I'm too young to have been a part of Usenet, but it seems to me that there's no good way to recreate the space described in the article without keeping most people out. My understanding is that the "Golden Age" of Usenet was possible mainly because only the people with the proper resources, knowledge, interest, and opportunity could even get to it in the first place. When you select a group of people from the general population with those traits and assets, of course you'll end up with a group that's more or less self-policing; the population will be small and largely homogeneous. It's hard to have conflict when your neighbors are almost identical to you, at least on a large scale.
In my estimation, the larger and broader a group is, the more it'll approximate human culture and interaction as a whole. It shouldn't be a surprise when the negative parts of those things (e.g. war, strife, hatred) emerge, just as much as the positive things (peace, fellowship, love).
"In my estimation, the larger and broader a group is, the more it'll approximate human culture and interaction as a whole. It shouldn't be a surprise when the negative parts of those things (e.g. war, strife, hatred) emerge, just as much as the positive things (peace, fellowship, love)."
Yes and no, I think. Physical space has some constraints that counter this in a way online spaces don't. Take a place like NYC, for instance, where there are so many people, from so many parts of the world, that it arguably begins to "approximate human culture and interaction as a whole." What you see here is that people start to subdivide the space and agree on expected behavior -- in public spaces, like the subway, people by and large try to reduce interactions. Then there are public spaces that are pseudo-private, like bars or cafes or restaurants, but each have their own understood rules -- at a bar you can start to talk up a stranger, at a restaurant you don't just walk to a random table and join in a conversation. There are also many private spaces -- apartments, or your own room in an apartment shared with roommates.
Contrast that with the typical online space, where it's not just that there are lots of people, but also no constraints. It's the equivalent of going on to a subway and yelling at someone about politics...
I don't think the problem with the modern internet is scale so much as a failure to build some constraints into its design. Everything is public at a very loud volume.
The constraint that no one in tech wants to consider is on full-text search.
If you want to regain the pseudo-privacy of physical spaces online, put your community’s conversations behind an authentication barrier and disable full text search of conversations.
Search engine indexing is what turns a pseudo-private space into a humiliating-public one.
It’s okay to let search engines index your forum’s existence, the sub forums it contains, and their descriptions. But do not let them index participants or conversations - either by subject, by participants, or by content. And do not offer full text search of post content to authenticated members. It’s okay to index keyword tags, but that’s it.
If you do this, you will regain the semi-anonymity that made the early Internet possible to enjoy. If you don’t, you will continue to suffer the trolls and abuse that full-text search enabled in the mid-90s (see also DejaNews, X-No-Archive: Yes, and Google’s purchase of DejaNews).
EDIT: If you truly feel that full-text search is so valuable that it must not be withheld, you have to do a lot of things to defend against abuse attackers - for example: charge money for search credits, deduct credits when they choose to reveal the text of results, warn users that their searches will be monitored for abuse, require users to be in good standing with paid membership and posting activity for at least 90 days, etc. Otherwise trolls will just use stolen cards to perform full content searches to identify users to harass and then report their findings back to a central forum. They may still do that after all the above criteria, but they’ll have to work excruciatingly hard at it. Yeah, they could manually scrape the site, but you can defend against that too (“you’ve participated on 12 days, so you’re allowed to view 12 days of old content” is a good simple test).
I broadly agree that infinite perfect archival, and searchability of that archive, make an online discussion effectively public forever, subject to broadcast forever.
But, even if you disable search, disable history, there's the fundamental fact that _anyone_ can record everything they see, easily and silently. You can't just have a private authenticated space, you need to be able to personally trust every single person you let in that space.
At that point, the features around archiving or search are a bit moot.
"It's impossible to stop a truly determined attacker, so we'd better not take any steps to fend off the less-determined attackers" is a terrible approach to building safe spaces. Some applications of that logic:
- We shouldn't bother checking for characteristics of credit card fraud at transaction time, because a determined attacker might get a fraudulent card through.
- We shouldn't bother checking IDs at bars, because a determined attacker might get a fake ID through.
- We shouldn't bother trying to prevent email spam, because a determined attacker might get a spam message through.
- We shouldn't bother making laws against recording people without their consent, because a determined attacker might do so anyways.
Please construct a more plausible argument than "it's ultimately hopeless". I'm willing to consider alternatives, but I'm not willing to consider fatalism.
I apologize, I may have made my point a bit unclearly.
I don't argue that "it's ultimately hopeless". I think, with effort, it's quite possible to create a pseudo-private safe space online.
I just think that the bulk of your benefit comes from vetting the intentions and judgement of your participants, and not from technological means like removing search.
If you're able to trust your participants, technological means can be like a simple fence/lock, keeping honest people honest, but don't otherwise add a ton of extra benefit.
If you're not able to trust your participants, removing search will help _some_, but it might not be enough.
Three of the four items you list work because the government will use force against those who break the rule which prevents rampant abuse. If you want a government run and legally protected safe space then sure. I suspect most people talking about them don't actually want that.
As noted above, fatalism is an uninspiring argument here. "This won't work because you can't use force against those who break the rules" is framing-by-assumption that success is either all or nothing. Success is not all-or-nothing when it comes to creating safe spaces. If you take steps and someone works very hard to break through your steps, they will probably succeed. That does not implicitly guarantee failure, especially if success is defined as "safety improved" rather than "safety guaranteed".
The illusion of safety is dangerous because it makes people act in ways that ultimately make them even less safe once the illusion is broken. The current issues with social media posts coming back to bite people after years is a perfect example. It works until it doesn't and then you're in the deep end of the pool realizing you don't know how to swim.
The damage done by the items on your list is mostly limited to the single attacker.
If it was just "determined attacker can do a search, and use the results privately" it wouldn't be a big deal. But they can then spread the result to everyone else in the world in a way that almost negates the barriers.
The recording option is closer, but search can be done retroactively, which makes a huge difference.
My own opinion is that if these messages are on public newsgroups/forums/mailing-lists, then they should remain public. Those who do not wish to make them known all the time should use private communication (or use a "non-archive" kind of communication, such as speech or live chat or whatever, but then you take a risk). (I do think that even (especially) for public "archival type" communications, you should perhaps be able to hide your identity from being tracked if you wish, whether by occasionally changing your account, using a different account name on different forums, or whatever else you might want to do.)
I find this argument really compelling. But, I also find it interesting to contrast this with HN's reactions to a court declaring web scraping legal a couple of weeks ago: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22180559
It is interesting but the proposal is entirely in line with that case as I recall. This issue was LinkedIn was complaining about scrapping of publicly reachable sites. And this new proposal is to keep the contents of discussions unarchived behind a login.
In some jurisdictions it's illegal to record a verbal conversation without all parties's consent. It's interesting that you don't often see anyone suggesting extending that right to online conversations.
I personally believe that stems from the popular social platforms forcing you to give up your controlling interest in copyright, preventing you from suing a troll forum for republication of your protected works without your consent, since you openly divested yourself of that right when you tweeted.
Under US law anyways, it is absolutely not okay to republish a written conversation without permission under copyright law to do so, unless you fall under the "fair use" exemptions. It is safe to say that most forms of attack would not pass a "fair use" test in the courts. So if more people were to sue over copyright violations and demand the unmasking of who posted and/or those who operate, that would certainly go a long ways towards resolving that imbalance.
Sadly, it's a very expensive process, and it's very cheap to violate copyright.
Do you want to improve SEO or do you want a safe semi-private public space?
If you permit full text search of content, you permit abusers to discover and harass your members, because they can just sign up to find out who posted something once full text search discovers it.
> Contrast that with the typical online space, where it's not just that there are lots of people, but also no constraints.
I feel like you're right about some communities, and wrong about others, and it's interesting to distinguish the two, because I don't think this is a distinction anyone usually bothers to make.
There are some communities where the same community divides its activity across multiple channels. Your average "same small group of people, different channels" Slack or Discord server is this way. IRC communities also usually end up this way after they grow to sufficient size, forking off channels of #foo-offtopic, #foo-announce, #foo-help, etc. phpBB forums are/were well-known for their structure of forums with subforums (where most forum admins would set up even more subforums than anyone needed, just because they could) but where there were certainly always separate "news" and "chat" and "on-topic" forums.
But other "communities" (more like societies, I suppose?) like Reddit, or Usenet, or Twitter, do basically none of this constraint-based splitting. You'll get topic-based splitting, but this doesn't change the tone of the conversation at all. It's less like being in a separate place with its own rules, and more like just having your conversation tagged with a topic so that people can find conversations like that.
I find that the only time this type of community/society seems to work, is when it generates entirely coincidental non-connected member subgraphs, i.e. when its members aren't just a random sampling of the larger community/society's membership, but rather mostly their own cultural enclave that happens to use the community/society's social network as a gathering place. Then they can have (probably mostly implicit) rules that are different from the free-for-all of the larger society's.
There are also [sub-]communities with specific explicit rules, like Wikipedia, or /r/AskHistorians/. I feel like these aren't really relevant to the question, because the explicit rules often cause a selection effect in the membership who bothers posting, such that it's not much different to just picking those particular people and saying that only they can post. So you can't really use them as an example of how to solve the problem of general Internet discourse being shitty.
>I don't think the problem with the modern internet is scale so much as a failure to build some constraints into its design.
Can you speak more concretely what you mean here?
Are you talking about technical "constraints" into protocols such as "http" or "TCPIP"? Or constraints into DNS? Or constraints on HTML markup language?
What would an "internet technical architecture designed to prevent negativity" actually look like? Is there an example repo on github or a computer science research paper showing the algorithms that would satisfy this ideal?
I'm not sure -- in the physical space, a lot of the constraints are social, but they emerged in the context of physical constraints. You could, for example, walk into a restaurant and start haranguing the people there, but generally people don't. Without even raising the possibility of the police being called, there's a whole set of inputs the would-be haranguer can see and respond to -- the facial expressions and other body language of disapproval by the others in the restaurant, the sudden change in noise patterns in the room as all the private conversations ceased and everyone shifted their attention to the disruption, etc. Such social signals are lacking or extremely muted in non-physical settings. Is there a way to bring similar social signals to the online world? Maybe some equivalent will emerge as we grow accustomed to being online (though, given how poorly people drive despite cars being a thing for several generations, I'm skeptical of our ability to fully adapt our social systems to some kinds of technology).
Or to take another example of constraints -- if someone in a bar spreads a false rumor, that misinformation can quickly spread to all the patrons in the bar, but it's reach beyond that bar will be slow. By that time more factual information might also be circulating, and the damage of the false information blunted. Online, by contrast, misinformation spreads so much faster than factual information that it is often nearly impossible to counter.
I don't know what the solution exactly is here, but I feel that public spaces need to have more speedbumps. In the same way that people are jerks when they drive and the answer is often "less driving, and slower," I suspect that the answer to bad online social spaces is "less online, and slower," but I'm not sure what that looks like.
> I suspect that the answer to bad online social spaces is "less online, and slower," but I'm not sure what that looks like.
Kind of like how HN limits us to a handful of posts per day before the “you’re posting too much” roadblock, causing you to really think about what you have to say and whether you want to burn one of your budget on it. Usenet could have used something like that.
>if someone in a bar spreads a false rumor, that misinformation can quickly spread to all the patrons in the bar, but it's reach beyond that bar will be slow. By that time more factual information might also be circulating, and the damage of the false information blunted [...]
I think you're being a bit optimistic about physical spaces here. Rumor mills are as old as the hills. News spreads more slowly IRL, but that goes for truth as well as falsehood. You claim that misinformation spreads faster online than truth and imply this is different from IRL info, but I don't see why this should be the case. The same underlying reasons that favourite one message over another operate in both domains.
> Is there a way to bring similar social signals to the online world?
You're assuming that people will react to those signals by stopping (or not starting in the first place). Many of the most disruptive people look for those signals as their goal, because they want to be disruptive.
Think about people who will interpret any variation of "ugh" signals as "oooh, I've found the buttons to poke to get fun noises". If you want to solve this problem, that's a large part of the threat model.
Another angle on this is the economic models. Physical social spaces are generally social as a side effect -- it's not how they make money. People go to a restaurant or a bar because they want to be around other people, but bars an restaurants make their money by selling food and drink, not by selling a "social experience."
The economic models we've seen so far online are different -- the product is "be social here" and I think that's problematic. Few people want to pay just to hang out, online or off. But those selling this space have to make money somehow -- so if you're Facebook, you make your money by advertising to the people hanging out at your place, meaning to make more money you need to get more people to come be advertised to, or convince advertisers they're getting more value per ad (and so you start intrusively data mining your advertising targets).
Usenet somewhat has that division of space, in that it's divided up into thousands of individual newsgroups, each of which is (ostensibly) about a particular topic.
It's more like having thousands of parallel NYCs, each one focusing on just a specific subset of the overall culture. To your point, they're still public spaces though where anyone can come in and yell about their thing, that is undeniable (and it happened).
>Take a place like NYC, for instance, where there are so many people, from so many parts of the world, that it arguably begins to "approximate human culture and interaction as a whole."
Except people are a product of context, so putting them into a new context creates a new breed, the new yorker, of which no human being aspires to.
The zeitgeist definitely changed as the general public gained access. Prior to wide availability conversations were close to Hacker News posts in that people were mindful to be constructive and meaningfully contribute to conversations. But that was only in the macro - there were still pockets of poor behavior and even groups dedicated to different standards, notably the alt tree was meant to be looser and groups like alt.flame were no-holds-barred.
Similar to modern-day memes, one of the alt.flame threads inspired a tshirt (which I still have, somewhere) sporting the quote "Go jump in a goddamn volcano, you f.... cave newt." And like memes of today you need some cultural literacy to get the reference, much less for it to be funny.
And keep in mind that HN is only able to be the way it is because of constant, vigilant moderation.
The Internet has simply grown too large over the past couple of decades for any unmoderated public space to not be taken over by people who don't care about community norms, individual bad actors, organized invasions, and psyops.
Usenet could handle the first two in small doses: people who don't care about community norms will eventually learn or leave, bad actors will get bored of trolling, and persistent individuals can be killfiled. But both of those two flooding in in large groups can kill a community. If bad actors harass and attack every new person every time they post something, the community can't grow. and enough people in a community who disregard the existing norms will simply cause the Overton Window to shift, establishing a new normal. And a killfile isn't a large-scale solution: when you have to have a triple-digit killfile just to get past the noise and actually see the useful discussion, the community is dead.
Usenet on the other hand has never been resilient against coordinated activity. The Meow Wars were one of the most deleterious things to ever happen to Usenet back in the day, and I'm sure it contributed a lot to people abandoning Usenet for moderated web forums.
Now that the Internet has had 20 more years to further develop invasion techniques, and the invading forces are even larger and more malignant than ever, unmoderated communities can't survive unless they're invisible. Even heavily-moderated communities have trouble handling incoming raids from 4chan and 8chan.
And then you have the subtle psyops, groups stealthily infiltrating others in order to promote an agenda. Imagine a coordinated effort to have new people join a newsgroup for a TV show and slowly push the Overton Window towards normalizing antisemitism. This is hard to detect and root out even in a place with moderators (see: Stormfront's psyop in /r/videos), and unmoderated spaces are completely helpless against this kind of assault.
>Usenet on the other hand has never been resilient against coordinated activity. The Meow Wars were one of the most deleterious things to ever happen to Usenet back in the day, and I'm sure it contributed a lot to people abandoning Usenet for moderated web forums.
>Now that the Internet has had 20 more years to further develop invasion techniques, and the invading forces are even larger and more malignant than ever, unmoderated communities can't survive unless they're invisible. Even heavily-moderated communities have trouble handling incoming raids from 4chan and 8chan.
You really hit the nail on the proverbial head... curated or moderated forums are really the only thing that can work in the face of so much noise, but without passionate ownership as we have here on HN or possibly a paid position of some kind I'm not sure what the answer is. PGP's web of trust model sort of addressed this but failed to embrace the nuance of human social interaction needed in modern society.
Google's circles kind of tried to do the right thing but failed there too. What I mean in a practical example is if my father who describes himself as slightly more conservative than Gengis Khan wants to send me some conservative screed that's fine I can handle it, but I don't want that to be generally consumable content in my "feed" and associated to me for all my friends to see, particularly as my views may be (and often are) wildly different. I need to firewall people based on multidimensional levels of interest and trust.
I abandoned Facebook over a decade ago because their business model is antithetical to that way of thinking and their regular and involuntary updates to privacy policy and settings simply clashed too much with my needs. A practical example at the time was something like my wife didn't want photos of her shared with anyone but family, but I had friended people she'd never heard of and FB let them or possibly even friends of friends see her in my posts. Since I couldn't guarantee perfect separation of interests thanks to their meddlesome tweaking I deleted facebook.
I suppose the trolls can claim a kind of victory because at least for me it's just easier to tune out and withdraw rather than slog through the noise.
I think you are correct, and inconveniently, the principle doesn't apply to only USENET.
The public square serves a vital purpose in public discourse and society at large, but it isn't actually where great ideas are born; it's where they're tested. Traditionally, salons and small groups are where great ideas are born and polished before being presented to a public. Otherwise, you're fighting a low signal-to-noise ratio that hampers motion.
Both are necessary. Neither is superior. They are complements.
I'd hived the idea from elsewhere, and this piece discusses it in the context of trying to form a new community (largely failed), but the ideas may interest:
Salons in 18th and 19th century Europe generally revolved around one or a few wealthy patrons of the salon who not only funded its operations but also attracted the luminaries and intellectuals to its doors.
The analogue of patrons on the internet would be forum moderators, website owners, group creators, etc. But only to a certain extent because the owners and maintainers of an online forum are far less personally engaged with the conversation and daily goings on.
Of course the scale is much larger on the internet, and we don't actually deal with one another face to face. Banter is usually restricted as well and discussions are highly focused, in contrast to salons which were more of a social club.
I don't think online forums are the equivalent of saloons. I believe saloons were fairly scarce, thus if you got banned from one, you could not simply pop in another or make another account. The penalty for breaking the rules was fairly high and that made people leave some of their "crazy" at home.
A coffee shop is pretty much the modern version. In England coffee houses played the role in the Enlightenment. [1] Salons were more associated with France and were a bit different but related concept. [2]
Is a coffee shop really the modern version -- in context?
I think the whole relevance of the "coffee house" in the Enlightenment was that it was a space where different people were talking to each other and sharing ideas.
Does that happen in coffee shops anymore? Do strangers talk about more than pleasantries, if that?
> Does that happen in coffee shops anymore? Do strangers talk about more than pleasantries, if that?
Even in Vienna, which is somewhat of a self proclaimed coffee house capital of the world you can't really have any prolong conversations with strangers to exchange ideas. Beer houses of today are probably more suitable for discussions.
People do meet and have discussions in Starbucks. You're probably right though that it's not really the same thing--if only because there are so many ways to have discussions that don't require physically sitting at the same table.
I want to give a tongue-and-cheek answer and say "Discord and Slack," but more realistically I think you're right. Coffee shop, living room meet-up, face-to-face interactions among peers.
Everyone thinks there was a golden age in a lot of platforms where a small group enjoyed a short amount of time together. When I started lurking around HN in 2010 they were saying the same thing, Reddit was identical, AOL, Internet forums, Usenet, BBS etc...
I think they're not wrong either.
I was rather invested in what used to be a small subreddit that is now huge.
It's a shitshow now sometimes but back then most of the posters were regulars and could recognized each-other.
Moderating was a lot easier and context and what have you could be taken into account.
I know i could trust one person's expertise, that another often would take a specific stance, another that was always an asshole but very careful to stay on the edge of getting banned and what was technically allowed generally got downvoted.
There was space for public meta discussions about sources (not)accepted by the community that actually had an impact, etc
Experiencing the transition has made me value small communities much much more.
Small communities - you might as well say community communities. Not picking on you, just agreeing, to the point of asserting that "community" can't exist past a certain scale. Dunbar's number and all that.
Unsubscribing from any subreddit over ~50K users (incl defaults) really improves the reddit experience.
The one problem specifically with reddit and other 'frontpage' type communities is that they don't surface where the actual conversation is in the way vbulletin or other forum software does. With the old reddit code, however, you could go to https://old.reddit.com/r/subreddit-name/comments and see a comment view of the entire subreddit. This would bring the current conversation to the top regardless where it is in the standard view. Really improves the experience for smaller subreddits that don't have much traffic otherwise.
Unfortunately they seem to have removed the feature in the new code. You can still use it in old per above however.
> With the old reddit code, however, you could go to [...] and see a comment view of the entire subreddit.
Depending on the newsreader, you could essentially get the same thing by having the thread with the most recent comment move to the to of the thread list. Then, expanding the thread would show new comments in bold font to distinguish then from ones you've already read or previously downloaded.
Being able to see new posts is something that's lacking in reddit and HN (though reddit does provide this feature on subs you moderate or have reddit gold).
The tried and true thread model from usenet, email and vbulletin-style forums leads to long-standing topical conversations that easily stretch days and weeks, commonly months and sometimes years.
The continuous fountain of content model at reddit/hn/digg/etc is good for retinal adhesion but not so good for exchange of ideas.
Right, the unifying thing there is basically about community size. The same thing happens offline. The fact that you had a highly educated user base made a difference too. Early internet users either at a university or affluent and interested enough to pay a lot of money for that use (pre-flat rate AOL.)
A lot of the challenges today are related to community size. Also, a lot of the problems are either solvable or already solved, but just relate to platforms wanting maximum user growth/monetization so they disregard those early learned lessons. Just take a look at the stuff Randall Farmer has written. These are lessons dating back to easy online communities in the 1980s.
I think you're mistaking "educated" for "similar". The community don't necessarily have to be educated, but it helps a lot if they're broadly similar in some way. Same background, same age, same goal, same education, same interests, something.
(And lets be honest, the reason size is a problem is because beyond a certain point, you can't do human moderation).
I genuinely miss my LAN forum though. I've spent a lot of time talking to different people from my city there, playing video games and just socializing. Ten or twenty years later we've met each other a few times in real life, and the nostalgia is strong in everybody I see.
I was heartbroken when I've realized that one of the forums was hosted by an ISP that is no more. I've got some content archived, but damn did I feel weird like some part of my life is gone, wiped off the face of the internet.
That was probably the beginning of the end even if it held on for quite a while after that. (And a lot of other changes were happening at the same time.) Especially outside the alt. hierarchy, which was always more of a free for all, real names usually associated with university, company, or government email addresses and a culture built around a certain exclusivity tended to keep flame wars and and other disruption to a manageable level.
That was the original "Me Too" movement. I remember all those Me Too posts popping up everywhere.
(AOL users were notorious for block quoting long parts of text they agreed with, and reposting with Me Too! above. It's like "This." but less hip, if that's possible.)
Spot-on. I was on Usenet for a bit in the 1980s, and loved it. After I was out of school, though, it was effectively unavailable to me until internet access opened up in the 1990s.
In the meantime, though, there was a similar but smaller network that operated in a similar fashion: FidoNet's Echomail system. For younger readers, FidoNet was a network of dialup BBS systems (usually single-user) with a central list of nodes distributed weekly. Echomail was an add-on that worked in much the same manner as Usenet; a message posted in a forum would be propagated to other systems sharing that forum. Strictly speaking, both still exist today, but like Usenet, FidoNet is a shadow of itself, and most FidoNet nodes are using the internet instead of dialup modems these days.
I recall FidoNet having a lot fewer problems with spam and bad actors than Usenet, though, mostly because troublesome nodes could and did get de-listed.
I am old enough to remember Usenet. All you needed was an Internet connection, a usenet client, and access to a usenet server.
Most ISPs provided usenet access just like they provided an e-mail address at the time. So it was no more difficult to be involved in usenet than it was to have e-mail.
In modern terms, usenet would be reddit if it was distributed (so anyone willing to set-up their own server could run a node and let people connect to it). But for end-users it was as simple as having an e-mail account and a client application on your computer.
During the "Golden Age" of Usenet, which I believe many people to consider to be pre-Eternal September, the number of Americans with any form of internet access was just a fraction of the population. I am finding varying figures online, but they seem to hover at <15% of the population of the United States.
Given the costs of that access and the costs of the computers. It was both a very small and a very specific type of person that was accessing Usenet at the time.
I've been digging up numbers over the past few years. In 1980 there were 2 million computers in the US, doubling every 2 years. By 2000, there were 168 million computers, only 6 doublings rather than the 10 the 1980 estimate would have provided. That suggests about 16 million users as of 1990, possibly 24-32 million by 1992.
As of 1995, total worldwide Internet usage (then largely in the US, though also Europe) was 16 millions. As of 2019 it's 4.5 billions.
Yeah I got my first modem in 1985 (hence the username). Anyone outside of academia was all BBS, not Internet back then. I’m shocked to hear Usenet even had 140k active users in 1988.
Oh man, I had a 300 baud modem for a very short time. Then my parents found out how much it'd cost to use it (long distance to nearest BBS or provider) and they sent it back. Ugh.
I did eventually get to use a 2400 baud modem though, and even ran my own BBS for a while. Fun days.
I think people do not appreciate just how expensive it was to get online.
In 1988 Compuserve (more than 250,000 subscribers) was charging $11 per hour, The Source charged $8 per hour, Delphi charged $6 per hour, and BIX was $9 per hour.
Long distance rates to BBS's were nasty, too. Thus the joy in finding any and all ways to get free calls. In ... 1992? i think it was I had a provider that offered dialup shell access for $8/hr on an 800 number, and that was the best legitimate price around for a good while. I built people networks off that box.
And that included intra-state long distance which could actually be even higher than inter-state calls. For quite a while I used a subscription BBS in a relatively nearby city. Phone calls were still expensive and there were all sorts of tricks/tools to minimize the time you spent online. (e.g. software that let you download new messages on specific boards and read/reply offline.)
That in itself was a significant enough barrier to entry for the general public. Most people prior to Eternal September were unaware that the internet existed, or falsely believed it could only be accessed by university students. And outside of the G10 countries getting online was a major technical barrier.
From my days on usenet (rest in peace, rec.arts.poems) one of the more obvious trolls had to resort to accessing the newsgroups via his local library, after he ran out of ISPs willing to take his money.
On the positive site, I know of one intercontinental marriage facilitated by RAP.
It's funny because I think this is true of most online communities I've joined. People will say on here things like "HN has changed now that its big" or "HN is not how it used to be", and I'm sure some would say the same of 4chan as well, and reddit, and probably even Facebook.
No, it never survived the late 90's campaigns against the RIAA trying to stop piracy at the ISP level. Thats when all the big ISPs yanked support, especially after alt.binaries was sharing damn near everything.
And they were big bandwidth sinks due to the distributed model usenet has, so it was easy for ISPs to yank the carpet and look at the immediate gains.
Usenet wasn't dependent on binaries groups in the 90's. There was plenty of active discourse. Non-commercial hosts could easily drop binary groups. Commercial providers were the ones stuck in a bind.
The massive cross-posting of troll threads in the late 90's is what helped kill it off. The lack of effective moderation controls is the biggest weakness of Usenet.
> RIAA ... especially after alt.binaries was sharing damn near everything
While this didn't help, I don't think it was a key factor for ISPs. Most ISP NNTP services didn't carry binary groups anyway for bandwidth cost reasons. There were some issues with groups that linked to where to find copyright covered material, but the RIAA and their ilk were going more for the direct sources at the time. The public list/pointer resources were actually useful to them as lists of places to chase down.
Of course this led to people paying for external NNTP services which did carry the binaries groups. These services were obvious targets for the RIAA and other such groups unlike the ISPs.
> they were big bandwidth sinks due to the distributed model usenet has
This was a far more important reason, even without carrying binaries groups Usenet could consume a large amount of bandwidth. As well as the incoming load, and the bandwidth used sending data to clients, back then modem access was common and NNTP lead to people leaving the line open to download a huge pile of stuff (most of which they'd discard without reading anyway) meaning ISPs would have to invest in more modem racks, impose unpopular limits, or be perpetually busy, any of which would lose them custom.
Another significant issue was the cost of building and maintaining the servers required too. To run an NNTP service for a noticeable amount of users with reasonable performance you needed an arrangement with impressive IO performance stats for the time, and the access patterns (constant & random) could be murderous to the drives, sometimes chewing through them as fast as they could be replaced.
Yeah, exactly. I worked for a small employer in the early mid-90's who maintained a NNTP feed (and had for years), and ultimately had to shut it down because it had basically become a giant unmanageable firehose of porn and piracy. The actual human-written text content had dropped down to the 1% level or worse.
Usenet died for the same reason Facebook won: people exploit "free" forums in ways that ruin the experience. It's simply not possible to have an unmoderated discussion environment in an unrestricted internet, which is why we're having this discussion on a moderated site.
I don't think the RIAA's efforts had much effect on Usenet, since in that time-frame the RIAA all but ignored Usenet. They were much more in shock-and-awe over Gnutella (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gnutella) at the time.
What I think led to the decline was at least a combination of:
1) an overrun of SPAM - Usenet was first to be hit by the spam flood, email SPAM came later as Usenet usage died off.
2) the 'newness' factor and the 'new shiny object' factor of the web drew away existing users, and resulted in new users never joining (i.e., pictures, fancy formatting, etc. all made plain text character Usenet posts look "old-fashioned"). And once you have a situation where new users don't join, and some number of existing users continue to depart, you are on a downward slope to disappearance.
Both of the above helped contribute to ISP's dropping NNTP service. Bandwidth costs for #1 (plus bandwidth if they were carrying alt.binaries.*) and a drop in NNTP usage due to #2. They (ISPs) no longer saw offering NNTP as a sales factor for obtaining subscribers, and once NNTP was no longer a "hook" to bring in subscribers, it was only a matter of time before they decided to just drop it entirely.
And of course ISP's dropping NNTP accelerated the issues around #2 above.
Another reason was due to the actions of former New York attorney general Andrew Cuomo in 2008 where he got several major ISPs to block access to Usenet newsgroups that were used to distribute child pornography[1]. IIRC, those ISPs discontinued Usenet service not too long after that.
There are a number of free text only usenet providers out there. Why couldn't the ISPs simply stop carrying the binary groups instead of discontinuing their usenet service entirely?
Who do you use? I had Cox because they were the only one left offering usenet (albeit capped).
I was a really late adopter to torrents because of my background in usenet, sometime around 2010 all the alt.binaries I used to frequent went dead or were broken with little par2 support.
It was a great time back in the early 2000s, though.
If I'm honest, I don't download as much as I used to, but I do miss the niche communities based on those groups, though. They have since moved to IRC but for the most part its all gone from what I can tell.
Cogeco in my case. No cap either, which is pretty cool.
Those little niche communities on usenet were what originally got me so excited about the internet. Both participating in ones that interested me and just exploring all sorts of interesting little communities.
The problem is that binaries are transferred in a non-binary manner. Base64 was the preferred way. Except it was also used to push images back and forth as well for pertinent conversations.
For any method of communication, you can transfer content that someone else tries to prevent.
Upper bounds on per-user bandwidth would help. Though for significant messages, one still has sock-puppet accounts (or aggregates of like-minded individuals with copies of the source message pooling their resources). And, of course, upper bounds create knock-on restrictions (should the system be allowed to transmit public-domain large-volume data? A bandwidth limit blocks that "valid" use too).
It's fun to game-theory how such limits can be broken.
Who cares about piracy? It exists over HTTP, too, and in a far greater volume than a modern USENET-equivalent could ever hope to achieve, and it's not like ISPs need to be sucked up to anymore: they've already taken their ball and went home on this matter, proverbially-speaking.
Unfortunately, technically banning binaries merely means binaries will be transferred in a more spacetime-inefficient manner.
You can mathematically prove atop Shannon's theorem that if the system can transmit comprehensible text information between two users, it can transmit binaries. Worst-case scenario, the users could use the text information layer to just say 'one, zero, one, one, zero, one' at each other, etc.
(Socially banning them can certainly "work," in the same sense that social banning works in any context: pushes it underground out of the moderators' lines of sight. Depending on what you're trying to accomplish, that can be good enough).
I have given this some consideration, and what I ended up with is super low tech: require a user registration where users can't just sign up for N accounts and limit all accounts to 10 MB a day. Too little to share any meaningful binary data and way more than a person can type in a day.
In my original consideration you could only sign up with government ID -- actually the original problem was what to do prior to the day reddit banned your community, so that you could keep going.
In either case it was pretty trivial to picky bag of existing IDs, if I ever solve that for the general case, you will find out.
many interesting usenet groups were long dead before that due to spam... the things you mention are more like pulling life support than the cause of death
That's a bit ahistorical. The "September that never ended"[0] (aka "Eternal September") was in 1993, the Canter and Siegel Usenet spam[1] was sent the following April. The DejaNews acquisition[2] wan't until 2001.
I feel like this is a broadly applicable human phenomenon akin to Isaac Aasimov's "Psychohistory" in the Foundation series. It also feels easy enough to capture that someone's already done the research on it.
HN is kinda dying as a community, though moderation isn't the whole story. There are also some long-standing bugs, and misbehaviours of the voting system.
Being able to downvote replies without any refutation, to me, seems like a massive mistake; it just teaches people not to say anything interesting, because they won't get a response anyway, even when they're wrong in a subtle or interesting way.
The formatting available to users is maybe close to the right amount, but the implementation is broken (for example, it doesn't end URLs when it sees >, so you end up with broken URLs when you go out of your way to protect them). It could probably also do with proper first-class block quotations, people end up putting them in <pre> blocks or italics, and it's not always clear.
I've been here almost 10 years now, and I don't think so. I think the overall quality has remained about the same.
> Being able to downvote replies without any refutation, to me, seems like a massive mistake
If downvoting is going to be used just to express disagreement, I agree it's too easy to do. (A number of commenters have posted links to comments by pg where he has said that's what downvoting is for, but I still think it's too broad.)
If downvoting is going to be used only for posts that are seen as adding no value to the discussion or the site, that's a much narrower category, and it doesn't really lend itself to "refutation".
> it just teaches people not to say anything interesting
The way around that is to build up enough karma that you don't care if you get downvoted. Of course, then you have to police yourself by not saying unpopular things just to be difficult, but only if you genuinely think they need to be said and are adding something to the discussion and the site. But people who have built up enough karma are going to have learned to do that anyway.
> Of course, then you have to police yourself by not saying unpopular things just to be difficult, but only if you genuinely think they need to be said and are adding something to the discussion and the site.
It seems like you're impugning their motives here.
Do you honestly think that most people whose thoughtful comments are downvoted are engaging in bad faith, “saying unpopular things just to be difficult”?
> Do you honestly think that most people whose thoughtful comments are downvoted are engaging in bad faith, “saying unpopular things just to be difficult”?
No. Remember that I was talking about a particular subset of users: the ones who have enough karma that they don't care if they get downvoted. In order to get that much karma, such a user will have already made a lot of thoughtful comments that were made in good faith. I was just observing that, once a user has enough karma not to care if they get downvoted, the feedback mechanism that regulated their behavior up to that point--karma--no longer has much impact. When put in that kind of position, it has been known to happen that a person might change their behavior. But I would hope and expect that a change for the worse under those circumstances would be rare.
I guess I just disagree that the behaviour required to gain a karma cushion is "good", or "better" than the behaviour that stagnates or moderately shrinks karma.
I personally think that playing in to the echo chamber is a subtler form of abuse; making the people in the community progressively more unhealthy by carefully avoiding anything that looks or feels challenging.
I don't think a healthy community is one which encourages people to fat eachother up on sweet nothings and uncontroversial shower thoughts.
It seems to me that the most popular replies are often the ones which present an obvious, widely-held opinion as though it's controversial outside the group; which enables holders of the majority opinion to think of themselves as underdogs and free thinkers.
I think a lot of harm is done by rewarding people for defending the majority opinion as though it's controversial.
> I guess I just disagree that the behaviour required to gain a karma cushion is "good", or "better" than the behaviour that stagnates or moderately shrinks karma.
It seems like you think that upvotes are not being used to identify posts that add value, but simply as a signal of agreement with groupthink. Am I reading that right?
Also, do you think that downvotes are similarly misused? (I.e., to slap down controversial but value-add posts?)
My own experience is that the posts of mine that have gotten lots of upvotes have been thoughtful ones, not simple "party line" ones, and the posts of mine that have gotten downvotes have been thoughtful ones as well--just thoughtful ones that the majority disagreed with but didn't have any good refutations of. But my experience might not be typical. It is certainly more plausible on its face that both upvotes and downvotes would be misused, than that downvotes would be misused but upvotes would not.
> It seems like you think that upvotes are not being used to identify posts that add value, but simply as a signal of agreement with groupthink. Am I reading that right?
I didn't say anything about upvotes or groupthink, I know that's for sure. If you would like to understand what I've said better, your first step should be to read it for the first time.
There is nothing wrong with upvoting something you agree with, that makes a lot of sense. What I take issue with is downvoting something sincere because you disagree with it, but without supporting an alternative position. If the only signal is "this comment deserves to be gray because people disagree with it in their own personal ways", then nothing is learned.
> I didn't say anything about upvotes or groupthink
Ok, fine, if you insist on my quoting your exact words, here is how you described what you call "the behavior required to get a karma cushion":
"I personally think that playing in to the echo chamber is a subtler form of abuse; making the people in the community progressively more unhealthy by carefully avoiding anything that looks or feels challenging.
I don't think a healthy community is one which encourages people to fat eachother up on sweet nothings and uncontroversial shower thoughts."
This is what you think upvotes mean, since getting a lot of upvotes is how you get a lot of karma. I don't see the point of quibbling over whether "groupthink" is a valid description of this; the point is that none of the behaviors you describe are using upvotes to identify posts that add value.
> If you would like to understand what I've said better, your first step should be to read it for the first time.
Please dispense with the snark. As far as I can tell, you are the one who is failing to read what you wrote, not me. Or at least you are failing to draw obvious inferences from what you wrote, like the fact that getting a lot of karma requires getting a lot of upvotes, so by describing the behaviors you think get you a lot of karma, you are describing behaviors that are rewarded by upvotes.
> There is nothing wrong with upvoting something you agree with, that makes a lot of sense.
It does? How does this square with the extremely negative portrayal you gave of the behavior required to get a karma cushion, which I quoted above?
> What I take issue with is downvoting something sincere because you disagree with it, but without supporting an alternative position.
I agree with this, but I don't see how it relates to "the behavior required to get a karma cushion". To get a lot of karma, it's not enough to just avoid downvotes.
Not all upvotes, but specifically writing things for the sake of avoiding downvotes or getting upvotes. If you write things mainly because you predict people will agree with you (and thus, at least not downvote), then I feel that's not going to make for particularly good discourse. I'm still mainly talking about downvotes here, I don't think the problems should be solved by changing the behaviour of upvotes.
> none of the behaviors you describe are using upvotes to identify posts that add value
Yes, because I'm concerned about the bad outcomes of what can be described as an economy based on avoiding unexplained downvotes.
> It does? How does this square with the extremely negative portrayal you gave of the behavior required to get a karma cushion, which I quoted above?
It squares with it just fine, but you have again misunderstood the point I am making, that other people seem to have understood just fine.
Consider making an effort to interpret what I've said in the ways that make sense, rather than searching for ways to interpret it that make it sound inconsistent.
P.S. you are yourself and not anyone else, so don't try to say what other people think, as though you know it for a fact.
> specifically writing things for the sake of avoiding downvotes or getting upvotes
Now that I've cleared up my earlier misstatement (see my other post about 7 or 8 minutes before this one), let me go back and take another look at the underlying point here, which is: how should upvotes and downvotes be used?
We agree that downvotes should not be used just to express disagreement. But to me, that seems to imply that upvotes should not be used just to express agreement (whereas you said you think it's fine for upvotes to be used just to express agreement). Even if people aren't specifically trying to write things for the sake of avoiding downvotes or getting upvotes, if upvotes are used just to express agreement, I think that creates the same kind of problem that using downvotes just to express disagreement does. People respond to incentives even if that response is unconscious.
To me, both upvotes and downvotes should be used in response to whether or not a post adds value to the discussion; a post can do that even if you don't agree with it, and it can fail to do that even if you agree with it. I think a downvote should mean "this post adds no value to the discussion and makes it harder to have a value-added discussion by adding noise". And an upvote should mean "this post adds above average value to the discussion".
In short, while I agree that usage of downvotes needs to be fixed, I don't think it stops with downvotes; I think usage of upvotes needs to be fixed too (if we assume that you are correct and that upvotes are mainly being used just to express agreement).
> We agree that downvotes should not be used just to express disagreement.
We do not agree on that, I did not say that. I think that downvotes are a perfectly good way to express disagreement. My one real caveat is that downvoting should only be an option when you have provided or upvoted a reply to the comment you are downvoting. That is, it is reasonable to downvote something you disagree with, but only if you disagree for a reason that has been expressed.
You may have your own ideas about upvotes, I think they're more or less okay. There are obvious downsides to upvote systems, but they serve a legitimate purpose, and there's no really straightforward alternative.
> specifically writing things for the sake of avoiding downvotes or getting upvotes
I agree that this is a bad thing, and I see that I did not properly describe the strategy I was advising. I did not mean "write enough things specifically tailored to whatever is going to get upvotes and avoid downvotes, so that you have a lot of karma". I meant "write enough things that add genuine value to the site, and eventually you will have enough karma that you don't care about getting downvoted". But I wasn't clear about that, which is my bad.
> you have again misunderstood the point I am making
Which point? Your point that downvotes should not be used just to express disagreement? I understood that point just fine from the start, and what's more, I agreed with it.
What I was having trouble understanding was your description of the kinds of posts that get upvotes; I now realize that's because I misdescribed the strategy I was advising, so we were talking at cross purposes. See above.
> that other people seem to have understood just fine.
Nobody else is posting at all in this subthread (the one starting with my original response to your "HN is kinda dying as a community", it's just you and me. So I don't know what "other people" you are talking about.
> Consider making an effort to interpret what I've said in the ways that make sense, rather than searching for ways to interpret it that make it sound inconsistent.
> P.S. you are yourself and not anyone else, so don't try to say what other people think, as though you know it for a fact.
Consider that maybe the actual issue had nothing to do with any of these things. See above.
I made a generic, non-specific comment about people using religion to manipulate and swindle a few weeks ago. As expected it got -4 because it had too many trigger words for the snowflakes. Then it was flagged into oblivion. I don't mind harsh downvote even when unmerited. What shouldn't be allowed is groupthink as an excuse for completely erasing non-incendiary discourse.
I wouldn’t say HN is going down hill but one thing that I’ve noticed more of is downvoting because people disagree with the comment.
That was never the intention behind downvoting privileges if I remember right. Down voting exists to bury flippant, inappropriate or insulting comments.
We really cramp quality discourse when we automatically hit down just because we disagree.
I think this is a reflection of the culture at large, online and off, where so many argue in bad faith or refuse to accept basic facts as true.
In online communities where so many are anonymous or psuedo-anonymous, it becomes easier and more mentally healthy to downvote an opposing position than to reply with a well reasoned response only to find out your dealing with a bot or someone who insists the sky is green.
I'm not sure how we fix this, though the signal to noise ratio is higher here than many other sites, so I keep coming back.
>That was never the intention behind downvoting privileges if I remember right. Down voting exists to bury flippant, inappropriate or insulting comments.
PG said it was OK once, because upvoting for agreement is also OK, and now it's permanently baked into the culture, despite the obviously incorrect assumption that merely because the actions are symmetrical, their effects are also symmetrical.
It's also funny that people have been saying HN has been going downhill or "turning into Reddit" since the beginning. It's common enough that it is (or used to be) specifically barred in the guidelines.
I think there's a tendency for many people to consider everyone who came to a culture before them to be authentic, and everyone who came after them to be the ones destroying it. The Eternal September effect is real, but it also panders to nostalgia and a sense of entitlement that says things were better when we and our culture were more relevant.
You can't downvote replies to your own replies, that's the one I'm aware of. Maybe there's another level based on karma that was introduced since I got where I am.
As someone who’s been on HN for about 9 years, it’s funny to read this. I don’t see how it’s gotten any worse during my time here.
I think HN’s community is fantastic but you either get it or you don’t. I really enjoy the signal to noise ratio and I’m happy that silly comments and jokes are downvoted or moderated.
I read HN with showdead on and personally I think the moderation is spot-on.
I get HN's community, and I enjoy it. That said, I often think twice about posting anything meaningful; I know I'll get a bit frustrated when I put myself out there in good faith, and people have nothing to say, but downvote anyway.
I know that some very bright and lovely people have been totally turned off of the place by this, and this behaviour of the system doesn't really help anything.
> I read HN with showdead on and personally I think the moderation is spot-on.
I too use showdead, I think the moderation is generally good (though I think at times I've been handled somewhat unfairly). The times when there's a dead post that I don't think should be dead, it's usually from a person who has worn out his welcome with other comments. This is why I say moderation isn't the main problem, contrary to the parent reply.
> That said, I often think twice about posting anything meaningful; I know I'll get a bit frustrated when I put myself out there in good faith, and people have nothing to say, but downvote anyway.
I've notice more and more people say this and it's a sentiment I feel myself too. Personally I don't come on HN half as much as I used to because I just don't fancy putting myself out there when, at times, it can be a flip of the coin whether your gain or lose "points" over it.
I know it's just numbers and it shouldn't bother me; but it does. Judging by the comments others have posted, I'm not unique in that regard either.
In any case, HN will keep rolling on albeit the signal to noise ratio will gradually worsen over time as people get more apathetic about spending their time writing a high value post.
>Personally I don't come on HN half as much as I used to because I just don't fancy putting myself out there when, at times, it can be a flip of the coin whether your gain or lose "points" over it.
I just accept that Hacker News culture can be vitriolic and petty and that anything I say that's even mildly controversial to someone might be downvoted, and I'll probably never know why, beyond the obvious fact that at least one person disagreed for some reason. It's much easier to participate here once you stop caring about it, though.
My account's even been rate-limited now, and rather than letting that serve its intended purpose of driving me away from the site altogether, it just helps me focus on writing better comments which sometimes get downvoted even more than they otherwise might.
Like the movie says, it's Chinatown. This aspect of Hacker News culture is never going to change.
>The times when there's a dead post that I don't think should be dead, it's usually from a person who has worn out his welcome with other comments. This is why I say moderation isn't the main problem, contrary to the parent reply
It really annoys me when I see this happen cross subject/thread. Someone's opinion about zoning has no impact on the correctness of their opinion about low level disk IO.
With a minimum level of karma, you can vouch for a dead comment which will resurrect it. You click on the time the comment was posted and then click vouch.
I think the “drive-by downvoting from people with nothing to say” problem could be solved by requiring down voters to type even a short rationale. Good ol Slashdot did this well 20 years ago with the “reason” drop-down you needed to select from when downvoting.
I'm occasionally surprised by downvotes and wished I knew why they were issued, but overall I would rather permit silent downvotes than have every disagreement spawn another comment.
The tit-for-tat exchange of conflicting earnest opinions has degraded many other discussion systems. My wife used to comment a lot on a newspaper that used Facebook comments. Some articles would have hundreds of comments, with 3/4 of them coming from a small core of people rehashing fundamental differences of opinion.
Without downvoting, many people can't ignore bad comments because "someone is wrong on the internet." Leaving bad posts untouched looks like an implicit signal of community approval. But countering predictable comments with predictable responses makes the whole discussion worse.
My favorite comment chains here are ones where I upvote the original, then the counterpoint, then the refutation to the counterpoint; everyone in the chain is making good, fresh arguments or observations.
My least favorite comment chains are ones where someone opines aggressively, which spawns a sarcastic reply, which leads to a heated response... In those cases I'm happy that I can downvote everyone involved without having to add any more text.
4chan partially solved this problem by using inside knowledge to identify 'newf*gs' and push them out. Triforce, fingerboxes, etc. The weirdly complex boardculture was self sustaining because new people couldn't even keep up with the conversation without lurking for a year or so.
And then of course, the newcomers started taking the abrasive and politically incorrect culture at face value.
4chan has largely been a place where people can express counter-culture views. Whoever and whatever could not be criticized in public, that was the place to do it it.
The left is currently unable to directly admit to themselves that they are in power (they teeter on awareness of it: where once they were concerned about tone-policing and voices being silenced they now say things like "deplatforming works") in the universities, the news, the entertainment media, and so on. And so 4chan (although largely /b/ and /pol/) is the place where you can tweak the noses of the left just as it was once the place to tweak the noses of the Scientologists, the right, and so on. Should the pendulum actually swing the other way, you would see the shift.
My archives of the chans dates from 2005 onward. You can see the expression of what was "naughty" shift one way or another tacking into any political or cultural wind.
In any case, 4chan's "solution" has been to simply embrace the idea of Eternal September and say, "it's up to YOU to ignore things you do not like." Having watched various communities succumb to stifling moderation like HOAs descending into controlling nightmares, I would say that there's a very crude wisdom to the approach.
"Any community that gets its laughs by pretending to be idiots will eventually be flooded by actual idiots who mistakenly believe that they're in good company."
4chan was started by people too awful for Something Awful, and I mean you're self-aware enough to recognise that they used slurs to scare people off, so you _know_ it was always a horrible place.
My impression is that 4chan did a Mother Night on itself. They started with ironic Hitler memes and edgy teenage shit, but eventually people took that seriously and all that were left were edgelords and nazis.
I know it's comforting to believe that there were never any real racists on 4chan until relatively recently, and that it was all naive shitposters and kids making edgy memes, but it's far more likely that actual racists have always hidden behind the pretense of 4chan's ironic culture and anonymity, and have always been active there.
In the olden days you could read between the lines to see people mocking the very culture their post was supposedly glorifying. Later this nuance disappeared as the board was overrun with actual Neo-Nazis.
The folklore was that the neo-nazi forum Stormfront saw an opportunity and started astroturfing legit Nazi views on boards like /new/, causing this transition (and thus changing the course of western politics for years to come).
I never looked deeply into it, but I don't think the transition happened entirely naturally.
On the flip side, they were only "alive" because people -- like me, like you -- posted to them. So they're dead, but like Lazarus they can be resurrected by commanding them to be alive, through the simple mechanic of using them, and encouraging others to come participate.
Something like that happened back when Slashdot was bought by Dice.com, and lot of users just up and left. Some people started building new, similar sites, but a lot of them agreed to go to Usenet newsgroup comp.misc, which had been long dormant by that time, with nothing but occassional spam posting.
Since then, comp.misc has been a rather nice place.
EDIT: Corrected the newsgroup name. Note to self: don't drink and type.
I opened up comp.misc and the first post was from 9 days ago arguing that women can't code, and the insinuating tirade of arguments.
I don't think you'd find that on HN at least.
I feel like since just anyone can sign up for Usenet these days instead of just the technologically motivated, communities like them have been altered significantly.
Yeah, I haven't been there myself in months (I forget, plus do not have a NNTP reader in my phone), but I don't remember it being this bad before.
Still, there are still interesting threads, and with judicious application of PLONK (something you can't do on modern web forums like HN, by the way), you can make the worst idiots out of your sight.
I frequent alt.ham.radio, comp.sys.cbm and comp.os.vms (which is quite active). I lurk on some others that are generally used for notifications, such as alt.bbs (and alt.bbs.ads).
I'm always up for more newgroups to hold my interest. Another poster mentioned comp.misc is active, so I'll probably start checking that one out as well.
Thanks, I've subscribed to the ham radio groups (don't really do anything with commodore or VMS [anymore]). Do check out comp.misc, it's got some regulars and things can be a bit curmudgeonly but it's quite active and not spammy.
> of course you'll end up with a group that's more or less self-policing
...don't forget that the supposed golden age of Usenet included a bunch of assholes, and that you could usually call or email their sysadmin at their university / work and get that person to have a quiet word.
For pure institutional memory from primary source. I went to the archives and read a lot of the posts on comp.infosystems.www.announce circa 1990-1994. Origins of Mosaic. Glory days at CERN. And that day had its share of cranks. Perhaps 25% of the populations ;)
But even the cranks had a certain elan. The made up private research centers in the email sigs were optimistic: Paragon Institute of Cyber Consciousness, and such
Whats interesting about IRC, with xdcc peer to peer file transfers, it already acted as a distributed peer brokerage back in the mid 1990s. Trying to bootstrap a laer like that today requires enormous overhead
I remember back in the early 1990's as the web took off people bemoaning the fact that the oiks from AOL were bringing the tone down.
Back then studying for a PhD was almost the defacto minimum requirement to have access. Few undergrads outside computer science had access.
As an illustration, back then, once I got into a usenet discussion with some called Martin Rees ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Martin_Rees ) on the nature of science.
People see Usenet and the wide-open access to all. What they fail to see, especially for its crucial first formative decade (1980-1990) was the very formidable gates that did exist: institutional access through selective research universities, and a handful of tech firms and government agencies.
It was a bit like Disneyland's legendary E-Ticket -- once inside the gates you could wander freely and sample at will. But there was a price to be paid to enter: technical ability, inclination, and most of all access to the institutions. Those institutions also provided a brake on some of the worse forms of abusive behaviour -- individuals could be identified, sanctioned, and removed from the system. The small number of site administrators (initially literally a handful, later still capable of fitting within a single conference room or lecture hall) also reflected a balance of centralisation and decentralisation which seemed to mostly work.
Much of what was good and bad about Usenet derived from these gatekeepers, and that is a point very often missed in subsequent treatments or discussions.
Don't forget that Usenet itself has its own safeguards as in the news.admins and the newsgroup moderators should that particular newsgroup have it enabled.
Otherwise, it was and still is the wild west in terms of content and quality.
Technology both represents and influences our culture. For example, usenet and other forms of Internet posting in the past were more long form. They types of thinking and discussion were different. These days it's much shorter leading to shallower comments. Thinking in longer form vs short form influences us.
Usenet itself may be a thing of the past but some of the useful elements can be reincorporated going forward.
> In my estimation, the larger and broader a group is, the more it'll approximate human culture and interaction as a whole. It shouldn't be a surprise when the negative parts of those things (e.g. war, strife, hatred) emerge, just as much as the positive things (peace, fellowship, love).
Given how vicious and downright nasty politics can get in incredibly homogeneous small towns/organizations/communities, I don't think the size of a community has all that much to do with this.
As soon as everyone is not friends with everyone, people start behaving in incredibly shitty ways. If the community does not police that behaviour, the resulting interactions become quite visibly toxic.
If the community does police that behaviour, then they are still toxic, but in a less-visible manner.
>there's no good way to recreate the space described in the article without keeping most people out.
I have to disagree. You don't have to keep them out, you just have to provide an option to mark and filter them.
Then, it's possible to see the full spectrum of comments and interact with everybody. However, if discussions become too big, the filters can be used to remove the noise.
Creating such a system will be brutally eye-opening for some people but it will inevitably come. The minimum viable product will be the Chinese social graph. If China plays its cards right, they have the tool to overcome Eternal September.
I've been toying with the idea of running some "chatroom experiments" - chatrooms each with different functional gimmicks, one of which would be capping the user count allowed in each channel. I think reddit's robin [0] was onto something really cool and I wish they'd explored it more in-depth.
There's no good way to recreate the space described in the article without keeping most people out.
Right. Anonymity plus the ability to create an unlimited number of accounts guarantees spam.
Originally, to have a USENET address you had to have an account on a time-sharing computer of moderate size, or run your own node. Both were hard to create in bulk, which kept the noise level down.
What can we use now? Facebook real names? RealID? Proof of work?
Golden age often comes from a nostalgia driven perspective of what life seemed to be at some point. In many cases it involves individuals who had similar views and beliefs which made them feel more comfortable around each other. In other cases, it is just the brain looking for things that made someone feel good, even if it only accounted for a short picture of what the good/service/experience really was.
I learned Usenet in 2009 as a Uni freshman because the University blocked p2p software and monitored http traffic to stop people downloading loads but for some reason my Usenet usage wasn't detected.
I mean that's over a decade ago now, but it seemed like it was still pretty big back then - albeit just for piracy.
> I'm too young to have been a part of Usenet, but it seems to me that there's no good way to recreate the space described in the article without keeping most people out.
Hahahah no. So the biggest problem of usenet wasn't really the throngs of the "Eternal September" people (I hate the expression, btw). It was that nearly every Usenet group had its resident troll with too much time on their hands and an extreme obsession. So you'd post about, say, plans to build a 2nd railway track between Chachówek and Radom, and you'd get some dude go at you about how useless that would be and how improving transport between Warsaw and Radom would destroy the public infrastructure of the entire country. This is not theoretical, I've stumbled on usenet archives from _a few years ago_ recently and have seen the dude still going.
And it was everywhere. Operating systems? Some journalist going off about how Mac's better than Linux in Every. Single. Thread. General "whine about the world" group? Some random libertarian to tell you that actually it's you who sucks.
It wasn't many people, but they were active enough to ruin everyone's day. You could mute them, but unless you muted every thread that included them (and nearly every did) you'd still be exposed to them. And, because I happened to meet a few of them personally: if you further restrict the space by means, credentials and "interest", all you're going to get is a higher concentration of these people.
"So the biggest problem of usenet ... was that nearly every Usenet group had its resident troll with too much time on their hands and an extreme obsession."
This is what kill files were for, which every half-decent news reader of the time had (something that's still lacking in most contemporary web forums).
So trolling wasn't really a problem, because you could easily filter out the trolls. Same with spam, especially once Bayesian spam filtering was invented.
No, the real challenge that Usenet faced was the World-Wide Web. People were enamoured with the new shiny, with hypertext, and with embedded pictures and styling, which Usenet did not have.
Web forums were also a lot easier to use. You didn't need to download or learn to use a news client. All you needed was a web browser, which everyone already had and knew how to use.
Also, web search results on your topic of interest usually pointed you to forums, not to Usenet newsgroups.
If Usenet was better integrated in to the web, it might have stood a chance.
> This is what kill files were for, which every half-decent news reader of the time had (something that's still lacking in most contemporary web forums).
...that just didn't work, as I even wrote: with active trolls _most_ threads had the troll somewhere in them. They tended to dominate the groups and saturate everyone else's time.
> Web forums were also a lot easier to use. You didn't need to download or learn to use a news client. All you needed was a web browser, which everyone already had and knew how to use.
Oh, and frequently had better moderation. Maybe because of accumulated experience, or maybe because they were less cliquish than usenet was.
> If Usenet was better integrated in to the web, it might have stood a chance.
Usenet better integrated with the web is called a web forum. Some, like Discourse, are even pretty good, they're far easier to set up than a non-alt usenet group. The one thing going for Usenet is modempunk nostalgia.
> This is what kill files were for, which every half-decent news reader of the time had (something that's still lacking in most contemporary web forums).
Agreed, but the problem was that every new user began with an otherwise empty killfile. And so they had to be quite thick-skinned to outlast the barrage long enough to build up a respectable kill file to quash the noise, spam, and trolls.
Unfortunately what often happened is the new user was overwhelmed, disappeared, and never returned.
> No, the real challenge that Usenet faced was the World-Wide Web. People were enamoured with the new shiny, with hypertext, and with embedded pictures and styling, which Usenet did not have.
This had a very significant effect. The draw of the web, new, shiny, and fancier than plain text Usenet postings, had a huge effect in cutting off the influx of new users to replace those who disappeared.
Usenet always had a dramatically diverse group of participants. However each peer -- how you connected, likely through your university -- had an authoritative position over participants, and was the singular authenticating partner[1]. So if you were a shitbag, so to speak, your university could do something about it, which can be as simple as removing usenet access which left one with no alternatives. And given that you only had one usenet account, any newsgroup could ban you without one being able to just pop up again.
It started to fall apart when the nodes on the network included every ISP, etc. When people who have no authority over the participants, and no real punitive avenue if they broke conventions, it started to fall apart. Even if you got banned from that node, there were thousands of other nodes to jump to and continue your abuse.
[1] When you went to some university, the account they provided you was your authentication on Usenet. You had that single account and it was your sole key to the network.
Usenet was full of people like me: educated, tech-savvy and interested in a whole wide range of obsessions.
The first time I "met" people who weren't involved in tech online was probably Friends Reunited (school friends) and then Facebook. Reddit, Twitter, Instagram, Snapchat and TikTok are all far more diverse than Usenet ever was (although I only ever use Twitter these days, so that might have changed).
I therefore can't accept your view that it had a dramatically diverse group of participants. It has an even less diverse group of users today, and it's worth remembering we should probably not talk about it exclusively in the past tense: it's still an active thing.
On the authority thing: the OP link suggests a public shared space has to be owned collectively, and therefore the policing model that Usenet lacked (other than a few good actors at the edge of the network like you suggest), will eventually be its downfall. We see this in unmoderated spaces all over the Internet today.
All public spaces are at risk of anarchy without some sort of policing, once populations reach a certain size. This is not a uniquely digital/online phenomenon.
I wonder if it's possible to create a protocol where policing is built in somehow, whilst retaining the public commons features that the OP desires.
> When people who have no authority over the participants,
I don't think it's exactly a matter of authority. A university wouldn't care about someone merely being a troll in Usenet; they'd have to be breaking a law or otherwise acting egregiously to attract disciplinary action.
Instead, I think it's a matter of reputation. A smaller community is one where everyone is likely to be familiar with everyone else on an individual basis, and a community with a technical barrier to access imposes a transition cost on someone wanting to take their ball and go elsewhere.
In my opinion, both of these things act together to change one's target audience and engagement style. In such small Usenet-style communities, a user is speaking to that community at large. In larger forums with less individual reputation and lower barriers to access, the forum instead becomes more of a performance place: people are speaking to a subset of like-minded supporters.
Twitter is a great example of a very large forum with a near zero-barrier, where I can shout at an adversary while speaking to like-minded people.
> Usenet always had a dramatically diverse group of participants.
How so? It was universities, tech people in corporations and a few folks that just had PCs as a hobby. In short: upper middle class (because those things are expensive), educated (because it really wasn't as simple as it is today) and with time on their hands.
There may been some diversity in political leanings, but on the fundamentals, education, social class etc?
It depends on the time frame you're looking at. Sure, the very, very beginning was that isolated, but by the mid-to-late 1990s, almost any first-world country resident could get to it if they really wanted to. Varying degrees of how hard you have to "really" want it still, of course. But you certainly had non-trivial "alt.anything.you.can.think.of" communities for LGBT, any radical political position you can name that existed at the time, obscure anime fandoms, or anything else you can think of. The mathematical principle of "regression to the mean" ensures that you get a non-trivial diversity (by pretty much any standard) long before you get to the point that "everybody" can get on there. You do not need access by literally 100% of the possible population before you get "diversity". (After all, the internet is still not there yet either even in 2020.)
(The only exception is if by "diversity" you mean "exact proportionality of representation"... but that's not the same thing. If you want to say that, go ahead. At that point I will agree with you that there wasn't exact proportionality of representation... but then, there isn't today either, nor is it even clear how one would get there, especially as you crank the requisite "exactness" up. Two decimal places? Four?)
Yes, sure, but that's like saying that country clubs are diverse because members have different hobbies. If they really want to, anyone could join, it's just easier for some than for others.
My point is that it's a diversity of opinions (maybe; they tend to be closer together on the important things, too, demographics predict politics fairly well after all) and of hobbies or interests, but not of backgrounds, i.e. where the rubber meets the road. I understand that people usually do not mean "the conservative child of lawyer A and the progressive child of investment banker B chat about their shared interests with the apolitical child of entrepreneur C", but "the child of a lawyer, the child of an office worker chat with the child of a day laborer".
Again, I don't mind it not being or having been like that, I don't see any intrinsic value in diversity by itself. Calling it diverse just sounds like a misrepresentation of what it was.
This sounds remarkably elitist. And honestly if one were to analyze the trolls of the world, I'd wager "upper middle class" (or simply middle class -- it was hardly so exclusive) and "educated" would be a dominant trait.
A single university is an wide spectrum of participants. Yes, there are some demographic commonalities, but there are so many significant differences. Now add universities across the spectrum and across the globe.
> A single university is an wide spectrum of participants.
Is it? Sure, you'll have people studying physics, law and economics, but they'll be pretty similar in background. I'm not saying that usenet was a hive mind, far from it, but it certainly wasn't very "diverse" with regards to the background of participants.
"Usenet always had a dramatically diverse group of participants"
Who knew this was debatable. Every race, creed, religion, and demographic (even if skewed slightly to the higher end). Every political lean imaginable. People in sports programs, arts programs, and every other nature.
The notion that this group has some natural agreement is not reality based.
These conflicts didn't really matter because nobody used real names anyway. Online identities were very much expected to be disposable, if necessary. Real names and real-world reputation wpuld only enter the picture in more "serious" spaces where moderation actions and social expectations were correspondingly a lot higher. Modern social media merged the "real names only" expectation of the most academic Usenet groups with the conflict-orientation of alt.flame.flame.flame and www.4chan.org. Disaster is the predictable outcome of this, often with non-trivial real-world consequences.
The point is, the web ate all the other info-sharing protocols, except for mail (which does look worse than ever, but still works) .. and as a result its near-impossible for a new user to easily share their content from their own computer to the rest of the world ..
My greatest hope for an open social network that people actually use and truly threatens Facebook & friends still rests on something built on top of email. A social-client that uses the email system as its transport layer, basically. It even already has calendaring for events! Heh.
Disagree. The Internet was still mostly a curiosity when IE3 was around, but people were becoming aware of it. I'd say things really took off in the IE5 timeframe.
Pretty much every installation of Windows in the mid '90s and onward had Outlook Express installed and it was definitely capable of interacting with usenet.
> If they'd included an NNTP reader, we'd be still using USENET to this day.
How does this square with Eternal September being caused by (paraphrasing) "too many normal users with access"? AOL giving its customers NNTP access is frequently cited as one of its downfalls.
I don't necessarily agree on why, but I do agree that Eternal September had major repercussions for how technology proceeded, and especially how marketing people managed to spread their insanity into the OS stack, as it were.
The problem with Eternal September was, that we suddenly had a major influx of people who thought they knew how to use the Internet, suddenly on the Internet.
They didn't, really, know how to use the Internet.. no, sir!
AOL had its guardians and angels, COMPUSERVE had its governors, and so on - so when this all hit the near-total benevolent sovereign dictator anarachists that were holding the Internet together, it was, literally, a Cultural War.
Eternal September was fucked; suddenly there were shit-posts everywhere, and oh so much entitlement from the 'paying consumers' who were suddenly interested in alt.binaries.*
Someone decided that Internet services should be deprecated/ignored - and decided not to build true "Internet OS"'es, but rather "Internet Applications" .. and appstores .. and so on.
Now, it is my strongly held belief, as someone who weathered that fateful day and ever since with a sense of absolute wonder at the stupidity of humankind .. if the brainfucked horde that made up Eternal September didn't have the experience of suddenly getting "on the Internet" from some shiny CD from some TLA with its own custom browser, but rather - the OS was set up to better guide behaviour over the stack from the outset - my belief is that we would still have NNTP, and possibly more of these kinds of services.
Instead of the behemoth (and now totally out of control) web monstrosity.
I mean, at some point, if we step back and see what really makes the Internet, its that there are more ports than just :80, and anyone can make one to another. You just have to have the right bits.
The problem is, our borked OS'es aren't making it sufficiently easy for the Internet to work - for the user - without requiring a long list of third parties.
So, I also think: someone has an opportunity to change everything by making an OS stack which, out of the box, contains a user-publishable/accessible Global Filesystem, which makes the Web seem like UUCP over a soggynoodlenet...
With regards to Eternal September, you're exactly right. Prior to that AOL invasion you had relatively small bursts of new people joining with no predetermined cultural expectations who had to assimilate into an existing culture. When AOL hit usenet you had a massive number of people with their own established cultural expectations due to the walled and managed AOL garden colliding with the existing Internet culture, and the Internet culture was overwhelmed.
Prior to Eternal September the primary conception of the Internet by those on it was that it was a tool. After Eternal September the primary conception was that it was a channel for consumption and entertainment.
It was less the barrier to entry than a combination of limitations in the rate of new members in a subgroup (you may get burst of new members in September but the total number added over the course of a year was manageable) and a process of cultural (with regards to expectations of behavior and discourse) assimilation, made easier by the fact that there was no prior cultural expectations on the part of new members.
Remember that usenet newsgroups numbers in the tens of thousands, usually focused on a very specific interest. New members joined either to gain knowledge, be among those who share an interest, or occasionally to troll. Trolls were easy enough to add to .ignore files, and the others had a desire for the benefits the newsgroup offered and thus were inclined to respect whatever rules were in place in order to receive that benefit.
The general model of a usenet group is echoed on the web with message boards, absent the unified means of distribution and discovery.
In my estimation, the larger and broader a group is, the more it'll approximate human culture and interaction as a whole. It shouldn't be a surprise when the negative parts of those things (e.g. war, strife, hatred) emerge, just as much as the positive things (peace, fellowship, love).