Weekly Edition
Return to the Front page
| |||||||||||||
|
| |||||||||||||
The end of USENET
Your editor, ancient relic that he is, first discovered the wonders of
global email around 1981, thanks to a BSD-running VAX with a blazingly fast
1200-baud uucp connection. A USENET addiction was quick to follow; on the
net, it was possible to converse with a few thousand people on literally
hundreds of computers! It was an eye-opening introduction to what a
global conversation could be like, both good and bad; hopefully some of
those ill-advised, youthful conversations on net.singles and net.politics
are lost forever.
As it happens, your editor was late to the party, and the old-timers were busily worrying about how the whole thing was going to collapse under the load of all these new, clueless users. USENET proved to be resilient, however, to the point that the "death of the net" idea became a sort of running joke. It survived its rapid growth, thanks to faster modems, better software (including a thing called "rn" posted by a young Larry Wall), and user education. USENET survived the loss of the central "seismo" hub, in the process (as seismo's connections were shifted over to a new host called "uunet") kicking off the commercial ISP industry. It survived the abrupt arrival of AOL, initially connected via a uucp link of its own (here's a classic posting on how the AOL folks were perceived at that time). It even survived the beginning of the spam onslaught - the famous "green card spam" was carried via USENET, not email. USENET was a useful medium for a long time. Among other things, much of the very early Linux development conversation happened over USENET; your editor decided to go for Linux after noting that the relevant groups had much more going on than the BSD groups. When LWN was first launched, the announcement went to comp.os.linux.announce - the news source for Linux users at that time. Many years earlier, Richard Stallman's first GNU Manifesto posting happened on USENET. The next time you complain about your distributor's repository, think back to the joy of receiving GNU emacs over USENET - as a large number of 50KB chunks which you got to piece back together yourself. The legacy of USENET also surrounds us in other forms. Many of the features in your fancy mail client which allow you to deal with your incoming flood were first worked out for netnews reading. News clients still have their uses; your editor would have a hard time keeping up with so many lists if it weren't for the highly useful, NNTP-based Gmane repository. The Globe and Mail has recently declared the death of USENET, as a result of Rogers Communications deciding to stop providing netnews access to its customers. Others might have noted the death of USENET earlier this year, when AOL disconnected its customers. But the fact of the matter is that USENET has been dead as a medium for useful conversations for some years now. It is too open, too easy to flood with spam, too easy to forge control messages for. The signal-to-noise ratio of USENET - often not all that high to begin with - sunk to a point that most people had no remaining desire to deal with it. So it is not surprising that the commercial service providers are pulling the plug on USENET. A news feed requires significant bandwidth, and its contents seem to be mostly spam and porn. Few customers care anymore. There are much better alternatives out there now; the global conversation has moved on to different forums. USENET is dead, and, at this point, few of us miss it. But USENET played an important role in the history of the net as a whole. Those of you who were there: raise a glass to the memory of USENET at your next opportunity. (Log in to post comments)
The end of USENET - NOT Posted Nov 23, 2005 2:21 UTC (Wed) by dskoll (subscriber, #1630) [Link] I still use USENET frequently. I read a handful of technical newsgroupsand I find them extremely useful. And there's hardly any spam on any of them.
(I haven't read a talk.* or alt.* newsgroup in many years, however. I stick to the comp.* hierarchy.)
The end of USENET - NOT Posted Nov 23, 2005 3:46 UTC (Wed) by magsilva (guest, #378) [Link] The same here. Several sci.space.* groups are still active, hosting newsand discussions not available anywhere else in the Internet. Oh, and no spam too.
The end of USENET - NOT Posted Nov 23, 2005 4:26 UTC (Wed) by roelofs (subscriber, #2599) [Link] I rarely have time to read Usenet, although occasionally I still hit some of the comp.graphics.* groups or comp.compression. However, I note that my ISP, one of the biggest independents on the US West Coast, just last week completed a major upgrade of their Usenet servers. Usenet may be "dead" in the sense of ubiquity--when's the last time any of us downloaded source code that way?--but it's still thriving as a "corner of the Net." (I was going to say "niche," but that connotes something smaller than Usenet still seems to be.) Greg
The end of USENET - NOT Posted Dec 7, 2005 17:33 UTC (Wed) by moxfyre (guest, #13847) [Link] Ya, ditto. I think Usenet is still very useful. I read and post to:
rec.bicycles.tech
None of those groups get much spam. Lots of good discussion and quick responses.
I enjoy a lot of web-based forums too, like ubuntuforums, bikeforums, etc. I find that the web-based stuff tends to create a bit more of a "community" around it, probably because you can't cross-post as much and there are links to people's home pages and locations and little photos and such. I think that both the web-based forums and Usenet have their uses, though the immense versatility and searchability of Usenet is a huge plus.
The end of USENET Posted Nov 23, 2005 3:42 UTC (Wed) by mikov (subscriber, #33179) [Link] What alternatives to USENET ? There are a handful of sites with interesting discussions and between 20-50 regular posters, but that is basically it. Slashdot is no USENET :-)
There are many interesting and useful USENET groups that have no alternatives, at least not widely known ones.
comp.arch, comp.compilers, comp.std.c, rec.arts.int-fiction are ones that I read often and find them very interesting. There are others, but I won't bore you with the list. If the USENET really disappeared it would be a tragedy.
The end of USENET Posted Nov 23, 2005 6:30 UTC (Wed) by gdt (subscriber, #6284) [Link] What is disappearing is USENET as a service your ISP carries as part of your subscription. It's a push technology and ISPs are calling a halt to sending information which is never read. There's nothing at all to stop you paying $5 to a USENET provider and using your ISP's IP carriage service to reach your USENET provider. I've seen a calculation from a university in Australia which showed that each read USENET message was costing $40 in traffic. The uni's IT department arranged accounts with a USENET provider for those people that actually read newsgroups and ended up thousands of dollars ahead.
The end of USENET Posted Nov 23, 2005 16:12 UTC (Wed) by nix (subscriber, #2304) [Link] Australia, of course, is unusual both for its geographic location and for its lunatic bandwidth charging policies, making bandwidth vastly more costly than anywhere else in the civilized world...
The end of USENET Posted Nov 23, 2005 18:30 UTC (Wed) by mikov (subscriber, #33179) [Link] Well, Comcast still carries it. And there is always Google.
What bothered me in the original article was the claim that "there are much better alternatives out there now; the global conversation has moved on to different forums". I see nothing of the kind happening at all.
Web forums (even this one) are hugely inferior to Usenet in usability. And even if they weren't, they are scattered across random web servers here and there (e.g. realworldtech). No comparison at all.
The end of USENET Posted Dec 1, 2005 10:17 UTC (Thu) by rqosa (guest, #24136) [Link] > Web forums (even this one) are hugely inferior to Usenet in usability. Maybe someone could implement an NNTP gateway for LWN. That would be one way to use killfiles on LWN.
The end of USENET Posted Nov 23, 2005 22:34 UTC (Wed) by zorgan (guest, #4016) [Link] For the record, the two Usenet groups i have been reading, on the games ofbridge and go (rec.games.bridge, rec.games.go), are by now surpassed in usefulness by dedicated web sites (one Wiki and one forum). Their advantage is that they have special features dedicated to graphical presentations for either of the games, making them much more readable. Their other advantage is, of course, that many people with useful things to say on these topics don't even konw about usenet, but all have a web browser. This will not be the same for a tech-oriented newsgroup.
The end of USENET Posted Nov 23, 2005 4:33 UTC (Wed) by decaffeinated (guest, #4787) [Link] If fighting spam is your thing, news.admin.net-abuse.blocklisting and news.admin.net-abuse.email still carry useful discussions, although the latter is often infested with spamming trolls who've had their privates spanked. The former newsgroup is often the only venue available for sysadmins to get their IP space removed from various DNS blocklists (cf spews).
The end of USENET Posted Nov 23, 2005 6:46 UTC (Wed) by mmarkov (guest, #4978) [Link] Does anyone know an equivalent of comp.text.tex for TeX/LaTeX related discussions?
The end of USENET Posted Nov 23, 2005 16:13 UTC (Wed) by nix (subscriber, #2304) [Link] There is none. Googling c.t.t is also an invaluable resource for that nifty trick posted fifteen years ago which you happen to need in your latest document...
The end of USENET Posted Nov 25, 2005 21:06 UTC (Fri) by kreutzm (subscriber, #4700) [Link] Clearly seconded. The one Newsgroup, although rarly used, I would miss to see go!
I'll call "bullshit" :-) Posted Nov 23, 2005 7:35 UTC (Wed) by davidw (subscriber, #947) [Link] May I draw the attention of the jury to exhibit one:
as well as this group, still *the* place to go for Tcl and Tk help:
http://groups.google.com/group/comp.lang.tcl?lnk=li
Active, polite, relatively spam free, and read by most of the Tcl Core Team. I haven't had quite as good luck in other groups, but I'm convinced they do exist.
Perhaps this hyperbole is a good thing - the rest of the world can go on to "blogs" and trackbacks and other junk that is poorly suited to real dialog, and leave usenet to the techies.
The end of USENET Posted Nov 23, 2005 7:57 UTC (Wed) by ekj (subscriber, #1524) [Link] Now I've seen that to: a troll article on Lwn.Do we get "BSD is dead" articles next week ?
The end of USENET Posted Nov 23, 2005 9:12 UTC (Wed) by cventers (subscriber, #31465) [Link] You won't find me agreeing. A troll is by definition writtenintentionally to bait people in. This article makes some observations I mostly agree with, and it certainly doesn't seem to be written to anger. Hence, it's a very long way from a troll.
The end of USENET Posted Dec 2, 2005 13:09 UTC (Fri) by ekj (subscriber, #1524) [Link] OK, so you're rigth the article probably isn't written with the intention to anger. It is however written in a way that any reasonable person would understand is more suitable to provoke responses (mostly disagreeing ones) than it is to inform or contribute to constructive debate.Look at the responses: Lots of people saying the predictable thing. Noone, or nearly noone saying "Thanks for the informative article". That's because as I see it, the article doesn't contain anything informative in the sligthest. Some ISPs stopped carrying usenet. Fine. Do we post "BSD is dying" articles every time some mirror drops some variation of BSD ? On Slashdot I expect such articles regularily. I had expected better from Lwn. I simply fail to see the value of the article, other as deliberately provoking disagreeing comments. (it is offcourse possible that it wasn't deliberate. If so, Lwn knows its readership less than I had thougth.)
The end of USENET Posted Dec 1, 2005 16:33 UTC (Thu) by arcticwolf (guest, #8341) [Link] Not everything's a troll just because you don't agree with it, kid.
The end of USENET Posted Nov 23, 2005 9:36 UTC (Wed) by Taleel (subscriber, #10361) [Link] Imminent death of USENET predicted; film at 11.
Seriously, in my 14 years of USENET participation (well, mostly lurking, actually) I have seen dozens of these prophecies of doom. Guess what? USENET is still a useful discussion forum, with client software that surpasses all web forums in usability. Real threading, a text editor of my own choice, easy navigation with a single key instead of mousing around, all newsgroups in one client - this makes reading newsgroups more fun than wading through dozens of different webforums with ever so slightly varying user interfaces.
That most newsgroups are not moderated is another feature webforums are lacking. How often have I seen a moderator close a topic, just when the discussion became interesting?
I'll certainly continue to use USENET, and I'm using my own server's resources to propagate at least de.* (the german language newsgroups), plus some hand-picked newsgroups from comp.*, sci.* and soc.*.
Damnit Posted Nov 23, 2005 15:14 UTC (Wed) by Baylink (guest, #755) [Link] Someone beat me to the punchline.
Yes, indeed, though; perhaps this will send Usenet back to it's roots: a discussion forum you had to *work* some to be part of. That filtering is what made it useful.
(And when I say 'work some'... I had to track down a Usenet feed for the 3 AT&T 3b2-300's at St Pete Junior College in about, oh, 1984 or so. This entailed, among other things, about a 15 minute chat with Gene Spafford, then at Georgia Tech (who ended up being 3 hops north of us; we got our feed from USF, who got it from Perkin-Elmer Orlando (remember them?)); even then I knew who Gene was; I was a little star-struck. :-)
The end of USENET Posted Nov 23, 2005 10:58 UTC (Wed) by hanwen (subscriber, #4329) [Link] hopefully some of those ill-advised, youthful conversations on net.singles and net.politics are lost forever.You mean like these?
ill-advised, youthful conversations Posted Nov 24, 2005 4:58 UTC (Thu) by roelofs (subscriber, #2599) [Link] Heh...I wonder if Jon's blushing right about now? Or did he secretly intend for everyone to appreciate his youthful insightfulness? :-) (The particular posting in that link--from 20 years ago, ay carumba!--is indeed insightful and nothing to be especially embarrassed about. I didn't peruse much beyond it, however.)Greg
The Ghost of Usenet Postings Past Posted Nov 25, 2005 9:21 UTC (Fri) by ayeomans (subscriber, #1848) [Link] After an article like this, it's good to revisit the Ghost of Usenet Postings Past.
The end of USENET Posted Nov 23, 2005 12:00 UTC (Wed) by faassen (subscriber, #1676) [Link] comp.lang.python also appears to be still alive and well.
The end of USENET Posted Nov 23, 2005 12:49 UTC (Wed) by smitty_one_each (subscriber, #28989) [Link] I only get a few groups in my Gnus through NTTP via my Cox provider.The bulk of my groups come from http://www.gmane.org/ , the front page of which has a posting activity graph with a healthy positive slope, suggesting to me that "USENET is dead, long live USENET!"
The end of USENET Posted Nov 23, 2005 14:56 UTC (Wed) by Duncan (guest, #6647) [Link] Another Cox user! =8^)For many years, USENET (incl. some alt.* groups) was /the/ reason I had broadband and a good portion of the reason I had internet at all. Since I switched to Linux, it's as important a reason to keep broadband as USENET, but USENET is certainly still one of the top three reasons (the other one of the three being streaming content, like the kawaii Japanese/Anime station I'm listening to ATM). USENET is also the reason I'm on Cox, as I switched from my previous ISP due to their restriction to 256kbps (two connections each limited to 128kbps) of their news service. At the time, I thought I might need to get a third party provider as well, but Cox was faster and cheaper than my then current provider, and the money I saved by switching to Cox would go quite a way to paying for an NSP, if necessary. As it turned out, it wasn't necessary, altho I'm thinking of getting a third party NSP now, some two years later. I too use gmane's list2news gateway to follow my mailing lists. Actually, I depend on news far more than mail, and have been known to go for weeks without opening a mail client to check mail, while I normally check my various newsgroups, at least the gmane list/groups and the various other text groups, several times a day. Thus, mail is far more "dead" to me than news. For that matter, so is the web, tho I use it a bit more than I use mail. Actually, I think much of the usefulness of news stems from the fact that it's /not/ so well known. Were it to suddenly become as popular as mail or the web, I've a feeling I'd equally suddenly find it far less useful for my purposes, as the noise level would tend up considerably, while the useful content would likely decrease, as folks such as myself departed in droves. That said, I'm not sure how the various ISPs dropping USENET as a bundled service altogether is going to affect things. Bundled but little known has been status for years. Unbundling it and making it a third party service (free or paid) for the most part, /will/ eventually affect things. Many of those effects will be positive as it becomes harder for potential spammers and "low clue level" users to stumble upon it. However, if it begins to reduce the supply of (eventually) knowledgeable regulars, because the level of new users ultimately able to /become/ knowledgable regulars is reduced, USENET as a source of /anything/ useful, overall, could eventually go down as well, altho that would tend to be a multi-year process, taking half a decade or more. BTW, what's your handle on the Cox groups, assuming you post to them? (I'm "Duncan" both here and there, and in my lists, Gentoo and PAN, on gmane, as well). Duncan
The end of USENET Posted Nov 23, 2005 16:24 UTC (Wed) by smitty_one_each (subscriber, #28989) [Link] I don't subscribe to any Cox-specific groups.I'm smitty_one_each or smitty1e pretty much everywhere.
The end of USENET Posted Nov 24, 2005 3:03 UTC (Thu) by dirtyepic (subscriber, #30178) [Link] AFAIK Gmane provides nntp (and other) access to mailing lists rather than USENET.
I use it all the time. If only I could meet a newsreader i liked...
The AOL bus has taken an off-ramp Posted Nov 23, 2005 15:05 UTC (Wed) by bkw1a (subscriber, #4101) [Link] I think this "usenet is dead" conclusion is based on a flawed interpretationof the data. It seems to me that a lot of non-technical users jumped on usenet back in the boom days of the web, and now they're jumping back off, going to flashier parts of the internet instead (blogs, web forums, etc. -- the sort of places with animated emoticons).
What we're left with is a usenet community that's very much like the old
The end of USENET Posted Nov 23, 2005 17:54 UTC (Wed) by iabervon (subscriber, #722) [Link] I think that the downfall of USENET will be when people can't find news feeds any more, and are forced off into web forums (which might be front-ends for USENET, but still force you to use the site's interaction design). I think that protocols should be arranged so that anyone who wants could set up a news server with a few of the USENET newsgroups, without needing to negotiate with ISPs.
Of course, gmane and Google will probably communicate forever over USENET, but it won't really be the same if it becomes only a mechanism for a limited set of web forums to have the same content.
The end of USENET Posted Nov 24, 2005 13:35 UTC (Thu) by jschrod (subscriber, #1646) [Link] I have to agree with the rest of the commenters that have posted up to now. A trolling front-page article on LWN, that's new.
You say that there are better alternatives than USENET for technical advice and information. But you don't tell which ones. Slashdot? (OK, that was a cheap shot -- but c'mon, scattered web-logs and some forums don't replace comp.*.)
Yes, USENET is plagued by spam in several group hierarchies -- but not in those where it matters: comp.* and sci.*. (At least, I don't see them with my USENET provider. ;-)) Yes, in the future we might have to pay for USENET access extra -- great, that will drive the masses to web-forums and scattered blogs, we don't need them on USENET. Yes, I'm an elitist here, and I don't care -- I use USENET since 15+ years and will continue to do so.
Just my 0.02 EUR, Joachim
There is no better alternative Posted Nov 24, 2005 15:07 UTC (Thu) by rakoenig (subscriber, #29855) [Link] Let me start with a quote:
Progress (n.): The process through which Usenet has evolved from
You wrote that some users don't care if they can access Usenet or not, see above why. :-)
No, seriously I think that nothing is as good as Usenet. Surely some people can be impressed with fancy looking web forums, but if you really want to exchange knowledge then there is nothing better than Usenet. The reason is simply that once you configured your Newsreader the interface to the knowledge is pretty much the same, not caring if you want information about Linux or a receipe to bake a cake. If you would want to access the same knowledge with web forums then you would need to cope with a lot of different user interfaces. That's not a big deal if you sporadically look for something, but if you use it frequently you would like features like "scoring" or "highlighting responses to your articles". An easy job for a good newsreader software, but something that I've never seen on web forms.
So if you want to announce the death of usenet because of spam, then you should at the same moment
No, thank god Usenet isn't dead by now. I would rather suggest that providers that pull the plug will be dead sooner or later. At least for me this would be a real argument to change the provider if mine would do it.
Ok, now I will stop feeding the troll... :-)
A possible alternative: individual NNTP servers Posted Dec 1, 2005 9:34 UTC (Thu) by rqosa (guest, #24136) [Link] I used to post at one newsgroup which had set up its own NNTP server which only carried that group and one other (related) group. This has the advantage that other posts sent to the same server can be read almost immediately. Another example is the aforementioned Gmane. In addition to the mailing list gateway, Gmane also has its own gmane.* hierarchy.
The end of USENET Posted Nov 24, 2005 23:36 UTC (Thu) by stock (guest, #5849) [Link] Every year, when reaching the christmas holidays, certain editors seem tofeel the urge to write a op-ed piece to insert their favorate pet or turkey to be slaughtered. Nothing new here. I have seen lotsa "End of the Internet in 200X?" articles showup in this new 21th century. Normally these articles are harmless, until lame duck government officials start abusing these as a public excuse to introduce new legislation proposals, like the one we have seen with the WGIG summit held last week. There are a couple of things tricky here. First it seems like certain editors only write articles to feed the agenda of their covert employer, instead of the newspaper itself. I refer to the Valery Plame outing by several newspaper editors. I don't think that lwn.net has these kind of double agenda editors amongst their ranks. So what could the Globe and Mail editor have thought here to declare the end of USENET? Who's agenda was Brad Templeton transforming into wishful thinking? Second why does the GlobeandMail rant about USENET showup at all these RSS feeding sites, like slashdot, linuxtoday and now lwn.net? Is it not just the amplification of wishful thinking propaganda by letting it hit the internet global echo fan? It just stinks IMHO and by amplifying this bad odor using the internet echo fan, one only scares the serious readership away. I thought LWN.net was above this all. Robert M. Stockmann
The end of USENET Posted Nov 25, 2005 0:39 UTC (Fri) by mato (subscriber, #964) [Link] >Those of you who were there: raise a glass to the memory of USENET at your next opportunity.
And now what? phpbb?
The content of USENET Posted Nov 25, 2005 6:49 UTC (Fri) by zblaxell (subscriber, #26385) [Link] A quick unscientific survey of my NNTP server's group list sorted by article count reveals that USENET is mostly copyright violations with 8 to 9-digit file sizes--TV shows and movies, apparently. Just the *headers* for one newsgroup of this kind is larger than a DVD, and there seem to be dozens of newsgroups of similar size and content. I have no NNTP client capable of coping with groups this size (they seem to expect to be able to hold the list of all article subjects in a group in RAM), so I have to randomly sample the headers with telnet to categorize the contents.
Porn looks like a distant second--fewer files, smaller files, but still quite large due to widespread use of automated posting tools.
The rest is non-porn copyright violations of various formats and genres, and text (not sure from my data which is bigger).
I haven't seen much spam in the groups that I do read (certainly not the 999:1 ratio of spam to non-spam that I get in email).
The content of USENET Posted Nov 25, 2005 20:22 UTC (Fri) by mikov (subscriber, #33179) [Link] After reading your post it occured to me: Couldn't the ISPs prohibit attachments to USENET postings - this will filter all pr0n, music and video and decrease the required traffic drastically. All problems solved (well ... except spam).
The content of USENET Posted Nov 25, 2005 22:40 UTC (Fri) by giraffedata (subscriber, #1954) [Link] If the file distribution is the problem, they could leave attachments and just not carry the groups that specialize in distributing files. Or any group that has more than a certain volume.
The content of USENET Posted Nov 27, 2005 5:17 UTC (Sun) by zblaxell (subscriber, #26385) [Link] ISP's can and do filter by newsgroup.
There are several alternatives to running a local NNTP server in an ISP. Some ISP's outsource NNTP service to one of the premium providers. Others run some kind of proxy/cache to a third-party USENET service. Large corporations just select the technical newsgroups (with a wide definition of "technical" ;-) for their employees.
Preventing attachments won't happen on any server that matters. Premium USENET providers have been quite careful to please people who want to contribute and use such newsgroups. The sales language is about as clear as it can be on this point, without actually saying "please exchange your warez through us for $29.95 a month, uploads are unlimited and free as long as it's not spam." If someone said "you can't post RAR files any more," then someone would come up with a new format and encapsulate attachments in that format (which is probably how we got to RAR in the first place...I remember ARJ, and before that, LZH/LHA).
The end of USENET - maybe not quite yet Posted Nov 26, 2005 15:16 UTC (Sat) by corbet (editor, #1) [Link] Clearly I hit a nerve with this story. For those who are wondering, the story has its roots in the facts that (1) I have not personally found usenet useful for some time; I don't remember when the last time was that something from usenet found its way into LWN, and (2) ISPs are withdrawing support.That said, it seems clear that people are still finding usenet useful to them, and I am glad for that. Remember that you're dealing with somebody who, once upon a time, had a full incoming netnews feed to his Microport Unix system over at 2400 baud modem... I have no particular desire to see it go away.
The end of USENET? Maybe, but not the end of USENET news. Posted Dec 6, 2005 18:21 UTC (Tue) by filker0 (guest, #31278) [Link] I've been on USENET news (on and off) since there were only 13-20 machines on it. I posted from a PDP-11 running a seventh edition Unix with Berkley extensions (decvax!sultan!dag). I even showed up in the top-10 bandwidth wasters list at least once in 1982-3.
Between 1989 and 1995, I ran a public access Unix system on various hardware (uwvax!gorgon), getting a full USENET news feed from a university and supplying it to other sites, including a local ISP (thus saving them a lot of money in their early days, as they did not have to pay their provider for the USENET newsgroup traffic.)
I still use USENET news. If you drop the alt.* groups, most of the copyright violations that people complain about go away. There is still a technical community that uses newsgroups to keep in touch, and there is really no good alternative to the communication model it provides.
USENET itself is pretty much dead. USENET was not the same thing as USENET Newsgroups; it was a network of computer systems that communicated with one another via serial lines (mostly dial-up) using the UUCP (Unix to Unix Copy Program) protocols to exchange files. These files could be newsgroup messages, e-mail, or just about anything else. Long about the mid 90s, the use of the technology that held together the actual USENET was waining. The Internet replaced the USENET, for the most part. I don't know if there are still smart hosts and USENET maps -- I've not been maintaining a USENET site since 1996, but the importance of the USENET itself is very diminished.
However, just like the Internet is not the same thing as the World Wide Web alone, the USENET is not USENET News alone. The USENET Newsgroups have outlived the USENET itself.
The end of USENET - maybe not quite yet Posted Jan 13, 2006 18:03 UTC (Fri) by rickmoen (subscriber, #6943) [Link] Jon wrote:Clearly I hit a nerve with this story. For those who are wondering, the story has its roots in the facts that (1) I have not personally found usenet useful for some time; I don't remember when the last time was that something from usenet found its way into LWN, and (2) ISPs are withdrawing support. Jon, when you get curious again, the comp.os.linux.* hierarchy is still thriving and healthy. We'll be glad to have you back. My Usenet feed's spool of comp.os.linux.setup, for example, currently has 168 unexpired threads, of which one is a two-post religion spam ("CHRIST: THE ARRIVAL"), one is a make- money-fast fraud, and 166 are as close to substantive and topical as you can get in an unmoderated, public technical forum. Which is pretty darned good. However, I applaud your encouraging the easily dissuaded to use Web bulletin boards and blogs instead. That should help keep newsgroup quality up. Keep up the good work. Rick Moen
Rumours of demise exaggerated: Usenet alive and well Posted Nov 29, 2005 2:44 UTC (Tue) by qu1j0t3 (guest, #25786) [Link] Please stop sending condolence cards: Usenet is not yet buried; not even taking medication let alone on the operating table. Possibly with large thanks to Google Groups, I don't even expect it to expire of old age. The groups I read - probably 20 or 30 daily - are quite healthy; and if they were not, I would not bother with them...
The main point about Usenet that almost everyone (except for, I gladly note, some respondents to this somewhat nutty article) is that nothing has actually replaced it. Apart from certain very narrow (usually vendor specific) fora, there is generally no well organised and well frequented central forum for such a variety of topics.
The one SURE way to make useless topical fora is to fragment them into thousands of tiny pieces, which is exactly what has happened on the web: Presumably because people don't know any better. Examples that come to mind: Special interest groups on social networking sites like Orkut (useless!!); the myriad "me-too" group spawnings on Yahoo!, non-Usenet Google Groups - for instance count the Macromedia Flash vanity groups there. All useless!! The whole point of building a useful topic forum is to centralise users there - and if necessary break it up into a hierarchy in the way that Usenet (after Dewey?:) pioneered.
The quality of answers is proportional to the size and quality of the population who are inclined to read and respond - is this not a simple principle to grasp? Clearly any forum/community has to be bootstrapped into life - but Usenet's central hierarchy shambled into life decades ago. One million fragmented vanity boards are no "replacement" - nor is there any necessity to look for one.
Besides, nobody has really built a web forum that works properly. (I still find much-maligned Google Groups a very usable way to access Usenet - all GUI newsreaders I have tried have been terribly mediocre.)
Certainly some groups have died through neglect and abuse, but one must not overlook those which are thriving and on many topics is still the single BEST place to ask a specialised question. This is where Usenet is still unbeatable: There is a core of several hundred (thousand?) long-lived groups which are frequented by the world experts in their areas. Where else can you rub shoulders with the Dennis Ritchies of the world? (To name just one current distinguished Usenet contributor.)
LWN, LWN. If you weren't so intelligent the rest of the time, I'd start to worry...
Rumours of demise exaggerated: Usenet alive and well Posted Dec 1, 2005 14:43 UTC (Thu) by landley (guest, #6789) [Link] > LWN, LWN. If you weren't so intelligent the rest of the time, I'd start> to worry... Translation "I disagree with what you said, what's wrong with you?" I personally stopped following usenet in 1998, but earlier this year I had a very brief (2 months) contract at a company called Data Foundry, an offshoot of texas.net whose business plan is to do usenet for ISPs who don't want to do usenet themselves anymore. I didn't do much of interest there (poked at spam filters and a test harness, woo), but I did learn that their huge infrastructure is primarily to deal with gigabytes and gigabytes of binary attachments. The text only groups would fit on a single server, the _vast_ majority of usenet traffic (99% plus) is binary attachments. And no, it's not just porn. It's also mp3s, and DVDs, and software, and some nutball company was broadcasting large binaries (I forget what they were, weather sattelite photos or some such) to all of its branch locations via usenet because it was cheaper than paying the bandwidth bill directly. Usenet seems to have evolved into a gnutella variant that the RIAA/MPAA/BSA simply hasn't noticed yet. (That was my impression anyway; as I said my contact with this stuff was pretty brief and tangential.) I'm not suprised that ISPs don't see much point in basically running their own napster servers in-house, and especially not storing the actual content being transferred. Mailing lists and the web obsoleted usenet's conversation function years ago. (Doesn't mean it's gone: I know some people still using BBSes.) These days usenet is yet another Napster replacement, and technically inferior to bittorrent for moving that kind of data around. Rob
Rumours of demise exaggerated: Usenet alive and well Posted Dec 1, 2005 18:17 UTC (Thu) by qu1j0t3 (guest, #25786) [Link] Google seems to have found a way to deal with the explosion of binary postings; I have no doubt other sites could cope, even if it means dropping such groups or postings. I was talking about the conversational groups, in any case.
As for "mailing lists and the web obsoleted Usenet's conversation function", most of my post was devoted to the contention that they have not. Mailing lists (like the explosion of web bb's and vanity groups) have only usefully taken over in certain areas - such as support for specific products. For hundreds or thousands of general topics, they are worse than useless - for the two reasons I cited - no centralisation (any topic is fragmented over innumerable small communities); and in the case of the web, clunky overweight interfaces.
The key to Usenet's continued existence is likely to be Google Groups, since as you imply, it's probably not economic for every mom-n-pop ISP to persevere with the service.
Film at 11 Posted Dec 1, 2005 22:36 UTC (Thu) by anton (guest, #25547) [Link] Just recently I had a Debian-specific question with some Gentootangent <2005Nov24.194223@mips.complang.tuwien.ac.at>. I looked around for a Debian newsgroup and did not find one (linux.debian.* seem to be just mailing list mirrors), so eventually I posted it to alt.os.linux.gentoo (fortunately, there is a Gentoo group).
Maybe Usenet died for LWN's editor, but for many others it is still
As for spam, even though I don't see most of my email spam, I see much
USENET is dead Posted Dec 6, 2005 22:33 UTC (Tue) by samiam (guest, #34378) [Link] OK, since a lot of people are talking about Usenet still being alive, here is my humble "Usenet is dead" post. Usenet is dead because the discussion groups are, by and large, not attracting new members and there is no way to keep the kooks and flame wars in check. [1]
The replacment for Usenet is PhpBB/Vbulletin/Phorum/Slashcode (maybe not this one)/Scoop/whatever web pages. The advantage of these systems is that each one has a mechanism for keeping flamers and spammers in check. Usually, the moderator kicks off the troll in question; if you don't like how a given web page is run, there are always others. Scoop and Slashcode, children of a culture where a moderator dealing with trolls is somehow censorship, have more sophisticated ways of zapping bad posts.
Usenet, in a lot of ways, was (and, yes, I mean "was"; Usenet is dead. Let me take that back. Usenet has become a file sharing network; Usenet as a discussion medium is dead) a big clique. There was a lot of useful information there, but there was also a lot of attacking of newbies and people with different opinions in a lot of forums. I remember a 1994 article (back when Usenet was the internet) about Usenet, comparing the behavior of members to the rites of street gangs. The whole "anti-AOL" and the resulting attitude which resulted in jokes like "Eternal September" (as I recall, AOL didn't have Usenet until mid-1994) was just one symptom of this cliqueish. IRC was another big clique; the pre-dot-com internet was very cliquey (actually; let me take that back. The Free Chess servers always had nice people; people could express their agression by kicking my butt at Chess instead of being a cliquey snob).
There are some things I miss about Usenet. I miss being able to use Leafnode to download a few Usenet newsgroups to my laptop over a modem, taking my laptop to the library and reading and posting to Usenet while studying; I would have my posted articles uploaded to Usenet that evening when I was online again. Usenet did not need a continuous online connection to be usable. Then again, more and more libraries have wireless internet access.
One of the positive benefits of the dot-com revolution, besides making it so that a given hot girl you see at the pool now has a web page, is that the internet is not the clique it was during the heyday of Usenet.
As an aside, I actually have on my webpage an archive of some Usenet articles which were never fully indexed on Google's archive:
http://www.samiam.org/alt.hackers.1995/
- Sam
[1] Actually, that's not true. As recently as nearly three years ago, I was able to set up a robot-responder [2] that chased off a kook from Usenet. That kook is probably lurking in Slashdot these days.
[2] I was very aware of nettiquette when writing the responder. It only responded once a week. It only respoded to people who responded to the kook. It only responded to a given email address once.
|
|
||||||||||||
