General Musing

My father send me and article on the death of Usenet: R.I.P Usenet: 1980-2008. I was Usenet a warez trader at 14, started my own newsgroup in the alt.* hierarchy at 16, a big contributor at 18 and a Usenet administrator at 20. I too loved Usenet with a passion during a long period of my life. My father still does his answer is “I don’t think so…“

I too like to proclaim the death of things, but I realize that in essence Sascha Segan is correct. With large US based providers killing of the alt.* hierarchy, or completely killing of Usenet, there will be a mini-death. In Europe this had been happening too, albeit on a smaller scale. Even the formerly hacker ISP XS4all killed of much of the high volume alt.binaries.* when it became too much for them to store. Having once administered a server I disagreed and even called him on this, but I could see his point.

His, my father’s and my idea of the child-pornography groups was that it was best to carry the groups, and at my ISP we used to file reports almost daily on the pornographers and distributors which came from our network. Due to Dutch law we were not allowed to actively pursue these possible offenders, and could only respond to information supplied by our customers.

That brings me to another point, the miscreants, the visitors of alt.misc and other alt.*.misc groups. A subculture of Usenet users who targeted newsgroups for takeovers, much like IRC channel takeovers. They destroyed part of the newsgroups by coming into a newsgroup and filling it so full of flame wars that in the end there was no way for legitimate discussion to continue.

I don’t think Usenet is dead, but we will miss many of the legitimate new users if this fragmentation continues.

technorati tags: usenet, miscreants, alt, nntp, irc, porn