It is ironical that we talk about usenet everywhere but on usenet. Events like the blackout on reddit and the scramble to move to alternate platforms would hardly be necessary if usenet worked clearly as a discussion platform.
While everyone blames spam for the slow death of discussions on usenet, I think there are a couple of other reasons:
- access over http
- searchability
These two reasons are why Google Groups continues to work while discussions on usenet barely do.
Usenet has to evolve to provide solutions to these problems:
- spam: moderated groups are an insufficient solution when compared to moderation tools provided by modern discussion platforms.
- usenet over http: people should be able to carry on discussions using browsers as well as apps. They should be able to share links to these discussions as well.
- search: people should be able to conduct a search across all discussions by using native as well as third-party search engines (Google, Bing, Brave etc).
In my opinion the problem with Usenet is accessibility to “normal” people. For a non-technical user, or even a neophyte, the mere act of finding a Usenet news server is difficult. Yes, we have Eternal September, but if you ask most people, they have no idea what that is. When ISPs offered it, access was easy to find and there was nothing else as ubiquitous. Now, most search results for Usenet find the paid news servers and nobody wants to pay for something that, for all practical purposes, exists on other free platforms.
If we want to revive Usenet, we need to have a big-name provider offer free access with no strings attached; no walled garden, no caveats. If a service like Reddit were to come along today, built on top of Usenet, it would explode in popularity. The problem is that any company building something like that wants control over the access to data and content generated on their platform. It’s kind of a shame, actually, that a project like Lemmy doesn’t do just this…
If we want to revive Usenet, we need to have a big-name provider offer free access with no strings attached
Like Google Groups?
Would you know, by just looking at Google Groups, that it provides access to Usenet discussions? They have done all they can to obfuscate the matter.
For a non-technical user, or even a neophyte, the mere act of finding a Usenet news server is difficult.
This might be a good thing. All that is required is a little research and gumption. Filtering out those without that means a higher grade of users.
That doesn’t test for their ability to meaningfully contribute to a discussion group. There would never be a robust group of woodworkers because the grandpa with years of professional woodworking experience has been excluded for using iPad. It will always be a group of tech focused people discussing woodworking.
I disagree. If they cannot follow basic instructions to get into a system, and we are talking very low bar here, they probably are not going to be able to successfully operate any kind of discussion forum.
I’ve come to believe that mass adoption, as we’re suggesting here, and high quality content are mutually exclusive. I agree that the current barrier to entry self-curates the content a bit but the same barriers will forever relegate it to the fringe.
I agree that the current barrier to entry self-curates the content a bit but the same barriers will forever relegate it to the fringe.
It is the perpetual struggle: get too mainstream and you become Reddit or Facebag, stay hard to use and you get a buncha nerds but the content is better.
accessibility to “normal” people … we need to have a big-name provider offer free access with no strings attached; no walled garden, no caveats.
This is the point I have been arguing over on the subreddit with a user who is looking at it merely from a technical angle instead of from a regular end-user angle. I have been suggested options like browser extensions.
My answer:
The problem is access + bandwidth. What is easier?
- finding https://news.example.org/g/comp.lang.c/Axxxxxxxxxxx49z on Google/DDG and clicking through
- browser extensions + register for (free) account on Eternal September?
Even browser extensions are too much for wide market penetration. Only 42.7% of people use adblockers, despite the obvious benefits of doing so. Most people just don’t bother. They’re not gonna go through hoops just to post pictures of their dogs on a platform.
usenet has been rumored to be dying for years but it is still used. It has a little group of enthusiasts but it is alive. Here an interesting article on Usenet, with some thoughts https://shkspr.mobi/blog/2023/06/why-did-usenet-fail/
Usenet was a stream of consciousness and, short of blocking individuals, there was no way to separate the interesting topics from the dull.
Maybe this is the best it gets. Upvoting and downvoting invite abusive behavior once the userbase gets widely distributed enough. Upvoting alone seems superior.
Inwas under the impression that we had USENET access via our newsreaders on SDF, I even tried reading it a bit but it seemed like a ghost town… but someone told me it’s not actually connected to the wider usenet so it would just be for SDF (which would explain the emptiness.) Was I misinformed?
I don’t know the details. My guess, based on the FAQ, is the
sdf.*hierarchy would be accessible internally while the public newsgroups (comp.*etc) would be dealt with in the regular manner.It seems the sdf hierarchy is not carried by the Usenet provider. I checked on Newshosting and Newsgroupdirect.
It might be a local newsgroup.
I’m afraid that Usenet won’t be evolving much more, it’s dying. I don’t like this, but that’s how it is. The time where ISP’s offered Usenet-access is gone. People are moving on.
Yeah, most people like free stuff but with free stuff, usually you, the one who becomes the commodity.
Perhaps.
It is irritating to see all these new discussion platforms reinventing the wheel. They could have tried to build themselves on top of usenet. The distribution problem, at scale, has already been solved there. All they had to do was concentrate on usability. Now, it takes hours for a community to be visible elsewhere.
No one owned USENET, therefore there was not much investment in it. The question is how to make USENET profitable so that our corporate overlords will adopt it without replacing it.
to make USENET profitable
Hosting binaries is costly. Text is fairly cheap.
Any reasonably technically competent person can host it online for < $100/y if they want a replacement for web forums. You could even write a brand new nntp server in less than a week. The standard is simple.
If you want federation, then you have to consider peering with other servers to share feeds.
corporate overlords will adopt it without replacing it.
I don’t think corporations help here. Google famously bought DejaNews and tried an EEE move on usenet with Google Groups.
Google has never had a functional profit model. There is probably some way to make it a resource without making it a walled garden.
