[HN Gopher] RIP Google Groups Dejanews.com Archive?
___________________________________________________________________
RIP Google Groups Dejanews.com Archive?
Author : doener
Score : 168 points
Date : 2023-11-12 09:43 UTC (13 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (dejanews.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (dejanews.com)
| fifticon wrote:
| and google continues their efforts to convince me to never rely
| on one of their products :-/
| rjgonza wrote:
| How come, is dejanews.com being gone due to some failure of/at
| Google groups?
| tonyedgecombe wrote:
| Google owned dejanews.com
| atomicfiredoll wrote:
| In the last year or so they sold Domains from underneath
| without warning. They also apparently changed the settings on
| two older Gmail accounts to make them inaccessible.
|
| I kept those accounts around because they had a maiden name and
| other services tied to them, I know for a fact at least one of
| them has an alternative contact email. There's no information
| on recovery and no way to contact anybody.
|
| Maybe it's just timing, but, it feels like in the last year or
| so, things have especially been going downhill with them and
| there have been more Google related fires to fight.
|
| As a result, I've moved my team off Workspaces and I'm winding
| down that Google org. And no, Google, I'm not signing up for
| YouTube Premium. I previously thought things were decoupled
| decently from Google and enough fallbacks were in place, but
| now I see the company as a clear risk and am doing everything I
| can to avoid it.
| yetanotherloss wrote:
| Out of curiosity what are you moving to? Ended up moving to
| gsuite because it was relatively stable some years ago until
| the domains thing but hasn't boiled over into a problem I
| needed to deal with imminently.
| jsnell wrote:
| _Were_ you actually affected by this somehow?
|
| Because, you know, this page had been nothing but a redirect to
| Google Groups for 22 years. That seems plenty of time for
| people to update their bookmarks.
|
| If you weren't affected, this doesn't really sound like an
| argument made in good faith.
| ketchupdog wrote:
| Fortunately, the person you were responding to wasn't making
| a bad faith argument, or even arguing at all, but was rather
| expressing a common opinion based on anticipating entirely
| predictable behavior.
| jsnell wrote:
| Why would that be any better? You still seem to be saying
| that comment had nothing to do with the submission, and is
| something commonly on HN. In fact so often that one can
| easily predict that it'll be spammed to any post about
| Google. Something predictable and boring is not the good
| kind of HN comment.
|
| It's an even worse comment _when nothing was killed in this
| instance_ as far as I can tell. The headline is just a
| total fabrication. Nothing had been hosted on that URL for
| 22 years except a 302 redirect. The archive is just as
| functional (or non-functional) as it had been for the last
| two decades. But maybe I 'm wrong about that. Maybe
| something did use to work for the OP and was broken
| recently.
| squarefoot wrote:
| Regarding Usenet, I was convinced to never trust Google anymore
| the day they removed the discussion search filter from the
| search engine, which happened roughly 10 years ago. Before that
| date one could search for people discussing products or
| services, while after that day one would be inundated by a pile
| of pages _selling_ those products or services. They first
| removed the filter from the main page, but kept it reachable
| through the search URL, then completely removed the
| functionality, although people were already complaining. It
| wouldn 't cost them a dime to keep it; that was a deliberate
| move to direct users searches from community forums to
| commercial pages.
|
| https://www.seroundtable.com/google-search-filters-gone-1799...
| thevagrant wrote:
| Is there any alternative archive?
| layer8 wrote:
| https://www.usenetarchives.com/
| golem14 wrote:
| Yeah, but it's really slow, and you can't actually download a
| copy of the data.
| bobsmooth wrote:
| I can't imagine being a historian in 100 trying to piece together
| history from a largely forgotten internet. Whole forums that
| shaped me as a person have been lost to time. Archive.org helps,
| and there are individuals with site rips on aging hard drives,
| but I'd bet more information has been lost in the past 10 years
| than all of human history has created before it.
| mcherm wrote:
| _Every_ single conversation before 1859 between _any_ 2
| individuals who were not literate has been lost.
|
| While I decry the unnecessary loss of this record (which Google
| maliciously chose not to offer to archivists, knowing full well
| that archivists would choose to preserve them if given the
| opportunity), we are actually living in the BEST recorded era
| of history, because only now have certain kinds of preservation
| become possible.
| tekchip wrote:
| Could you expand some more on this? Short of active curation
| of small segments of online, deemed important, snapshots kept
| alive by constant maintenance (I wonder what the internet
| archives drive failure rates look like), there isn't a
| digital medium readily available (to the masses) yet that can
| survive 100+ years while also storing a meaningful amount of
| information. There are research efforts like Microsofts
| crystal thing. But so far no real winners.
| Kye wrote:
| Not the person you replied to, but: Documents rarely
| survive just by being physically durable. They survive
| first by people making an effort to preserve them. Deja
| News might be the most complete archive, but it's not the
| only effort to preserve Usenet.
|
| For example: https://archive.org/details/archiveteam-
| googlegroups
|
| It's a roundabout way to do it, but probably includes
| enough context on what's missing for a historian to dig
| into other archives to find it. History is like RAID: given
| enough parity information, you can reconstruct much of
| what's missing. That's how we know so many lost texts
| exist, and occasionally find them: stuff we _do_ have
| references them and sometimes offers clues on where to find
| it.
|
| Digital information in particular benefits from getting
| smaller relative to available storage size. Running a
| Usenet server used to be a huge financial burden. Now I
| could hold most of it on a keychain. This makes replicating
| it across the planet to resist the chaos of human nature
| easier. It might die in one place, but it's also somewhere
| else. It would take a world-ending event to wipe out
| anything you might find in /r/DataHoarder.
| doubloon wrote:
| this is why i disagree with mcherm. we live in an anti-
| intellectual age where people seek to destroy
| information. Aaron Swartz and Alexandra Elbakyan are
| treated like criminals, while billionaires who abuse the
| legal system to silence critics are treated like
| intellectual heroes.
| mcherm wrote:
| Active curation IS an excellent way to maintain
| information. Drive failure rates are the kind of thing that
| archivists can easily measure (and appropriate amounts of
| redundant storage can nearly eliminate data loss).
| prepend wrote:
| And isn't present day so much better?
|
| I don't understand your comment. Should we not mourn death of
| 1,000 because many others died, routinely, in the past?
|
| This material is easy to maintain, and presents a new wealth
| of noise and communication the world has never known.
|
| Dejanews was pretty stable until google bought them and them
| destroyed them. Not cool, but it's a free world.
| mcherm wrote:
| > I don't understand your comment.
|
| It was in response to the parent comment stating this:
|
| > I'd bet more information has been lost in the past 10
| years than all of human history has created before it
|
| I believe that more information is being preserved for
| historians now than ever before, and yet even so we should
| decry senseless destruction of early internet history.
| hotnfresh wrote:
| Imagine trying to figure out whether the 2047-earliest-
| reliably-attested-timestamp-date gigabytes-of-text-large
| newsgroup backup you have is genuine, or has been subtly AI-
| altered to change history to be more favorable to [some group]
| mynameishere wrote:
| _trying to piece together history from a largely forgotten
| internet_
|
| "Eureka! Here's what some nerd thought about Star Trek!"
| qingcharles wrote:
| The entirety of the largest social network of its time was lost
| when the single last MySpace hard drive was erased o_O
| oofoe wrote:
| Was there not a huge archeological effort by people all over the
| place to resurrect old backups and older servers so that the news
| archive could be complete? Lovingly retrieved, curated and
| donated because DejaNews was going to be "forever".
|
| I realize that breathless reviews of "Small Wonder" and 40 line
| Boba Fett .sigs may not be the wisdom of the ages, but it's still
| an important part of the history of the Internet.
| dn3500 wrote:
| Yes, the UTZOO Wiseman Usenet Archive. It was on IA for a while
| but has been forced underground for legal reasons. You can
| still find copies pretty easily.
|
| https://archive.org/details/utzoo-wiseman-usenet-archive
| rwmj wrote:
| Is there a Torrent of that somewhere so we can keep it alive?
| logifail wrote:
| There's a .torrent file listed under
|
| https://archive.org/download/utzoo-wiseman-usenet-archive/
|
| but I've not [yet] looked at it...
| IAmNotACellist wrote:
| Unfortunately that only contains the index
| ('listing.txt') and not the content
| golem14 wrote:
| """ In 2020 after sustained legal demands requesting a
| set of messages within the Usenet Archive be redacted,
| and to avoid further costs and accusations of
| manipulation should those demands be met, the archive has
| been removed from this URL and is not currently
| accessible to the public.
|
| Included in this item is a file listing and the md5 sums
| of the removed files, for the use of others in verifying
| they have original materials. """
| qingcharles wrote:
| Magnet link here.. I just tested it and downloaded the
| whole 1.6GB in about 2 seconds:
|
| https://www.reddit.com/r/DataHoarder/comments/i2btuu/utzoo_
| a...
| qingcharles wrote:
| Here's a search engine for the archive:
|
| https://altavista.superglobalmegacorp.com/altavista
| generationP wrote:
| Do we know what messages were the bone of contention? Don't
| tell me this isn't common knowledge among dozens of people at
| least...
| qingcharles wrote:
| https://old.reddit.com/r/DataHoarder/comments/i2btuu/utzoo_
| a...
| generationP wrote:
| Yep, but that's begging the question :)
| Shorel wrote:
| Which legal reasons?
|
| Is there a monopoly over Usenet archives, or is it someone
| arguing about their own posts only?
|
| I would believe it is wrong for someone to have copyright
| over what's basically distributed public forums.
| qingcharles wrote:
| https://old.reddit.com/r/DataHoarder/comments/i2btuu/utzoo_
| a...
| Shorel wrote:
| This is sad.
|
| Also, that's how the law works :/
| qingcharles wrote:
| Reason for removal in case anyone was wondering:
|
| https://old.reddit.com/r/DataHoarder/comments/i2btuu/utzoo_a.
| ..
| crazygringo wrote:
| I'm fascinated by the idea that you could try to take down
| your own Usenet posts based on the idea that you have
| copyright over them.
|
| Surely there must be some law or legal precedent that in
| the act of posting to a public forum, you inherently
| "license" that content to be freely reproduced, at a
| minimum for non-commercial purposes as part of distribution
| in the context of the forum? (But nobody can correct your
| posts and sell them as a book though.)
|
| I'm wondering if IA gave up because they thought they would
| lose, or it would be too expensive to go to court in the
| first place.
| londons_explore wrote:
| Most interpretations of the GDPR in Europe allow anyone
| to remove/anonymize anything they have written and
| published online.
| rikroots wrote:
| > I'm fascinated by the idea that you could try to take
| down your own Usenet posts based on the idea that you
| have copyright over them.
|
| One does not simply walk into the Poetry newsgroups.
| Their strophes are guarded by more than just X-No-Archive
| message headers. There is evil there that does not sleep,
| and the grey-locked troll hunters are ever watchful ...
| qingcharles wrote:
| I actually gave this advice to a woman recently who was
| trying to get her images removed from Reddit. They
| weren't sexual enough for Reddit to remove the images her
| ex was posting, so I told her to just DMCA them all. Not
| ideal, but there you have it.
| altdataseller wrote:
| I remember the good ole days when I discovered I could actually
| talk with like minded fans about anime in alt.fan.dragonball
| (AFD).
|
| monkeigh, tazer, Naa, MiraiMatt, JimboChiu, MattBlue. I still
| remember all their screen names
| OfSanguineFire wrote:
| What I miss from those early days is the complete lack of
| profiles. People really were just screen names, there were no
| user profiles. Often one didn't learn more about one's fellows
| unless one arranged to meet up in real life (which was a thing
| back then). When people could not insist on a particular
| demographic identity or political wing, no one was looking for
| personal validation and discussion remained limited to the
| subject of the fora. Consequently, ideological battle was
| limited, and while flame wars were common, they usually
| involved nerd minutiae instead of society-wide polemics.
|
| Compare this to later social media, where it has been taken to
| extremes: I've seen Mastodon users whose profiles are a long
| list of their gender identity, sexual preference, furriness,
| autism or mental afflictions (officially diagnosed or self-
| diagnosed), favored political party, and COVID masking status,
| and in discussion of any topic we are supposed to consider all
| this.
| aaomidi wrote:
| > When people could not insist on a particular demographic
| identity or political wing
|
| I'm not sure if your memory is playing tricks on you or what,
| but politics has basically always been a part of these forums
| once the internet shed its "nerd" status.
|
| Heck, extremist politics found a safe place for itself in
| many of internets early forums.
| OfSanguineFire wrote:
| The politics I remember from the early internet was
| idealism about alternative approaches, like libertarianism
| or communism of whatever stripe. Such internet-nerd
| politics were usually divorced from what was actually going
| on in mainstream politics, and therefore there wasn't the
| exhausting, unescapable partisan squabble as found on
| social media today.
| aaomidi wrote:
| Those circles still exist.
| OfSanguineFire wrote:
| Yes and no. Yes in the sense that such fora are out
| there. But a person becoming fascinated by computers and
| getting on the internet, will no longer encounter those
| fora as the default experience, unlike in the days of
| Usenet or BBSs. Moreover, post-2005, the software running
| phpBB-type fora usually borrowed features from social
| media.
|
| (And "No" in the sense that, as one still reading various
| fora offering pre-social-media interfaces, there is no
| escaping that the participants are dwindling and graying.
| Moreover, the very thing driving people to hang around on
| unfashionable fora is an eccentricity that is often full-
| blown mental illness. Once forum activity has become
| dominated by a few outright cranks, you can't expect
| quality discussion.)
| trackflak wrote:
| If I open a forum and see it is Discourse, I immediately
| close it. What was wrong with distinct boards and clear
| categories?
|
| And you can leave your endless scrolling on facesbook
| where it belongs.
| 0xDEAFBEAD wrote:
| Where?
| 0xDEAFBEAD wrote:
| I think you could argue that mainstream politics has
| borrowed more from internet politics than vice versa. I
| don't see Trump or Bernie getting nearly as much traction
| without the internet.
|
| I'm very idealistic about alternative approaches, but in
| a "let's experiment on a small scale" sense as opposed to
| a "burn it all down" sense. I do wonder if widespread
| discussion of radical alternatives contributed to a "burn
| it all down" attitude. Yes, most real modern political
| systems are a mess of historical contingencies, but maybe
| democracy functions better if we ignore that and
| encourage everyone to buy into the system anyways. I miss
| the "Don't ask what your country can do for you, ask what
| you can do for your country" attitude.
| gregw2 wrote:
| The heaviest posted (non-binary) newsgroups with the in
| the late 90s were political, if I remember some analysis
| I did back then correctly. Something.politics,
| alt.fan.rush-limbaugh, etc
| OfSanguineFire wrote:
| Yes, by the late 1990s there was partisan American
| political battle, but only if you went looking for it, on
| the dedicated newsgroups you mention. If you did not
| expressly subscribe to them, you generally did not see
| those politics on sci.whatever, comp.lang.whatever, or
| alt.music.yourfavoriteband. And you had no way of knowing
| if your interlocutors held strident views about politics
| or posted elsewhere on Usenet about politics.
| gopher_space wrote:
| The permanence of forum account names was important. You
| developed an identity and a reputation that stuck with you.
| The long profiles you mention could be seen as an attempt to
| build identity in a more ephemeral environment.
| WillPostForFood wrote:
| People always were looking for some sort of profile to signal
| who they were. With Usenet it was the signature block.
| Intended as short contact blocks, they were often repurposed
| into oversized sword wielding manifestos.
|
| https://www.lysator.liu.se/(v1)/etexts/iguide/chap4.bigsig.h.
| ..
|
| Also .plan files!
| shagie wrote:
| Many of us had geek code (
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Geek_Code ) attached to our sig
| files. -----BEGIN GEEK CODE BLOCK-----
| Version: 3.12 GCS d- s+:+ a++ C++ U? P++ L+ E--- N M++ 5++
| e++ h+ ------END GEEK CODE BLOCK------
|
| And it can go on from there to some rather elaborate ones (
| https://www.joereiss.net/geek/geek.html ) - depends on how
| much you're interested in putting in there.
| wolfendin wrote:
| I was just thinking about Jim a few weeks ago, for the obvious
| reason.
| altdataseller wrote:
| You were thinking about JimboChiu? Why?
| m0d0nne11 wrote:
| USENET did, obviously, have a lot of garbage but it was
| manageable, contained boggling amounts of valuable info and
| nobody (yet) "owned" it. Now, with The Great Enshittification of
| the Internet nearly complete, USENET's loss is just that much
| more painful because it could have been prevented.
| LightBug1 wrote:
| The End of History? ...
| raxi wrote:
| It is down for many years already and no one spotted.
| jl6 wrote:
| Did something get announced? The search interface at
| groups.google.com still seems to work.
|
| (Well, it works as well as its modern incarnation ever did. It's
| been some time since there was a way to cleanly browse a
| newsgroup using Google Groups).
| layer8 wrote:
| I'm a bit confused. According to the Wayback Machine,
| dejanews.com already redirected to groups.google.com for many
| years, similar to how www.dejanews.com still does. So they just
| dropped the redirect from the plain domain without "www."?
| grepfru_it wrote:
| The domain apex has always been a problem for hosting
| companies. Since the apex domain is usually overloaded (TXT SPF
| MX records etc) it's very easy for the A record to be modified
| or lost unintentionally. It's almost a breath of fresh air to
| see such an old solved problem (you do run a cmdb right?)
| appear again even if temporarily
| jvolkman wrote:
| Seems like the content is still there? Here's me getting smacked
| down as a kid for asking for warez:
| https://groups.google.com/g/alt.games.doom/c/RrzQBjHIa6k/m/Q...
| godber wrote:
| Haha, thanks for sharing!
| sandyarmstrong wrote:
| You are a brave soul. I can't bring myself to share my pathetic
| early teenage exploits on Usenet. Hexen was awesome though. :-)
| kstrauser wrote:
| You should have replied that their sig was unnecessarily huge
| and was clogging the servers more than you did.
|
| Most of what I know about online knife-fight arguing came from
| Usenet.
| jvolkman wrote:
| If only I knew then what I know now...
| okr wrote:
| I would say it is not any different today. Just today you can
| be blocked anytime and no one will notice. :)
| d11z wrote:
| Sometimes, not even you yourself notice.
| epcoa wrote:
| It might not be too late
| 0xDEAFBEAD wrote:
| I'd be curious to know how internet culture has changed, and
| what has stayed the same, relative to the early usenet days
|
| I remember seeing this guide decades ago, but I can't say I
| participated in the social scene it documents:
| https://www.flamewarriorsguide.com/
| qingcharles wrote:
| It was fine when forums were still a big thing, that wasn't
| a bad transition.
|
| What I find now is that there is less community. Even
| "social networks" like TikTok aren't really social, in that
| nobody is doing much socializing. We're all just throwing
| out witty little comments and leaving.
| 0xDEAFBEAD wrote:
| Yeah that sounds right to me. Even though use of the
| internet has expanded a lot since I was a kid, I remember
| making more genuine friends in the earlier days.
|
| My theory is that it has to do with the ubiquity of
| feedback mechanisms. Likes, followers, upvotes, etc. It's
| a never-ending popularity contest. We're now living this
| Onion satire from 14 years ago:
| https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uFpK_r-jEXg
|
| The ubiquity of the "news feed" concept could also play a
| role -- long-running discussions are now fairly
| impossible. People who disagree just take potshots at
| each other, instead of getting to the root of the
| disagreement.
|
| It's a shame there's so much homogeneity across different
| social sites. Wish people would experiment more.
| qingcharles wrote:
| That Onion was great, thank you.
|
| I love the Reddit format, I think for the most part it
| works well in terms of commenting (same as HN), but the
| problem is the "news feed" concept, like you say. A
| Reddit post is only alive for a few hours before it drops
| away never to return.
|
| At least on forums whenever there is a reply it bounces
| back to the top and keeps topics alive.
| pests wrote:
| > I remember making more genuine friends in the earlier
| days.
|
| I used to have friends I would meet in a random video
| game or chat room and then communicate with them for
| _years_ over AIM or IRQ or mIRC. In a lot of cases not
| even knowing their real names.
|
| Reminds me of this old 1997 MMO released by Sony Online
| Entertainment (and later reimplemented by KaZaA and Skype
| co-author Priit Kasesalu) named Subspace (renamed
| Continuum) I grew up playing. So anyways...
|
| 10 years ago or so everyone got added to a FB group and
| suddenly everyone knew each others real names and faces.
| It was a very strange feeling.
|
| Just some reminiscing.
| jcpham2 wrote:
| I still do but most of our interests shifted to finance
| 0xDEAFBEAD wrote:
| Another way to think about it is that "social" media may
| call itself social, but it's actually more like broadcast
| media in most ways.
| trackflak wrote:
| Bizarrely I find a certain notorious imageboard to be
| much more sociable than anything that calls itself
| 'social media'. Even though everyone is anonymous, I come
| away feeling like it was more like a conversation with
| randomers in a pub, only with more success than I'd have
| in the namesake situation.
|
| I think the lack of any 'news feed' or forced revealing
| of your identity makes it a much more social experience.
| We're behind a screen talking nonsense and sometimes
| saying horrible things to each other, but it is fun.
| nurple wrote:
| Heartily agree. I don't visit much anymore as I have a
| tendency to overuse, but some of the most interesting,
| real, and oddly respectful, conversations I've had in a
| long time were on said board.
| Stratoscope wrote:
| Along similar lines, Season 1 Episode 7 of _The Orville_
| , "Majority Rule", had a similar theme. Summarized here
| by ChatGPT who helped me remember which show this was:
|
| "In this episode, the crew visits a society where social
| media influence and approval ratings dictate every aspect
| of people's lives. Citizens can upvote or downvote each
| other, and if someone's approval rating falls too low,
| they face severe consequences. The episode explores
| themes of social media, public opinion, and the potential
| dangers of a society driven by constant judgment."
|
| Miss Chatty, as I affectionately call her, also mentioned
| _Black Mirror_ Season 3 Episode 1, "Nosedive":
|
| "People in a society rate each other on a social media
| platform, and these ratings have significant consequences
| on their social status and privileges. The protagonist's
| life unravels as her ratings start to plummet."
|
| And _Community_ Season 3 Episode 1 (a common theme
| here?), "Biology 101":
|
| "The characters participate in a social experiment called
| the 'MeowMeowBeenz' system. In this system, people can
| rate each other from 1 to 5 'MeowMeowBeenz,' affecting
| their social standing and privileges within the
| community."
|
| https://chat.openai.com/share/d2ac7651-4ab3-4504-9369-7ea
| 4db...
| dylan604 wrote:
| social media consumers is the a better description.
| influencers peddle shite, and it is dutifully consumed by
| the followers. we've all been co-opted into eating bowls
| of shit and enjoying it without asking any questions. i
| say all, but there's a few hold outs.
| Kye wrote:
| I went looking for this so many times, but couldn't
| remember the name or enough details to search for or ask
| about it.
| 0xDEAFBEAD wrote:
| Glad I could help. Guess I just lucked into remembering
| the right keywords
| skrebbel wrote:
| Did someone send you Hexen though
| jvolkman wrote:
| I did get it eventually but I don't recall where. Possibly
| the infamous Quake shareware CD. :)
| qingcharles wrote:
| Here's me arguing with Jez San (Star Fox) about polygons in
| 1994. He eventually offered me an interview:
|
| https://groups.google.com/g/rec.games.programmer/c/j0CqgQSoV...
| rosywoozlechan wrote:
| > fully-asm coded polyfill (flat shaded) and it uses NO
| variables, only registers
|
| As someone who writes small hobby OpenGL 4 games with zig for
| fun and because I'm not using a game engine I think I'm doing
| low level stuff, but this really appropriately puts what I'm
| doing into perspective. This quote is pretty awesome. I love
| how we got to where we are these days. Early game developers
| were true pioneers and we owe you so much!
| qingcharles wrote:
| LOL. I was still in secondary school back then. It'd be
| another 3 or 4 years before I became a game dev for real.
| The same 3D engine I'm talking about there, I ported it to
| DirectX and used its poly-fill for this game:
|
| https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=t2kdKB18c7I&t=332s
| WillPostForFood wrote:
| Were they really getting 16000 texture-mapped polys on a DX2?
| qingcharles wrote:
| We will never know. I think I was probably 16 at the time
| there. With a lot of hindsight and watching some videos
| lately about hacking the Mario 64 3D routines I wonder if
| the techniques we thought were fast back then are outdated
| now?
|
| There are better profiling tools available now. I might be
| able to do it much better. Plus, not all registers are
| equal on the 486. Using FS and GS to hold data might be
| slower than pulling it from RAM. How much on chip cache
| does a 486 have? I don't know.
| jvolkman wrote:
| Brian Hook was in there as well. Wasn't he at id at some
| point?
|
| Also, lots of people on Netcom. That was my ISP as well
| around that time and I still have their DNS server IPs
| memorized.
| shortformblog wrote:
| This is my new favorite comment. Surfacing something this
| cringe is truly magical.
| nurple wrote:
| I have to ask: were you using your dad's Usenet account?
| jvolkman wrote:
| Hah, yeah. Although I apparently figured out how to use my
| own name a few days later at https://groups.google.com/g/alt.
| games.doom/c/2d7DfaMPovU/m/M...
| gjvc wrote:
| we need usenet back
| WillAdams wrote:
| Yeah, the closest thing to it is Reddit, and that's nowhere
| near egalitarian enough.
| OfSanguineFire wrote:
| Usenet was all about longform text. People posting to it were
| seated comfortably at a chair and typing on a keyboard.
| Reddit is today mainly browsed by people on their phones, a
| medium that discourages longform text no matter how much
| people claim to be just as proficient on a touchscreen
| keyboard as a real one. Moreover, Reddit's redesign
| discourages substantial discussion, and even if one chooses
| to use old.reddit.com, you still suffer from the overall
| culture of the site being set by the new interface.
| crtasm wrote:
| Nothing to stop a subreddit running a bot to enforce
| minimum post length and detect obvious attempts at padding
| to bypass it, I guess? The effects of the UI are still a
| problem though as you say.
|
| I view reddit less as a site, more a collection of lots of
| subs that vary a lot in how they feel.
| ok123456 wrote:
| How about forum software that enforces that top-level
| comments must be at least 500 characters, and replies
| need to be at least 140 characters? Also, enforce a max
| thread depth of 7. Anything past that is usually
| bickering.
| OfSanguineFire wrote:
| Mods on any decently popular subreddits will tell you
| that they feel limited in what rules they can enforce.
| Reddit users get used to the sitewide culture, so if they
| come onto a subreddit and run up against strange rules,
| they hassle the mods. I've seen whole mobs, drawing in
| even the sub's regulars, harangue mods as "gatekeepers",
| with few or none standing up for the traditional rules.
|
| Also, I'm not sure if it was true or a conspiracy theory,
| but I recall once hearing that mods of the most popular
| subs cannot institute any rules that would reduce
| "engagement" (and thereby profit), as Reddit would then
| replace them.
| shagie wrote:
| The infrastructure and software of usenet is still there.
|
| People tend not to be interested in using it in favor of easier
| to consume content that provides an upvote dopamine hit with
| it.
| jbverschoor wrote:
| Well, it's a great source to train your LLM. It makes a lot of
| sense to hide it from competitors
| alberth wrote:
| It's been this way for 20+ years.
|
| > _Google Groups became operational in February 2001, following
| Google 's acquisition of Deja's Usenet archive._
|
| https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Google_Groups
| dragontamer wrote:
| > The requested URL / was not found on this server. That's all
| we know.
|
| This is the part people are talking about.
|
| This all could just be a weekend glitch that's fixed on Monday
| or Tuesday this week. I wouldn't leap to the conclusion of this
| title without an announcement from Google.
| reidrac wrote:
| Only mildly related but I'm using Eternal September to follow a
| handful of newsgroups and the spam I see in those come from Gmail
| accounts via Google Groups.
|
| I wonder of it would be better if Google was out of Usenet
| completely instead of not completely caring.
| shever73 wrote:
| I use Eternal September too. I wish that there was another
| archive of Usenet. Google's "stewardship" of it has been
| predictably disastrous.
| StableAlkyne wrote:
| My conspiracy theory is that they bought it to kill Usenet.
| Search is their business, and users going to Usenet (which
| you can't exactly search without an archive) instead of a
| forum on the web hurts business.
|
| So they bought DejaNews and slapped a deliberately bad UI
| onto it. And as every ISP dropped Usenet, people were told
| "Go to Google Groups to keep talking."
|
| And because the UX was outright worse than the newsreaders
| they had been using (no killfiles, no moderation for spam,
| etc), people left for forums.
| Projectiboga wrote:
| The ISPs all dropped USENET when NY AG Coumo strong armed
| several ISPs to drop Usenet Binaries for the made up reason
| of Child Porn. The tell was he wanted them to drop all
| binaries not just the 'adult' ones. He was running for
| Governor, which is why I felt it was a publicity stunt and
| a favor to big media, who didn't want to litigate about
| Usenet due to the complexity and the existing case law.
| StableAlkyne wrote:
| The worst part about the whole thing is they could have
| just dropped the binary groups and kept the text groups.
| By dropping all of Usenet, they killed most of the
| discussion and effectively handed it to the binaries
| users. In doing so, they created an environment where
| most people using Usenet were doing it to pirate stuff,
| and those users had already moved to private providers
| who could afford the bandwidth.
|
| Nowadays all you get when you search for Usenet providers
| are folks dedicated to binaries. Piracy won and smothered
| out discussion in the process. Even the Usenet sub on
| Reddit is just discussions that toe the line on Reddit's
| piracy rules.
|
| The only text-only provider I'm still aware of is
| Eternal-September. I've heard of SDF offering newsgroups
| as well but I haven't looked into it.
| floren wrote:
| There are lots of small text-only providers, but they're
| not widely known because they're small. ES is special
| because they allow low-friction signups; others you will
| mostly need to know the admin to get an account.
| trackflak wrote:
| That 'everyone online is a predator' act has been going
| on for a while hasn't it?
|
| Its current snake head is the UK's online safety bill.
| floren wrote:
| I've configured my news server to just drop everything that
| originated from Google Groups.
|
| It's been a big improvement.
| willtemperley wrote:
| Marl the Marginal User strikes again.
|
| https://nothinghuman.substack.com/p/the-tyranny-of-the-margi...
| kevin_thibedeau wrote:
| Gonna have to call foul on everyone not including an ObHack in
| this thread.
| brudgers wrote:
| Cultural vandalism.
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Google_Groups#Google_Groups
| WalterBright wrote:
| NNTP still survives. The D language forums are based on NNTP.
| It's nice to have forums that are text only (no emojis), no
| signatures, no ads, no fat borders, etc. I also wrote an archiver
| for it that creates static web pages out of the threads.
| layer8 wrote:
| How does text-only imply no emojis?
| WalterBright wrote:
| They don't get recognized and replaced with a cartoon image.
| yason wrote:
| Unicode has code points for emojis. You can just use those
| and they will show up as images, given proper encoding such
| as utf-8.
| qu4z-2 wrote:
| I suspect the lack of emoji support is not a technical
| issue.
| layer8 wrote:
| It's not an NNTP limitation, in any case, which supports
| arbitrary encodings in news postings. Not sure what WB is
| referring to.
| wolverine876 wrote:
| Also nice for lightning responsiveness and threaded
| conversations. It's as if News has everything I want in a forum
| and nothing else.
| zeruch wrote:
| I still recall trying to recruit one of the dejanews SREs to come
| work at my then employer (VA Linux) to now avail. A couple of
| months later he was a Googler.
| gandalfian wrote:
| The terrible irony is now nobody reads Usenet because of the
| spam. But people continue to endlessly automatically spam because
| Usenet is picked up by web indexers like Google who read the spam
| links. So Google dejanews has killed the very thing it valued.
| The machines have taken over and pushed out the humans.
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