How to Get Started with Usenet in Three Steps

http://lifehacker.com/5601586/how-to-get-started-with-usenet-in-three-simple-steps

by rsamvit • 14 years ago

16 11 14 years ago

lifehacker.com

mhd3• 14 years ago

"Usenet is a wonderful service for finding and downloading digital media"

This sentence alone makes me feel old and sad.

cico71• 14 years ago

I agree, especially sad.

The most productive and efficient mean for discussions is now pretty much just a binary deposit for porn and copyrighted material.

I still can't believe everyone got away with non-threaded forums vs. newsgroups when the Internets became mainstream.

Also, Google had its own share when they acquired Dejanews and broke the search.

mhd3• 14 years ago

I think the two major factors that brought down Usenet are the focus on the web (i.e. most users not knowing that the WWW isn't the whole of the internet) and spam, loads of spam.

The weird thing is that mail actually managed to survive both.

I always wished that at least the NNTP protocol would prove to be more resilient. It would be a great secondary entry point for basically any online forum, similar to what RSS does for news feeds. Give me nntp://news.ycombinator.com, so that I could read and post via GNUS/Thunderbird/tin…

coroxout2• 14 years ago

"The most productive and efficient mean for discussions is now pretty much just a binary deposit for porn and copyrighted material."

Agreed, and definitely sad.

Last time I looked, even the binaries groups seemed to be mainly full of bots posting identical executable binaries (presumably malware) under thousands of different names per group, per day.

Although most text groups are now so dead that even the spammers have left. Maybe it could be reclaimed, if anyone could be bothered?

TheGateKeeper• 14 years ago

I remember back in the 90s time warner's news servers were only nntp://news-server/ and we could see our neighbor's computers via Windos 95/98's "Network Neighborhood".

Good times.

mxxx2• 14 years ago

I wish articles like this wouldn't ruin it for everybody else.

mxxx2• 14 years ago

They even mention the first rule! And then go on to ignore it.

sasoon• 14 years ago

Does anyone still uses Usenet for discussions? I guess I was too late with creating website for reading Usenet (just text, no binaries), something like Thunderbird Usenet reader in your browser. http://www.newswebreader.com

tallanvor• 14 years ago

Why post an article from 2010 that is significantly out of date?

How to Get Started with Usenet in Three Steps

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