My first introduction to the Internet, in 1990 before commercial Internet was available, was at university.
In those days FTP was common (mostly for sharing games, but also for technical docs. I adjusted an MFM drive to my controller, using assembly, thanks to various spec sheets.)
But Usenet was the killer app. There were newsgroups for everything and I consumed it voraciously. And I still remember getting a reply from someone at JPL to one of my questions. To 20 year-old me that was simply mind blowing.
Usenet fell out of favor later on, partly driven by the www,and partly because once the Internet became open to everyone, it didn't scale well with lots of users who didn't understand the conventions and social contract.
I guess Facebook is the modern alternative, but the dross overwhelms the grain.
Interestingly though I still use NNTP (News) daily. One community I participate in still makes use of a (private) NNTP server as the forum of choice. Only the lightest amount of moderation is needed, and trolls are swiftly booted.
I've come to understand that the tech matters little - for an effective online community it's the people that matter, and excluding those who would ruin it for everyone else.
> Usenet fell out of favor later on, partly driven by the www,and partly because once the Internet became open to everyone, it didn't scale well with lots of users who didn't understand the conventions and social contract.
This sounds like Eternal September [0]. I'd argue that the same thing has happened to the web. The number of people online now versus say 15 years ago is immense. The quality of discussion seems to get worse and worse.
That's honestly why I love hacker news. There are so many talented and intelligent people here and the site drives for high quality posts.
I'd argue yes overall the Internet has devolved into what reddit is now which is low quality discussion, Though sites like this are what makes it as awesome to me as Usenet or IRC did to me in the 90s.
Usenet wasn't an app. It was a protocol. The programs we used were, as I recall, readnews (the official program), and rn - written by Larry Wall who later created perl. Rn was a wonderful interface. Besides blocking and filtering, it has threaded conversations - much like reddit.
Im not sure I don't define Usenet specifically. It wasn't the program (I've no memory of what it was, News or something like that.) The protocol is NNTP. Usenet wasn't a term we used a lot but when we did it kinda referred to the whole News eco system. So encompassing the software, protocol, forums and so on.
Kinda like we'd use yhe term "web" today to encompass HTTPS, browsers, servers and so on.
> Interestingly though I still use NNTP (News) daily. One community I participate in still makes use of a (private) NNTP server as the forum of choice. Only the lightest amount of moderation is needed, and trolls are swiftly booted.
I really wish that more places would just set up a private NNTP server without any peering as a forum. Do people just use NNTP readers, or is there a web frontend?
I've found that the people who want to exclude others kill communities just as well as those who spam them. The more virtuous they want to feel the worse the problem.
In those days FTP was common (mostly for sharing games, but also for technical docs. I adjusted an MFM drive to my controller, using assembly, thanks to various spec sheets.)
But Usenet was the killer app. There were newsgroups for everything and I consumed it voraciously. And I still remember getting a reply from someone at JPL to one of my questions. To 20 year-old me that was simply mind blowing.
Usenet fell out of favor later on, partly driven by the www,and partly because once the Internet became open to everyone, it didn't scale well with lots of users who didn't understand the conventions and social contract.
I guess Facebook is the modern alternative, but the dross overwhelms the grain.
Interestingly though I still use NNTP (News) daily. One community I participate in still makes use of a (private) NNTP server as the forum of choice. Only the lightest amount of moderation is needed, and trolls are swiftly booted.
I've come to understand that the tech matters little - for an effective online community it's the people that matter, and excluding those who would ruin it for everyone else.