This is the key problem with decentralised systems. They simply
| can't innovate as quickly as centralised systems.
|
| We saw this with usenet and we also saw it with IRC. IRC really
| is what slack was, 30years ahead of it. However, IRC has so
| many essential missing features it never caught on - push
| notifications, saving your state when offline, admin controls,
| etc. I know some of these were solved with extensions and
| workarounds (having a shell connect to irc an then you connect
| to the shell for persistence for example) but it's a huge hack.
| This compares to Slack or Teams where they can push a back and
| front end update to millions/billions(?) of users in a very
| short space of time to add additional functionality.
|
| This is another reason why all the decentralised 'blockchain'
| things would have struggled (on top of many others).
| basscomm wrote:
| > However, IRC has so many essential missing features it
| never caught on
|
| IRC never caught on? IRC was extremely popular throughout the
| 90's and into the 2000's
| Domenic_S wrote:
| You're right; but I read that as IRC didn't implement
| ("catch on to") those essential features as technical
| feasibility marched forward.
| api wrote:
| I think this argument is seductive but wrong because it
| ignores an invisible elephant in the room: funding.
|
| Decentralization is a business problem, not a technical
| problem. Engineers tend not to see this because we're
| engineers and so we see technical problems first.
|
| Usenet had no economic model. All the problems you list are
| solvable if there were funding available to solve them.
|
| Free volunteer developer work tends to stop at the level of
| polish with which developers are comfortable, which is
| usually command line interaction and fairly manual processes.
| Developers generally have to be paid to develop new features
| and polish those features for the general audience, which is
| why there are precious few open source systems used by anyone
| other than developers.
|
| Those that do exist tend to be subsidized by huge companies
| for the purpose of "commoditizing your compliments" or as
| tools to herd users into an ecosystem that has upsell
| opportunities built into it. Examples: Chrome, any open
| source client for a SaaS service, etc.
|
| Non-profits can fund to some extent, but the truth is that
| polished feature-rich easy to use software is extraordinarily
| expensive to produce. A system that a developer can create in
| their spare time might cost _millions_ to render usable to
| non-developers. Computers are actually very hard to use. We
| just don 't see this because we're accustomed to it. Making
| them easy to use is a gigantic undertaking and is often far
| more difficult and complex than making something work at the
| algorithmic level.
|
| Centralized systems with built-in economic models like SaaS
| or commercial software tend to triumph because they can fund
| the polish necessary to reach a wider audience. A wider
| audience means exponentially larger network effects. See
| Metcalfe's Law.
|
| Cryptocurrency could have offered an alternative model but
| failed for entirely different reasons: perverse incentives
| that attract scammers. In crypto by far the most profitable
| thing to do is build a fake project that can appear just
| credible enough to attract retail buyers onto whom you can
| dump your tokens. There is no structural incentive to stick
| with a project and really develop it because all the money is
| made up front through the initial offering. This also ruins
| the ecosystem because "the bad chases away the good."
| Scammers make legitimate people not want to go anywhere near
| crypto, transforming the whole ecosystem into a "bad
| neighborhood."
| than3 wrote:
| I'd add, polish often means different things to different
| people. For example, failure planning and risk management
| often only happen when there is funding.
|
| There also was no content moderation.
| flyinghamster wrote:
| > Decentralization is a business problem, not a technical
| problem. Engineers tend not to see this because we're
| engineers and so we see technical problems first.
|
| > Usenet had no economic model. All the problems you list
| are solvable if there were funding available to solve them.
|
| You hit the nail on the head. Usenet was very much a "back
| channel" in its early history, with school and corporate IT
| people setting up feeds on the quiet. Indeed, it began
| outside the Internet, using dialup UUCP links to exchange
| news and mail.
|
| Email addresses were "bang paths" where you had to route
| your mail to its destination. If your outside mail gateway
| was foovax, an outgoing address might be like
| "foovax!decwrl!ihnp4!uiucuxa!example" instead of
| "example@uiucuxa.uiuc.edu". In posts, it was a convention
| to specify your email address path from one of the famous
| well-connected sites.
|
| One of the biggest early players was (surprise) Bell Labs.
| If the name "ihnp4" rings a bell to you, you might be as
| old or older than me. :) That was a central hub for the
| UUCP network, both news and mail. I wonder if any AT&T bean
| counters knew about it back in the day, or, getting back to
| the original point, how many bean counters found out about
| Usenet in their respective companies and forced it out?
| liotier wrote:
| > without central authority over who could connect to the
| network or firm control over groups and their contents
|
| Moderation. In public forums, everything else is trivial and
| moderation is the invisible stinking hairy elephant in the
| room. To the question "why isn't there a decentralized open
| protocol free software X" the answer is moderation. Think or it
| as the discreet but efficient bouncers without which a
| sufficiently popular public place cannot maintain a welcoming
| atmosphere. Newsgroups became sufficiently popular, death by
| inadequate moderation ensued.
| phpisthebest wrote:
| This is a very elaborate way of saying people became too thin
| skinned and needed a safe space, to be protected from free
| expression.
|
| Lots of people like to claim they support the idea of free
| speech, only then then list 100's of things they want to
| ban...
|
| Usenet could not survive because the public does not have any
| respect for free speech and actively wants to prohibit any
| speech they disagree with or find uncomfortable
| michael1999 wrote:
| Your summary is incorrect, and insulting. That is not how
| it happened. The old academic usenet was more than content
| to discuss sensitive topics. The problem with post-
| September usenet was spam.
|
| Small groups were ok. As soon as a group had any reasonable
| traffic, the spammers moved it. Since the spammers didn't
| care about conversation, they didn't need to maintain
| stable identify and evaded killfiles. They could quickly
| drowning out the topic with 10x ads. Not wanting this is
| not about being uncomfortable - it was about swimming in
| 90% garbage ads.
| ghaff wrote:
| This is the main thing IMO.
|
| Usenet went from students posting at a modest number of
| elite schools, .mil sites, and a relative handful of tech
| companies--often under their real name--to the Eternal
| September and beyond. Like many problems with the
| Internet over the years which occurred because systems
| that grew up on the assumption of mostly trustworthy
| actors.
| pierat wrote:
| > Your summary is incorrect, and insulting. That is not
| how it happened. The old academic usenet was more than
| content to discuss sensitive topics.
|
| I see no insult towards you, or anyone else in
| particular. In fact, to the opposite, others here are
| saying Usenet died due to _lack_ of content moderation -
| aka other people enforcing their will on others.
|
| > The problem with post-September usenet was spam.
|
| Now I know you're just guessing. The 'September that
| never ended' was when AoL peered with internet gateways
| to bring everyone on the AoL network to the internet,
| along with knowing little about computers or anything.
| "Me too" was around then, as a derogatory comment of what
| an AOLer would say. Even Weird Al in "All about the
| Pentiums" had a line to put them down like Old Yeller.
|
| Usenet really died in 2007 winter-2008 Spring, when all
| major ISPs killed their subscriber Usenet servers. They
| never officially stated why, but grumbles that made it
| out in the systems engineering folk were that it was
| alt.binaries were eating up loads of bandwidth, and much
| of it was 100% piracy.
|
| Spam was a thing, but most of us used good NNCP clients
| that removed a good 90+% of spam. And having lived
| through when Usenet was ubiquitous, I fully reject your
| hypothesis.
|
| And you might want to consider taking conversations here
| more impersonally. Feeling "insulted" over a comment that
| was directed to nobody in particular isn't healthy.
| Symbiote wrote:
| Towards the late 2000s, alt.binaries was irrelevant to
| consumer ISPs etc, as it was not available. It was
| trivial for any systems engineer to exclude
| alt.binaries.* from their news server, and most did.
| mavhc wrote:
| More it was overwhelmed with bad actors spamming
| everything, and no way to stop that.
|
| Free speech is not about letting you post your conspiracy
| theory in the wrong group
| phpisthebest wrote:
| I can see you are a "I support free speech but [except]"
| and then proceed to explain that you do not actually
| support free speech
| Sohcahtoa82 wrote:
| What if someone followed you around and just kept saying
| "You're a cunt. You're a cunt. You're a cunt." over and
| over?
|
| Any time you're not on private property. "You're a cunt".
|
| Is that free speech?
|
| I mean, I'm allowed to be on public property. I'm allowed
| to say whatever I want. Exercising those two rights means
| I'm allowed to follow you around and call you a cunt.
|
| You'd probably try to say "No, that's harassment". Aye,
| but now you've agreed there _should_ be limits on speech.
| IndySun wrote:
| >What if someone followed you around and just kept saying
| "You're a cunt. You're a cunt. You're a cunt." over and
| over?
|
| Free Speech is just that. It's not freedom from
| consequences too.
| Sohcahtoa82 wrote:
| Not sure how the "Freedom from consequences" bit enters
| the conversation here.
|
| "Free Speech" that has consequences from the government
| isn't free speech. The "Freedom from consequences" has to
| do with private entities reacting to your speech. For
| example, asking you to leave the premises or getting
| banned.
| fluoridation wrote:
| When people say that there should be no restrictions on
| speech, it's usually about _content_ , not _manner_. No
| free speech absolutist would think it 's acceptable to
| tell someone "you're a wonderful person" through a 600 dB
| speaker (if it was possible to construct such a device).
| If I scream at you so loudly that it liquefies your
| organs, I don't think that the fact the sound happened to
| form words makes the act any less harmful. Why should it
| be any different with harassment?
| Sohcahtoa82 wrote:
| > If I scream at you so loudly that it liquefies your
| organs
|
| At that point, the "speech" is objectively harmful.
|
| > Why should it be any different with harassment?
|
| Free Speech absolutionists act as if words on their own
| are not harmful, such there's no such thing as verbal
| harassment.
|
| Look at the sibling comment [0]. phpisthebest actually
| claims that being followed and told "You're a cunt"
| repeatedly would be amusing.
|
| [0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36202392
| phpisthebest wrote:
| If they have that kind of time, and no life I would find
| that rather amusing...
|
| I am sure they would tire of it long before I would get
| offended by it. and I can assure you I would could, and
| have responded far more decisive and penetrating
| insults...
| shadowgovt wrote:
| If there's one thing we've learned from the last two-
| decades-odd of the Internet being ubiquitous, it's that
| one cannot, in fact, outlast the harassers. They organize
| and they take shifts. They can keep the harassment going
| as long as it takes. They can keep it up until you are
| dead. And they can do it at scale.
|
| That's why cutting off their ability to do it through
| various channels is so important.
| mikestew wrote:
| Before you wrap yourself too tightly in the 1st Amendment
| to the Constitution of the U. S., perhaps it would be
| helpful if you defined what "free speech" means to you.
| Because repeatedly typing "no true Scotsman..." doesn't
| do much to move the conversation along, and definitions
| obviously differ.
|
| For example, I feel that you can say what you like, just
| not in my living room. Free speech does not guarantee an
| audience.
| AnimalMuppet wrote:
| Billy Joel's rule: "You are free to speak your mind, but
| not on my time."
|
| That is, sure, you can speak to whoever wants to listen.
| You can't make anyone want to listen, though - including,
| you can't make a forum want to listen. It wants to talk
| about gardening, and you want to talk about the latest
| Covid conspiracy theories? Great, knock yourself out,
| talk about your conspiracy theories - but not on the
| gardening forum.
|
| See, I _support_ free speech. I support their freedom to
| talk about gardening without having to wade through a
| bunch of conspiracy theory posts. "Post anything
| anywhere" reduces actual communication - willing speakers
| finding willing listeners - because the listeners give up
| rather than wade through a bunch of garbage that they
| don't care about. I support their freedom to talk about
| gardening without getting drowned out.
| phpisthebest wrote:
| But here the question is who is doing the controlling
|
| Usenet is a open protocol, not a forum that someone owns.
| So if you support moderation on open protocol then you
| support most likely systemic, or worse government
| censorship. Not someone controlling their own property
|
| With Usenet there was plenty of tools (just like with
| email today) to block spam, content, users etc at the
| client level if an individual did not want to see certain
| speech.
|
| With time those tools would have improved just like they
| have with email
| AnimalMuppet wrote:
| > So if you support moderation on open protocol then you
| support most likely systemic, or worse government
| censorship.
|
| Feel free to stop telling me what I support. You're lousy
| at it.
|
| If a protocol is open, that doesn't mean that my servers
| are. I'm moderating my servers, not the protocol or the
| traffic carried using the protocol. (In the same way, you
| don't control who drives by your house, but you control
| who's allowed in the door.)
|
| I don't want systemic censorship of speech (including by
| ISPs). I don't want government censorship of speech. But
| I support the right of servers to say "I'm not carrying
| that". And I support the right of a community to have a
| space that is public _to that community_ , and yet to
| keep stuff that they don't want out of it. And I support
| the right of those who don't agree to go form _their own_
| community, and to decide for themselves what the rules
| are for _their_ community. And all of this can happen on
| open protocols without systemic or government censorship.
|
| Specifically on usenet, you could have, say,
| alt.hobby.gardening, and have it get overrun by spam, and
| have alt.hobby.gardening_moderated start up with
| moderation to keep the spam out. And if you don't like
| it, and want to post your conspiracy rants, go post them
| on alt.hobby.gardening with all the spam that nobody
| reads. Knock yourself out. Or go start
| alt.hobby.gardening_conspiracy, or whatever. But let the
| gardening nuts have _their_ space without your rants.
| shadowgovt wrote:
| I, for one, own that label.
|
| I support free speech except in some circumstances where
| curtailing it makes almost everyone's lives better.
|
| Where I support it to the most extreme: criticizing the
| government.
|
| Where I want it most throttled: my own living room, so I
| can have some peace and quiet.
|
| I think most functioning adults have a similar spectrum
| of allow / deny and aren't absolutists on the topic.
|
| And, I mean... I don't think we need to look deep into
| the history of the Internet to see that becoming the
| dominant pattern. USENET failed. Email without
| spamblockers failed. Every forum either eventually adopts
| moderation policies or goes underground where barely any
| casual user hears of its existence.
|
| The user interprets lack of censorship as damaged and
| routes away from it.
| phpisthebest wrote:
| Here we have a fundemental problem
|
| It is often NOT the users of the platforms that want
| censorship, it is users of another platform, targeting
| something they do not like on the internet, and then
| going after underlying structures be it ISP's, DDOS
| services, Domain Registrars, Hosting providers, Credit
| Card Processors, etc etc etc
|
| We have plenty of examples of this on the internet, where
| it is not the users of the sites that want something
| censored, but 3rd party actors using systemic pressure on
| critical infrastructure to effect the censorship
|
| You have this utopia where someone puts up a gardening
| forum and the users or even the owner of the forums says
| "We do not allow talk about Politics here"...
|
| Where in reality someone sets up a political forum,
| someone posts something, then someone on Twitter,
| Facebook, Insta, etc gets offended and starts a campaign
| to have CloudFlare, or AWS ban them.
| shadowgovt wrote:
| Yep. It's a pretty clever approach, and I for one am in
| hindsight surprised that it took this long for people to
| realize that the system is a network and is therefore
| vulnerable to network dependency attacks.
|
| This is not necessarily a bad thing. Nazis, for example,
| deserve no platform and if companies decide to revoke
| service when they discover they're serving Nazis that's
| their prerogative. It can be abused, especially given
| that the largest players in the space are going to trend
| sensitive to controversy... But the internet has become
| embedded deeply enough in our lives that people can no
| longer enjoy the pretty fantasy of the neutral service
| provider; IBM got away with it in World War 2 and that's
| generally pointed to as a moral failing these days.
|
| If people are calling for enforced neutrality, they're
| really calling for government regulation (who else would
| enforce the neutrality?) which is its own can of worms.
| phpisthebest wrote:
| >Nazis, for example,
|
| Then you have the problem of labeling everyone that
| disagrees with you a "nazi" for example just because they
| favor strong border laws, and immigration controls, or
| oppose social justice and ESG "capitalism" or other such
| things
|
| Or the true crime of having a difference of opinion with
| a trans person...
|
| >>This is not necessarily a bad thing.
|
| yes it is a bad thing, it will always be a bad thing,
| even if doing to to actual nazi's not the new age
| defination of "nazi's" which seemly is anyone that
| happened to vote for Trump, or holds conservative
| political positions.
|
| >>If people are calling for enforced neutrality, they're
| really calling for government regulation
|
| yes and no, depends on what we are talking about
|
| Are we talking about an already heavily regulated
| industry like banking. This yes 100% I am calling for
| enforced neutrality. JP Morgan Chase, nor MasterCard
| should be able to refuse business to someone for the
| protected political speech.
|
| Services like AWS, or CloudFlare.... No I would not call
| for supported regulation but then we come full circle
| back to loss of cultural support for Free Expression
|
| There was a time were the ACLU would defend the KKK's
| right to speak, We should return to those days, where the
| axiom was "I disagree with you but I will defends your
| right to say it"
|
| If we at the point was the population is pushing for AWS
| to de-platform competitors of Twitter because of
| disagreements over politics we are not far removed from
| government censorship
|
| The reality is you would likely support both, as you
| clear abhor actual free speech
|
| This is also why Elon's purchase of Twitter was so
| critical and 100% support his efforts.
| shadowgovt wrote:
| > The reality is you would likely support both, as you
| clear abhor actual free speech
|
| Broadly speaking, I'm a fan of the marketplace of ideas.
| That marketplace includes boycotts, callouts, and choices
| by private individuals to provide or revoke a platform
| for someone else to speak in their space. Freedom of the
| press has never implied that everyone gets a free press.
|
| > which seemly is anyone that happened to vote for Trump,
| or holds conservative political positions.
|
| Hacker News isn't really a great venue for that kind of
| discussion. But there's a reason the pushback on him and
| his supporters has been so strong relative to previous
| politicians. He and his supporters actually do represent
| something fundamentally caustic to the American body
| politic. https://www.bu.edu/articles/2022/are-trump-
| republicans-fasci...
| phpisthebest wrote:
| >>That marketplace includes boycotts, callouts, and
| choices by private individuals to provide
|
| Which means I am sure you support the ongoing boycotts
| happening to BudLight and Target? Or are boycotts only
| for one side?
|
| > Freedom of the press has never implied that everyone
| gets a free press.
|
| The problem here is when the government subsides the
| people that makes the press, regulates the people that
| makes the press, and limits the who and produce presses
| it ceases to be a free market, and becomes a regulated
| market
|
| One can make the case, that since the internet was
| started by the government (dod) and regulated for decades
| by the government (Dept of Commerce Via ICANN), and tons
| of subsidies ISP;s have gotten and continue to get,
| locations where the internet is a government service, and
| tons of other factors that the idea that the internet is
| a purely free market is clearly a false narrative
|
| One often used for convince when it meets peoples
| political goals, and then the second that freedom is not
| aligned with their goals anymore.
|
| Further when it comes to consumer boycotts, you have to
| actually be a consumer, 99% of the people that have
| effective policy changes at CloudFlare and AWS have never
| spent a single dime at either of those services.
|
| Today cancel culture is something more than just a
| boycott, it is something new not seen before in human
| civilization, and it is a huge threat to not only freedom
| of expression but freedom in general
|
| I am unclear why people do not get that.
| amadeuspagel wrote:
| > Where I support it to the most extreme: criticizing the
| government.
|
| > Where I want it most throttled: my own living room, so
| I can have some peace and quiet.
|
| This is a category error. What if someone wants to
| criticize the government in your living room?
| lanstin wrote:
| They are free to buy a living room and criticize away. My
| living room, I am allowed to determine whom to allow and
| whom not to allow in. And I would like to find online
| spaces where the loser spam (both commercial and
| ideological) are kept out, so I can find the speech I am
| interested in. Why is this desire felt as oppressive by
| so many?
| Shared404 wrote:
| > Why is this desire felt as oppressive by so many?
|
| Because they're the spam being kept out.
| lanstin wrote:
| What you are calling free speech is boring to the
| audience. Usenet died because the endless unfiltered spam
| and shit posting was boring compared to slashdot and then
| reddit and then here.
| compiler-guy wrote:
| This is level 5 of the Content Moderation Speedrun.
|
| https://www.techdirt.com/2022/11/02/hey-elon-let-me-help-
| you...
| Scarblac wrote:
| There was moderation. There was even a newsgroup that
| probably has some overlap with here that required you to
| circumvent it in order to post.
| NoMoreNicksLeft wrote:
| Obviously, this is why 4chan died back in 2012. If only they
| had moderation, they might still be around today.
| dopa42365 wrote:
| 4chan has a million jannies, it's heavily moderated...
| amadeuspagel wrote:
| 4chan has moderation.
| pjc50 wrote:
| They're a special niche, and I believe they've been forked
| multiple times over moderation disasters resulting in 8chan
| etc.
|
| If 4chan "breaks cover" into the mainstream in the way
| that, say, Facebook has, it will make for some very
| entertaining Congressional hearings.
| pierat wrote:
| "Moderation" is a terrible excuse used by the corporate types
| as a reason to stick in their safe walled gardens.
|
| We had moderation on Usenet. It was simple, but damn, did it
| work. We had plonka lists (client selected ignored users),
| keyword scoring, server level scoring, some anti-spam. There
| was EARLY work in Bayesian filters built in to clients, but
| was too late for the "big event". (When ISP's everywhere
| killed Usenet servers, for what is pretty surely assumed as
| anti-piracy.)
|
| But lets look corporate moderation. It's done in secret, with
| vague rules that may or may not be stated, and by content
| moderation farms that use and abuse people.
| https://www.wired.co.uk/article/facebook-content-
| moderators-... . Or worse yet, you fool people in faux-
| ownership (reddit) and get them to do your moderation for
| you. Well, that is unless you do a bad job and get your
| subreddit banned for "low/no moderation".
|
| I'd much rather see everything, and craft my own blocklists
| as I see fit. You know, just like Mastodon. Sure, there's
| some fediblocks at admin-level over pervasive content from a
| single server. But aside admin tasks, its pretty damn sweet.
| And it's loads better than the shit that happens over on
| Twitter, Reddit, or Facebook.
| ranger207 wrote:
| Moderation isn't only about removing bad content, it's
| about removing content that's not necessarily bad but is
| unwanted. /r/gaming and /r/games are entirely different
| subreddits, with different content focuses and different
| communities because of their moderation. If I really wanted
| junk food content consumption I can go to /r/gaming. If I
| want to see news about video games I can go to /r/games.
| How do you accomplish that with client side filtering?
| /r/games has Indie Sunday where developers can post their
| own games on Sunday without competition from news about the
| massive AAA games everyone's already heard of. How do you
| accomplish that with client side filtering?
| liotier wrote:
| We, the technologically literate, are not the target
| audience. Client-side filtering requires awareness of
| client-side filtering. How many Reddit users want that ?
| Facebook users ? Oh, maybe they want to fine-tune their
| scoring rules library or tweak they bayesian filters - so
| much fun ! And lacking social intelligence, client-side
| filtering fails against organized harassment. By the way,
| who is liable for infractions to the local law ?
|
| Enter the party, meet regulars, meet new faces, enjoy a
| drink and don't even think about safety. Sure, you can
| manage it yourself for a birthday party at your home but at
| larger scales even the wild rave party thrown in an
| abandoned hangar out there will have some form of
| institutionalized enforcement, even if they are not
| corporate security.
|
| Yes, that means that successful large public places tend
| towards bland - the same reason why successful edgy
| underground dives are small affairs and their character
| can't survive growth.
| pierat wrote:
| > We, the technologically literate, are not the target
| audience.
|
| Highly disagree. It's the early adopters of ANY platform,
| hardware, or whatever that drive real organic demand and
| adoption. And those early adopters ARE exactly that:
| technologically literate.
|
| Alienating that group is how you get relegated to the
| "Digg v4" area of history.
|
| > How many Reddit users want that ? Facebook users ? Oh,
| maybe they want to fine-tune their scoring rules library
| or tweak they bayesian filters - so much fun !
|
| How many Facebook or Reddit users even HAVE the
| capability of client side anything? The big threads are
| that Reddit's killing most API access unless you pay a
| pound of flesh. And Facebook does enough horrible things
| in their coding that makes it impossible to even screen-
| scrape. The text "Sponsored" shows up as shittery like
| "essprnodo".
|
| For those gated islands, you'd need _their_ permission to
| really do any sort of client side anything.
|
| Places like Mastodon make blocking trivial. Ive shared
| that link, and no, you don't need to know about Bayseian
| weights or whatever new mod scheme you want to make. Its
| there, the initial functions are easy-peasy, and the API
| hooks are there to add whatever you want.
|
| > And lacking social intelligence, client-side filtering
| fails against organized harassment.
|
| And that _already_ is a major problem on the corporate
| side. Reddit calls it "brigading". HN has chill-down
| scripts to defuse flamewars. Twitter, Facebook, and
| Reddit all have mass-reporting as harassment. There's
| even current 4Chan threads to organize just that. Sure
| seems like an unsolved problem, not just "unsolved for
| federated systems".
|
| > By the way, who is liable for infractions to the local
| law ?
|
| Irrelevant. Someone in another area could read content
| that is illegal to them. That's *their* responsibility,
| not mine. As long as I follow the laws in my jurisdiction
| and where my server is located, I'm fine. And 17 USC 512
| covers me as long as I do good-faith DMCA process.
|
| > <example of comparing physical real world with
| raves/alcohol/drugs with online "dangers">
|
| And in your latter half, your other problem is that
| you're equating online "safety" with in-person bodily
| safety with alcohol and drugs. Those 2 aren't even
| remotely the same, and its laughable that you'd try to
| compare them.
|
| If someone is coming on to you in a sexual manner, and
| your "No" isnt effectively heard or acknowledged, you
| have a big problem. If someone uploads a bad image (say,
| animal torture, for something abhorrent), you can block
| the user, the server, report the user to their/your
| server admins. You can also choose not to show images.
| It's terrible, but physical assault is no comparison to a
| bad image or terrible text.
| ipaddr wrote:
| Someone in another area could read content that is
| illegal to them. That's _their_ responsibility, not mine
|
| Unless you serve people from the EU or sell things to US
| customers like bitcoin.
| tracker1 wrote:
| There's no reason a private/paid service addon to a
| client can't work for filtering. Been thinking similarly
| for Mastadon, in that you can pretty easily have a gated
| experience, and get top ranking for Android/iOS client
| use with a monthly service that includes filtering with
| relatively sane defaults, but toggle-able
| filtering/reporting.
|
| You can use fdroid, webapps or side-load the "full"
| unfiltered client but the experience for the normies
| would be that paid app experience. And I say paid app to
| avoid the pitfall that is advertising fed results.
| dragontamer wrote:
| There were plenty of well moderated newsgroups actually.
|
| A moderated newsgroup had all messages going through the
| moderator's system, with their programs deciding whether or
| not the message should be forwarded to the rest of the
| newsgroup. This doesn't necessarily mean that a human read
| all messages either.
|
| Some of the oldest flamewars I've participated in are about
| moderated vs unmoderated USENET newsgroups. It amuses me that
| we're still debating the issue today.
| amadeuspagel wrote:
| What kind of moderation programs were people using then?
| Word filters? I can't imagine anything that isn't both easy
| to circumvent and likely to catch innocent posts merely
| quoting a "bad" word.
| dragontamer wrote:
| I wasn't "tech awakened" at this time, so I simply didn't
| know which programs were used.
|
| What I can say is that plenty of spammers would have one
| or two posts on Newsgroups, before the mods would catch
| them and ban their email address.
|
| Depending on the Newsgroup, I'm sometimes "new users"
| would have all of their posts reviewed before their posts
| were forwarded to everyone else. But after being added to
| some kind of whitelist, they could say whatever they
| wanted (well, until a flamewar caused them to go over the
| line and get banned).
|
| So similar tools as moderators use today on Reddit / IRC
| / whatever. Or at least, it felt like that to me. Maybe
| it differed in implementation, but the overall effect was
| the same.
| jghn wrote:
| People used Killfiles [1]
|
| [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kill_file
| dragontamer wrote:
| I don't think a "kill file" was the same as "moderation".
|
| A kill file is "User X is tired of seeing User Y, so X
| stops reading posts from Y". Everyone else can still read
| Y.
|
| A moderator is "Moderator is tired of seeing User Y, so Y
| cannot post to Newsgroup anymore". A much stronger
| action.
|
| ---------
|
| Its been a few decades since I was part of any Usenet
| though. So maybe I'm mis-remembering the lingo. Or are
| you saying that the moderators used kill-files that
| somehow applied to the whole newsgroup?
|
| Because... the later would make sense. But I really don't
| know how things worked back then.
| Zak wrote:
| There's a third layer: the servers. Newsgroups relied on
| servers propagating messages to other servers as well as
| delivering them to end users, and they could have various
| types of filters.
|
| The same sort of model exists in modern distributed
| systems like Mastodon/ActivityPub. I can block a user
| from another server or an entire server individually, or
| my server admin can block them from communicating with
| anyone on my server.
|
| What's missing that I think will be required for anything
| that gets popular enough is a means of sharing blocklists
| automatically, preferably with some machine-readable
| details so that they're useful even when servers have
| different rules (e.g. I want to subscribe to bans from
| Foo if the ban is for hate speech, but not for porn).
| pm215 wrote:
| The machinery for a moderated newsgroup works by the news
| server you post an article to having a list of moderator
| email addresses for moderated groups. Instead of posting
| your article the server emails it to the moderator. The
| mod will then either just discard it, or else post it to
| their own news server with an Approved header to say it's
| moderated (and these days some crypto signing stuff).
| Then the post gets propagated as usual.
|
| The "approve/deny/edit" stuff is handled by moderation
| software, which in principle can do anything you like.
| jghn wrote:
| No, killfiles were at an individual level. But they were
| more than "I'm tired of seeing User Y", as you could also
| plonk text patterns and the like.
|
| IIRC group-wide moderation was handled per-post in that
| every post was approved by hand.
| dragontamer wrote:
| > IIRC group-wide moderation was handled per-post in that
| every post was approved by hand.
|
| Definitely not. The kinds of "mistakes" I've seen in
| moderation back then suggests that the process was highly
| automated.
|
| Moderated Usenet is way more similar to modern Reddit
| than people probably realize.
| redprince wrote:
| Several programs are available to do it: https://www.big-
| 8.org/wiki/Moderated_Newsgroups#Moderation_S...
|
| The type and quality of moderation is up to the
| moderation team. Might be automatic, might involve a
| review by a human for each post.
|
| As someone else already mentioned, there are groups which
| were configured to be moderated but have no moderators at
| all to approve posts. Either they disappeared or there
| never were any. To participate in these groups you have
| to set the "Approved:" header in your post yourself.
| Obviously that would also be the way to circumvent the
| moderation process for any other moderated group. The
| countermeasure is that the moderators send out a cancel
| control message which instructs all the newsservers
| receiving it or at least those who honor cancel messages,
| to delete this specific message.
| spfzero wrote:
| It wasn't like programmers were less creative or
| productive than they are now. The languages were fully
| capable of doing anything on a server you could do now.
| It was mostly C. Programmers were creative and smart,
| just like now, and could implement anything, albeit
| ground-up since there were fewer existing building blocks
| to reuse.
|
| A lot of sophisticated anti-spam software depended on
| some sophisticated anti-anti-spam showing up first, and
| there is a lot more of that now for sure.
| amadeuspagel wrote:
| Even now forums rely on manual after-the-fact moderation
| and not just algorithmic pre-moderation.
| boramalper wrote:
| Relevant: The ecosystem is moving (Challenges for distributed
| and decentralized technology from the perspective of Signal
| development)
|
| https://media.ccc.de/v/36c3-11086-the_ecosystem_is_moving
| shadowgovt wrote:
| The old chestnut "The Net interprets censorship as damage and
| routes around it" referred specifically to USENET if I recall
| correctly; it is often mis-applied to the Internet itself or to
| other services. But it referred to the notion that since USENET
| servers just routed their stash of stories to any node that
| requested them, censorship was functionally a non-starter; if
| you (the node owner) wanted content that some other node owner
| was squelching, you could request it from another node.
|
| But it turns out that model had some major flaws. Nowadays, one
| could say the 'net interprets _lack_ of censorship as offensive
| and migrates away from it. If there 's one thing the
| experiments after USENET (from Slashdot to Mastodon) suggest,
| it's that people on average _want_ some control (and don 't on
| average want the burden of being their own moderator for every
| damn bitstream that comes down the pipe).
| bitwize wrote:
| The net interprets hate as noise and filters it out.
|
| At least, that's the goal.
| sleepybrett wrote:
| Interested to see if we find these negatives paralleled in the
| fediverse.
| Earw0rm wrote:
| Usenet was - by the standards of the early 00's, which is when it
| began to decline - slow, and asynchronous. Posts could take hours
| to days to propagate, which meant conversation threads would go
| off in multiple directions at once.
|
| Technology that was transformative during the BBS-to-early-
| internet transition became a liability ten years on.
|
| Slashdot, PHPBB and later on Reddit offered synchronous, low-
| latency, single-point-of-truth updates to thread/post order.
|
| The promise of self-configured "agents" for content filtering
| never really caught on - they were too time-consuming for anyone
| bar a few geeks and academics to manage. The social media "feed"
| is an evolution of the same idea, but there's not really any
| self-configuration - instead the system is programmed by the
| platform's owners to adapt to your behavioural feedback.
| radicalbyte wrote:
| I disagree: between 1994-5 and about 2005 I made heavy use of a
| "private" NNTP server (for the Edge Magazine forums).
|
| Compared to early web forums it was super fast - you could sync
| all of the messages in about two minutes. Then you could
| disconnect your modem, read + reply etc. Then go online an hour
| later to send reply + update the feed.
|
| Broadband changed the game: once the internet was fast and
| always-on then web forums pretty much took over.
|
| We lost something though: the beauty of NNTP was that you could
| easily keep your own archive of discussions of the groups you
| were interested in. Search worked and it as offline. Oh and no
| adverts or tracking!
| Earw0rm wrote:
| I'm talking about server to server message propagation, not
| client/server - agreed, the Usenet clients were much faster
| and had better feature-sets than any web forum running on
| Netscape or the early versions of IE. That part was great,
| but messages could take hours to even days to propagate
| across the whole network. The sync-reply-upload work flow was
| indeed useful - especially so in countries where you had to
| pay by the minute to be online.
| slyall wrote:
| I'm going to call "mostly wrong" on the server-to-server
| propagation.
|
| By 2000 the NNTP mesh was very interconnected and fast.
| Sites competed[1] to get messages propagated fast.
| Especially text messages.
|
| Any site hooked into the mesh was going to be offered any
| article multiple times within seconds of it being posted.
|
| Slow articles would happen but only during outages or with
| sites that were not following good practice.
|
| [1] Via http://top1000.anthologeek.net/
| radicalbyte wrote:
| Absolutely - the federated case (I was rather active on the
| tolkien, c64 and various computing groups) was terrible. We
| used to use email lists for real discussion with plain text
| messages (shame that isn't a thing anymore).
|
| It was an excellent experience in the non-federated case.
| inopinatus wrote:
| * * *
| EdwardDiego wrote:
| That reminds me of the days of FidoNet [0] and Barren
| Realms Elite [1] where the inter-BBS propagation delay made
| your BBS's attacks on another BBS even more tense and
| exciting, and well, it felt realistic that sending your
| forces to another "planet" took time to happen and for
| results to be reported.
|
| [0]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/FidoNet
|
| [1]: https://www.johndaileysoftware.com/products/bbsdoors/b
| arrenr...
| listenallyall wrote:
| > Slashdot, PHPBB and later on Reddit offered synchronous, low-
| latency, single-point-of-truth updates to thread/post order.
|
| ...and reputation/karma, avatars, post counts, moderation,
| search, categories, emojis, anonymity (email address not
| exposed), notifications...
| pmoriarty wrote:
| Web was just the new shiny.
|
| People like the new shiny.
|
| Forum posts also had embedded images, and didn't require
| installing/configuring/maintaining a separate application.. all
| you needed was your web browser.
| TylerE wrote:
| What really killed it was alt.binaries.*. Vastly bloated
| bandwidth/storage requirements, so ISPs either killed NNTP
| altogther, or stopped giving a crap and you'd start, like,
| randomly dropping 10% of messages, which amounts to the same
| thing.
| vikingerik wrote:
| I don't think this was true. It was entirely common practice
| for an ISP to ignore alt.binaries but carry all the rest of
| Usenet fairly reliably. To the point where users would rebuke
| each other for posting binary content in a non alt.binaries
| hierarchy, lest the ISPs detect that as a stealth binary
| group and drop that too.
|
| What killed Usenet was as the parent said - users are better
| served by the centralized management and reliability of a web
| forum, they don't need or care about decentralization and
| peering. The same thing happened for Discord and Slack
| replacing IRC.
| radicalbyte wrote:
| Discord/Slack replaced IRC because IRC ran over a set of
| ports which could (and would) be blocked by almost every
| corporate firewall. I still remember the day that my
| friendly Systems Administrator left and the new guy nuked
| our IRC access :(
| quickthrower2 wrote:
| Probably the reason that took over is they are well
| funded and have marketing and/or salespeople. And they
| have emojis, file uploads, etc and they are just
| generally easier to use. Not that IRC is hard, but it is
| geeky enough.
| EdwardDiego wrote:
| Yep, and the entirety of Usenet became associated in the
| minds of ISPs with piracy.
| anigbrowl wrote:
| It didn't fail, it's just that GUI chat UIs like AOL and later
| web forums were more visually attractive, and were able to
| incorporate graphics. Usenet relied on uuencode for any sort of
| binary attachment which was a pain in the ass. There was also a
| high degree of snobbishness that made it unwelcoming to new
| users, who naturally went to other fora where they weren't
| treated like children.
|
| The other problem was spam. Usenet had excellent
| moderation/blocking capabilities for the time ('welcome to my
| killfile' was the last thing many trolls heard from a person),
| but relied on a general consensus that spam is cancer. Then
| Laurence Canter and Martha Siegel single-handedly broke usenet in
| one afternoon nearly 30 years ago, and I still feel annoyed
| whenever I think of them. People like this exemplify everything
| that is toxic about capitalism.
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Laurence_Canter_and_Martha_Sie...
| lanstin wrote:
| There was an AOL newsgroup reader, curtesy of Jeff Warrington.
| The AOL posters were mostly still treated like children, but
| not unfairly.
| [deleted]
| zmix wrote:
| I don't think Usenet failed. It declined. It was a platform for
| "first hour" internet users, the early "internet natives", mostly
| nerds, like us.
|
| When the masses appeared on the "intarwebs" the web would be the
| place to go, with all it's flashy hypermedia and uniform way of
| use (no separate client needed, same philosophy, etc.)
|
| The Usenet simply got replaced by web forums.
| NoZebra120vClip wrote:
| It seems that "failure" is a rather strong word.
|
| Usenet served its purpose at a point in time and then faded into
| obscurity, though it keeps chugging away in a niche, appealing to
| some.
|
| It's like saying that IRC failed.
|
| What forum community, social network or media platform has been
| permanent and outlasted everything else? It seems that on every
| social network, people migrate, people abandon platforms, and
| losing critical mass can be fatal to the platform, and then it
| just passes on to the next one, having served its purpose; did
| MySpace "fail" or did it simply cede the crown to Facebook?
|
| I remember Usenet fondly, though perhaps through rose-colored
| glasses. It was already full of trolls, flamewars, disruption and
| discord. Yet I cut my teeth there as a young sysadmin. I listened
| at the feet of experts, literal prominent experts in the field,
| who had spare time to just freely share their knowledge, because
| the Internet was an R&E community! I learned a lot about
| reputation and trust in the digital age. I gained "Internet
| street smarts" there.
|
| I believe that it shaped a lot of people's lives, for better or
| worse, and that's not a failure by any measure.
| shadowgovt wrote:
| Yep. Protocol-backed stuff on the Internet "fails" the way
| civilizations "go into decline" in the board game Small World;
| they aren't removed from the board, but they no longer serve
| any purpose other than taking up space that the active
| civilizations haven't taken over yet.
| NoZebra120vClip wrote:
| Exactly, it's protocol-backed, and that's the beauty of free,
| open source software and standards. As long as anyone care to
| maintain the client and/or servers, or even if very old code
| still works, you have a viable service. It's not a monolith
| that's beholden to the whims and fortunes of a single
| corporation that can just shut it down. Consider the enormous
| outcry when a single company has to shut down an entire
| platform, like a popular MMO or something, and then compare
| that to what happens when an IRC network has a schism, like
| the Freenode controversy: yep there was drama, but everyone
| took their toys and migrated to an identical network and now
| we have two.
|
| I come from MUDding communities myself, and there is no
| shortage of old and crusty wizards who cling to their MUD
| servers and have kept them open, going on 30 years now!
| Clients come and go, Internet standards change, and social
| network fads happen, and we're still playing a game that
| doesn't bother supporting TLS, MFA, Unicode, or graphics.
| MUDs never failed, they simply achieved posterity and faded
| from sight.
| tptacek wrote:
| I've said this a bunch of times before, but I don't see this take
| in a lot of Usenet postmortems, and I think it's truer than most
| of what people say about Usenet.
|
| Piracy killed Usenet.
|
| I ran a Freenix-competitive NNTP installation for a very popular
| ISP in Chicago in the 1990s. Usenet was by far the most demanding
| infrastructure we ran: we ran striped RAID arrays, read
| replicas+, transit servers --- all of this on the only expensive
| Sun hardware we had in our fleet. At one point, we independently
| reinvented the INN history cache, and there were a couple sites
| near the top of the Freenix leaderboard in part due to IRC
| conversations about our dumb patch. All this is just to say I
| feel like I have some bona fides here.
|
| Keeping up with the Usenet everybody laments today was not this
| demanding. You could easily have done it with a Pentium FreeBSD
| server and a fast disk. But customers wouldn't let you. The open
| secret about Usenet was that it was a binary distribution system
| first and a discussion forum second.
|
| Unlike discussion groups, keeping up with full-feed binary groups
| was a fucking nightmare. Usenet is the stupidest mechanism for
| distributing binaries you can possibly imagine: just imagine
| BitTorrent, but entirely Base64'd, and without the forward error
| correction --- your file was in 100 pieces, and if you lost one
| of them, you were just fucked. If users couldn't reliably
| download pirated games or porn from your Usenet servers, they'd
| loudly complain and tank your reviews for running a bad Usenet
| setup. And woe betide any ISP that claimed to do NNTP on anything
| less than a binary full feed.
|
| The rest of the story is obvious. ISP operators had better things
| to do with their time and money than cater to the small minority
| of angry cost-center users who used Usenet this way, and so they
| outsourced Usenet altogether. Usenet centralized because binary
| groups forced it to, and once it was centralized there was no
| reason not to just stick it on a website.
|
| Web forums are better than Usenet was back in the day, so
| arguably, over the long term, not much was really lost. Reddit
| today is very much like Usenet was like in the mid-1990s, and
| they at least have a reliable archive. Apart from the archives of
| my old comp.security.unix posts, all I really miss about Usenet
| was the competitive systems engineering aspect of it. I'd love to
| go back in time and take another whack at Usenet knowing some of
| what I know now; I didn't realize how fun a problem it was at the
| time: a real system people actually cared about with a
| leaderboard.
|
| + _These things sound very boring now but were most definitely
| not boring in 1995._
| kjs3 wrote:
| _Unlike discussion groups, keeping up with full-feed binary
| groups was a fucking nightmare._
|
| The nice thing about NNTP was _you didn 't have to carry any
| group you didn't want to_. We stopped carrying the binary
| hierarchy and some of the dedicated pr0n groups because of just
| this sort of administrative pain.
| 0xbadcafebee wrote:
| Some providers (namely ISPs) simply dropped the binary groups
| and kept the text ones. So piracy alone is clearly not what
| killed it. In fact, Usenet really only exists today for piracy,
| so if anything, piracy actually saved Usenet. Just for a
| different use case than originally intended.
| tptacek wrote:
| I mentioned this in my comment. As a technical matter, you
| could simply not take binaries. But as a commercial matter,
| you could not; if you didn't have binary groups, you weren't
| offering real Usenet (and if your binary feeds weren't ultra-
| reliable, you were offering shitty Usenet). The result was a
| consolidation of the platform down to a small number of
| providers willing to invest large amounts of resources to
| placate binaries users.
|
| If lots of people aren't running NNTP servers, there's not
| much reason to use Usenet. By the time Reddit and Digg rolled
| in, it was no contest.
| 0xbadcafebee wrote:
| Some providers simply dropped the binary groups and kept the
| text ones. So piracy alone is clearly not what killed it. In
| fact, Usenet really only exists today for piracy, so if
| anything, piracy actually saved Usenet. Just for a different
| use case than originally intended.
| radicalbyte wrote:
| Nowadays usenet really is nothing but a binary transfer system.
| Such a shame.
| rtsil wrote:
| > your file was in 100 pieces, and if you lost one of them, you
| were just fucked.
|
| That is, until Parchives were invented.
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Parchive
| tptacek wrote:
| By the time anybody knew what this was, Usenet was already
| fucked.
| pmontra wrote:
| Did Usenet fail or did it succeed until something better came up?
|
| Nobody would say that telegraph failed, do we agree on that? And
| yet we started using landline phones, fax, email, SMS and all
| sort of messaging systems on mobile phones.
| groos wrote:
| Fail? According to Vernor Vinge, it's in use Galaxy-wide 20000+
| years from now as the Net of a Million Lies.
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/A_Fire_Upon_the_Deep
| mattmcknight wrote:
| I presumed it was spam. It was a system designed for maybe 1
| million non-commercial users The presence of large numbers of
| users and commercial users were unmanageable. I used it quite
| extensive in 1992-6, but after that it was a mostly inferior, and
| the surviving groups I followed became closed mailing lists.
| vidanay wrote:
| > Thirdly was the user interface. Usenet looked dull. In a world
| of animated GIFs and MySpace colour schemes, Usenet didn't even
| have avatar images! Sure, the spartan nature meant that you could
| focus on a conversation - but it didn't feel as modern and
| exciting as the web did. NNTP software was fragile.
|
| Forte Agent was a masterpiece. Change my mind.
| nerdbert wrote:
| > Usenet didn't even have avatar images!
|
| Now let's not forget my 40-line ASCII-art sigfile.
| jghn wrote:
| alt.fan.warlord would like a word
| UncleSlacky wrote:
| and BIFF.
| mmcgaha wrote:
| Around the time frame of the beta versions of agent coming out
| in early 1995, the Windows world really surpassed unix for
| internet usability. Obviously netscape was netscape but agent
| vs tin, mirc vs ircii, or eudora vs pine, the windows software
| getting churned out was peak usability as far as I am
| concerned.
| clsec wrote:
| Agent was the very first piece of software I paid for. That and
| my Extra Newsguy subscription opened an amazing world for me.
| Then yEnc came along!
| rbanffy wrote:
| There was also Outlook Express.
|
| It could do NNTP feeds integrated with e-mail, an outgrowth of
| previous work on IE3-era Windows News and Mail (which was an
| architectural masterpiece - a Windows Explorer view of a folder
| full of messages, populated from the mail and news feeds)
|
| I wish we had something like that in Gnome - processes that
| sync my IMAP mails to local Maildir-like folders (dynamically
| populated, with download-on-open, perhaps) and a view that
| shows e-mails. Same for iCal feeds - make it a way to view
| specific kinds of content.
| bhaak wrote:
| >> Thirdly was the user interface. Usenet looked dull. In a
| world of animated GIFs and MySpace colour schemes, Usenet
| didn't even have avatar images!
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/X-Face
|
| I think there was even a color version of x-face? Oh yeah,
| found it. A 48x48 base64 encoded PNG image.
|
| https://www.emacswiki.org/emacs/GnusFace
|
| I don't know what other Usenet clients supported that. The
| x-face header was already not widely supported.
| senko wrote:
| > Forte Agent was a masterpiece.
|
| Yes.
|
| Also, my social network feeds could benefit from a killfile
| feature ...
| pierat wrote:
| https://docs.joinmastodon.org/user/moderating/
|
| There's a wide variety of ways to self-moderate content. Andd
| you can block whole servers from your account as well.
|
| And if stuff is terrible, you can report to your instance's
| admin (if you're not running your own). And barring that, you
| can also report to their instance's admin.
|
| Given enough harassment or badness, servers can block
| harassing servers.
| cobaltoxide wrote:
| Spam
| dariosalvi78 wrote:
| I used it quite a lot around 97 / 98, it was a great way to meet
| people and discuss serios and not-so-serious topics with people
| around the world. It was technically interesting and a very
| powerful tool.
|
| Then it got flooded with "replica watches" and "girls nextdoor
| porn", huge attachments and shady stuff.
| howard941 wrote:
| ISPs decommissioned their news servers. That's what killed
| netnews.
| jmclnx wrote:
| >ISPs decommissioned their news servers
|
| Yes, this is the number 1 reason.
|
| But USENET is still being used and there are many people still
| using it. And there are places where you can signup for free
| access, this is one but there are many others:
|
| http://www.eternal-september.org/
|
| One thing to remember, you never see a post from your teenage
| self on USENET being dragged up by your employer causing you to
| be fired or loose out on a job. Why, privacy still exists on
| USENET.
|
| Also I guess he never heard of killfiles :) These days I have a
| rather large one compared to what I had many years ago. See a
| post you do not want to see anymore, add it to your killfile
| and maybe the person who sent it.
| sokoloff wrote:
| That seems like it's reversing cause and effect, though. If
| lots of ISP customers were using their nntp servers, ISPs would
| have been quite likely to maintain them in order to be
| competitive.
| narag wrote:
| They didn't. What seems logical doesn't need to be true.
| Maintaining servers was hard, they decided to not compete on
| that.
|
| They were trying to minimize any kind of _customer support by
| humans_ , the number one cost center for any digital company.
|
| Lucky for them that the like of Google and Reddit
| externalized mail and forum services.
| Mc91 wrote:
| This is (part of) the correct answer, yet it is way down the
| list of upvoted answers.
|
| The story is:
|
| 1) There were a number of independent ISPs, but oligarchic
| forces, in addition to the Verizon/AT&T last mile monopoly
| consolidated things so that Verizon/AT&T became the ISP for
| most people, with limited competition.
|
| 2) Once consolidated, Verizon and AT&T killed their news
| servers. This mostly happened in 2008. The old Internet which
| was more open and peer-to-peer became a platform with end users
| limited mostly to web clients, consuming from big corporate
| upstream web servers.
|
| 3) This was helped along by various places in the US
| government, which blessed or even applied pressure to kill off
| the old peer-to-peer nature of the Internet, particularly
| Usenet, for the current model of big corporate web servers to
| end user customers.
|
| Of course the public relations announcements were all of this
| was done for the litany of reasons companies and the government
| do anything - to protect customers/children/whatever, fight
| against the forces of evil etc.
| rootusrootus wrote:
| Because it was _expensive_ to run such servers. Imagine
| dedicating 50-100 Mbps of constant bandwidth just to Usenet,
| and then explaining to management that 99.9% of Usenet was
| alt.binaries. We outsourced for a while, but even that cost was
| difficult to justify and none of our customers would admit to
| wanting it.
| dehrmann wrote:
| Which is a lesson for those saying "well just federate it!"
| kayo_20211030 wrote:
| TIL that `annecdata` (properly `anecdata`, I think) is a word.
| Nice!.
| pixl97 wrote:
| Why did usenet fail:
|
| 1) It couldn't serve ads in a controlled manner. The lack of
| monetization made sure that most people paid for usenet access
| allowing 'free' http driven apps to take over.
|
| 2) Most ISPs didn't provide much information if they had a NNTP
| server users could use, and NNTP readers didn't come with most
| users computers. HTTP did.
|
| 3) It wasn't exciting to new users. Web went from mostly text to
| multimedia as internet connection speeds increased.
| segmondy wrote:
| Google.
| rocketnasa wrote:
| Back in the 1990's, the in-person User Groups were a thing of the
| past and we didn't have Patreon style support donation system
| wasn't widely accepted. Funding was mostly out of owner/operator
| budget like it was in the BBS days.
|
| Usenet was part of the ISP plan, part of your monthly dial-up (or
| otherwise) costs.
|
| Who paid to moderate and solve problems was starting to fail
| under the load and the easy ability to mass spam.
| 2809 wrote:
| Wait, it failed? Since when...?
| [deleted]
| rbanffy wrote:
| > Dropbox is FTP with a better UX
|
| Nope. Dropbox is NFS with an asynchronous client with lots of
| local persistent cache.
|
| > WhatsApp groups are just ListServes
|
| That's a huge oversimplification.
|
| All in all, I wish I have built something that was the backbone
| of internet discussions for decades. Truth is, we all moved on.
| At one time, newsgroups was the only space where we could have
| threaded discussions. Now we have lots of other, more targeted,
| options.
|
| All the issues the author mentioned could be fixed. We can use AI
| to rate comments (at the client), and build a decentralized
| reputation system (maybe a good use for blockchain, finally).
| EwanG wrote:
| Quick summary - As K-Mart did to Sears, and then WalMart did to
| K-Mart, so Reddit has done to Usenet.
| jabroni_salad wrote:
| If we want to pin it to a single entity I would say one of
| these two:
|
| AOL's CD mailers, or microsoft/apple including an http browser
| in their operating systems.
| bigbillheck wrote:
| Not entirely sure about your summary or your historical
| analysis there buddy.
| johannes1234321 wrote:
| I would argue that Facebook had a much bigger impact pulling
| users there.
|
| As did multiple independent web forums (based on phpBB etc.)
| which allowed closed communities and moderation and we're more
| approachable for beginners.
| tenebrisalietum wrote:
| - Reddit didn't do anything to Usenet. Reddit postdates
| Usenet's glory days by over a decade.
|
| - Sears, a dying company, bought K-Mart, and they died
| together. K-Mart didn't do anything to Sears.
|
| - Walmart didn't do anything to K-Mart except sell stuff
| cheaper and work on its supply chain. Wikipedia article says
| this: "Unlike its competitors Walmart and Target, Kmart failed
| to invest in computer technology to manage its supply chain."
|
| I don't understand the analogy at all.
| arbitrage wrote:
| Not really. Usenet was circling the drain a long time before
| Reddit was a gleam in Ohanian's eye.
| mrweasel wrote:
| I don't really agree, but also don't have a better explanation.
| Moderation and clients would have been solved, had Usenet
| continued to be huge. Email have had it's fair share of problems,
| including spam, but has always managed to survive because nothing
| has been able to replace it and it's still valuable. You could
| argue that development of attractive clients have died down in
| the past decade for email as well. Panic kept their Unison client
| alive for way longer than they needed to, and that looked pretty.
|
| Personally I would love to see Usenet replace localized Facebook
| groups. It seems like every small town have a Facebook group, and
| if you have no presents on Facebook, you get no information.
| Usenet would be a perfect fit, no central authority to monetize
| and control the group, you'd be able to read about activities in
| your neighborhood, while having no account or an account with an
| organisation you trust.
|
| The ISPs might not want to pick up the tab for running the
| servers, but they kept doing it for years after Usenet became a
| ghost town.
| aaomidi wrote:
| I am still confused on how to access usenet for free tbh.
| Everytime I've looked into it seems weirdly expensive.
| floren wrote:
| The expensive services are expensive because they include
| alt.binaries.*, which are used for piracy.
|
| http://www.eternal-september.org/ gives free access to the text
| groups
| KingOfCoders wrote:
| I had much fun in Usenet (you can find many of my posts on
| comp.sys.amiga.advocacy), I've learned a lot, wrote a lot in
| English for the first time.
|
| There was another post some months ago here that argued success
| is not tied to survival.
|
| To me Usenet was a huge success and didn't fail in any way, just
| because people are no longer using it doesn't mean it failed.
| Delphiza wrote:
| alt.binaries killed usenet.
|
| Apart from pron clogging up bandwidth, alt.binaries became a good
| vector to distribute viruses, child pron, and a bunch of other
| things that ISPs, and their dial-up customers, were becoming
| increasingly concerned about. Its openness in an increasingly
| more dangerous, scammy, and criminal world was always going to be
| its own undoing. There must have been a stage where Pamela
| Anderson took up most of the world's storage and bandwidth just
| from synchronising usenet feeds.
| temporal828 wrote:
| > alt.binaries killed usenet.
|
| In 2023 Usenet is solely commercially viable for alt.binaries.
| korse wrote:
| I'm surprised people aren't mentioning this more. Usenet may
| be dead for discussion, but it certainly isn't a dead
| technology.
|
| edit: I guess they are. Took a second to search around the
| comments.
| superkuh wrote:
| I still post on usenet a couple times per month. You gotta be the
| change you want to see in the world.
| Scarblac wrote:
| Binaries, imo. At some point Usenet became synonymous to illegal
| downloads for people, and it became too costly to support.
| rootusrootus wrote:
| Warez, and porn. Neither of which are easy to defend when an
| ISP is looking to address the costs of a Usenet feed. Towards
| the end, we had close to 100 Mbps full time just for the feed,
| as I recall. Then we outsourced it to cut that cost. But then
| management decided none of our customers needed alt.binaries
| and we dropped it altogether. The effect on churn was
| negligible.
| badcppdev wrote:
| Totally agree with this. Why would any commercial ISP want to
| offer this as a service?
|
| There was very little upside and massive potential
| liabilities because they were storing and supplying
| unmoderated content that in the very best case was pirated
| music and movies.
| bsdetector wrote:
| Seems like nobody has mentioned a huge reason Usenet failed:
|
| It needed a client program.
|
| Digg/slashdot didn't succeed because they were flashier or
| moderated or had less illegal content or privately developed or
| any of these other reasons given, it was because people could
| just follow a link to a web page and they're in. Even today
| reddit or discord do everything they can to convert web users to
| app users for obvious reasons, but they must have that web
| version for casual users or they'll die off to whoever does have
| one.
|
| So ultimately what killed Usenet was Section 230. Without that
| services could do simple copying/caching like NNTP (protected
| under telecom rules) but the actual presentation had to be done
| on the user's computer. And consequently were 230 repealed it
| wouldn't be the end of the social media world, but rather the
| resurgence of Usenet-like models where all the presentation is
| done by a client program.
| [deleted]
| ok123456 wrote:
| Section 230 had nothing to do with it. Offering usenet
| retention is the same thing as being a common carrier. Section
| 230 would only come in to play if you actively moderated your
| usenet retention to prohibit perfectly legal speech.
| krapp wrote:
| > Section 230 would only come in to play if you actively
| moderated your usenet retention to prohibit perfectly legal
| speech.
|
| https://www.techdirt.com/2020/06/23/hello-youve-been-
| referre...
| ok123456 wrote:
| What is your argument?
| krapp wrote:
| Sorry, I thought you would actually read it, forgot where
| I was for a second - Section 230 protection doesn't
| require a platform to act as a "common carrier" or to
| only moderate strictly illegal content, so it would not
| "come into play" under the circumstances you described.
| xingped wrote:
| This is one of the big reasons, I think. I hear about Usenet
| all the time, but whenever I try to go looking for it in the
| past to figure it out, it just makes no sense to me and I
| cannot figure out how to get to it. To me it's just this
| nebulous thing that exists somewhere, but I have no idea where.
| walterbell wrote:
| Some ISPs still provide Usenet feeds, or there are commercial
| Usenet providers in many countries, similar to email.
|
| Usenet can be accessed via the OSS Thunderbird client, or OSS
| Usenet clients.
|
| https://www.fastusenet.org/thunderbird-windows-tutorial.html
| osswid wrote:
| Go to telehack.com and type 'notes'.
|
| It's not comprehensive, but will give you a taste of the
| flavor of what Usenet was like.
| UncleSlacky wrote:
| You can get a free account here (text groups only, not
| binaries):
|
| https://www.eternal-september.org/
|
| You can access Usenet via Thunderbird (or Pan, mentioned in
| the article).
| gmiller123456 wrote:
| There were, and still are, many web interfaces to USENET. So,
| IANAL, but I doubt section 230 had much to do with it.
| giancarlostoro wrote:
| > it was because people could just follow a link to a web page
| and they're in
|
| Discord has entered the chat. (wait a minute...)
|
| Seriously though, Discord is precisely an example of this. I
| was talking to someone about how Skype was degraded, and I
| wanted to build a competitor, then he showed me Discord. I've
| been using Discord since (and on my free time thinking of what
| I would do different to Guilded / Discord). Slack was cute, but
| Discord was much better. There's lots of room for improvement
| with Discord, but its just good enough.
| WarOnPrivacy wrote:
| In the 90s I used to edit out CSAM related groups, from the
| downloaded list in Netscape's built in NNTP client. Customers who
| were surfing usenet for the first time were reasonably horrified
| by the group names.
|
| After a time I got unhappy about this and went to see if I could
| determine a physical hosting location of the content. I don't
| recall the particulars, just that I came up with an AT&T
| subsidiary - something polkadot - sitting at a Canadian address,
| near the US border.
|
| I wasn't willing to reach out to the FBI blindly and couldn't
| locate anyone who know anyone in the bureau. I knew someone who
| knew the head of the [state] Family Association and that person
| was well connected politically. After some back and forth I gave
| up on the whole thing. That guy was fairly obsessed with stamping
| out homosexuality and couldn't be bothered with abused children.
| I moved on.
| temporal828 wrote:
| > In the 90s I used to edit out CSAM related groups, from the
| downloaded list in Netscape's built in NNTP client.
|
| This list gets downloaded from whatever server you configure
| and is then local to your machine. Editing it would only affect
| what you see on your own client.
|
| > After a time I got unhappy about this and went to see if I
| could determine a physical hosting location of the content.
|
| Usenet is a distributed system - every server that didn't
| filter the group was hosting the content. They were typically
| viewed as common carriers.
|
| (It sounds like you were tracing your own ISP's server?)
|
| On that note some from upstate New York may remember that the
| attorney general tried to garner votes by raiding and seizing
| servers from a few local ISPs (Dreamscape, RIP), which in the
| end didn't work out.
|
| > I wasn't willing to reach out to the FBI blindly and couldn't
| locate anyone who know anyone in the bureau.
|
| The FBI was quite well aware of the content on Usenet and very
| adept at navigating it in its heydey. They used it in a number
| of investigations to track down producers including breaking
| into trusted rings that communicated with PGP encrypted
| communications on Usenet. You wouldn't have informed them of
| anything they didn't know.
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