> Google ended up acquiring and eating Usenet, becoming Google Groups.

They did not acquire usenet, they acquired Dejanews, a big usenet-archive and gateway to the usenet. Usenet itself is made of decentraliced servers. Everyone can have one, most big providers and tech-companies had one in the early days. Each with their own groups. There also were public groups, maintained by some hive-mind-org or something.

Anyway, Usenet still exists, it's not dead, technically. But there is also not much alive either. File sharing on commercial servers seems to be very popular now, and the discusion-groups are receiving more spam than actual worthy content.

> Reddit fills some of this niche, but Usenet was tech-focused,

50:50 I'd say. There were many tech-groups. But pretty fast there were also an equal amount of non-tech-groups. And in terms of hyper-focus I would say, reddit has far more focus today than usenet ever delivered. It's more about finding a sub and filling it.

> generally quite professional and frankly didn't have the same clientele as Reddit does.

I get the impression your problem is more about the people, not the platform. Yes, usenet had more nerds and expert, more technical capable people. But usenet was also significant smaller, as was the whole internet at the time. You had some kind of natural selection, as internet generally, and usenet specifically only lured very specific people in. With special interests, from a special age and culture. Today it's different, you have anyone from anywhere making a space. I'd say those time are lost forever. At best you get some overhomogenized communities, like this hackernews here. But if you look at reddit, discord, or web-forums in general, you will still find hyper-focused spaces. Just not necessarily with the kind of people your chemistry matches with.

There's one structural difference: Usenet had no engagement metric but replies. Modern replacements measure and implicitly optimize for view counts (the lurker experience); both Reddit and Hacker News sort and surface posts based on a karma score/like count.

I think this difference led Usenet to implicitly optimize for high-effort posts. The stereotypical Reddit "in-joke" thread has no place on Usenet because the principal reward of karma is entirely missing. Instead, posters are implicitly rewarded with attention when their posts garner replies and discussion.

On one hand, this encourages real content and discussion over superficial "updoots to the left". On the other hand, it also encourages flamebait and high-effort trolling, which a vote-scoring system can silently suppress.

Yeah no, if you go back to the supposed USENET glory days you’ll find a sense of humor that, to be as charitable as possible, is incredibly cringey by today’s standards.

People smugly typing stuff like ‘Bahagaha ZAP LART!! plonk Welcome to my kill file, lamer!!!.’

Today you only really run into such bafflingly unfunny stuff in the Linux kernel mailing list— you know, supposedly hilarious things like ‘Come to the dark side, Sarah. We have cookies!’

(You may find a rare exception like a shaggy dog story about how a coin flip going differently would result in HP’s UNIX, HP-UX, being called PH-UX.)

Early technology for the internet was a natural sieve for nerds. As it became easier, that sieve became coarser until around Facebook and it became non-existent.

Nope. `rec.arts.sf.written` and `alt.folklore.urban` immediately come to mind as having extensive in-jokes. The phenomenon of replies to a post being almost incomprehensible to the uninitiated because they use/rely on the existing ecosystem of said in-jokes is as true for such newsgroups as it is for any subreddit. The only difference is that on Reddit said comments will be at the top of the tree, but the metastructure of their replies is otherwise the same.

1 - https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/James_Parry

edit can’t spel.

This happened to me with Archimedes Plutonium back when he was Ludwig Von Plutonium. You can find him discussed in https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Usenet_personality. (Luckily for me, his brand of crazy didn't trend towards violence. Though I still regret later having introduced him to the p-adic numbers.)

There is probably more aggregate pain over time from something like a group of 4chan users coming up with Rickrolling then successfully making it a meme. But the pain that a high effort troll can cause is rather...special.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eternal_September

I ran the Newzbin Usenet search engine so it's a topic of some nostalgia for me.

Google bought Dejanews, a service that operated a usenet2web gateway. It became Google Groups.

http://googlepress.blogspot.com/2001/02/google-acquires-usen...

I believe you may be thinking of the backbone cabal[1]. But maybe not, since it's secret and doesn't exist.

---

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Backbone_cabal

Allow regular people to set up a BBS that other people could connect to. Once there they can read/post on public message boards, they can send direct messages to other users on the same BBS, they can exchange files between them, they can play multiplayer online games with their friends, engage in group chat, etc.

A small percentage of people like running things like this. Right now they're probably starting up a Facebook group that has draconian content restrictions and extremely limited functionality. Make it easy for them to start a BBS - either on a SaaS platform or literally hosted on their own device, they might just switch to it.

Unless you were dialing up to CBBS between 1978-1980, i.e. the only BBS in the world at the time, then USENET predates your BBS era, which I would assume like most is really somewhere between 1984-1994, even if BBS existed prior to then and after then.

I remember reporting a PINE newsgroup thread bug at the height of my nntp usage and several of the local BBS systems had started dying off by then.

Especially the commercial BBSs could have quite a few systems and phone lines and, as you say the bigger BBSs often became the first ISP that consumers had access to if they didn't have access through their company or university.

You also had the big commercial services like Compuserve, AOL, Bix, Delphi, and so forth.

So in that sense BBSes would predate Usenet for most people.

I got Usenet access before I got full internet (even dialup) in fact but it was much later, in the mid 90s, using a really expensive UUCP account.

So, Discord?

I have left all social media - this site is the only social thing I do now - and this whole thread is giving me all kinds of sad feels.

What do you mean "allow"? Unless you have a ridiculous ISP, you're allowed to host just about anything. I seriously doubt any ISPs are blocking NNTP, UUCP, or SSH.

You mean, like this?

https://enigma-bbs.github.io/

https://thingbbs.rhizome.org/

It's a testament to how de-centralized and randomly those archives were served. And the death of dial-up async long manifesto culture. Any greenfield cloud based approach can scale users, but not that culture of usenet binary harvest tools, irc #warez clubs and constrained bandwidth netiquette ;)

In the late 90's, when the web started to dominate the internet, I was hoping for an NNTP overhaul that would allow most people to host mini-NNTP servers for true decentralization. Freenet and I2P seem to be sorts of stabs at the idea, but never really caught on, unfortunately. I'd love to see a truly worldwide Usenet.

That would be quite an idea: extended NNTP over P2P, but doesn't Mastodon do sort of a similar thing today?

Let me take a minute to commemorate "Canter & Siegel, green-card lawyers", for being the first sharp-eyed critters to spot they could make a buck shitting in the common's spring.

In the early days of Usenet there were very few ways to access it from the perspective of an average person. You either had to be working on one of the small number of companies that were internet connected or were at a university. That significantly restricted the available pool of people using it, and also filtered that pool.

Up through the early 90s that natural filter mechanism kept the focus of individual groups small, reduced noise, and increased signal. Over time as internet access became more widespread that signal to noise decreased, and most modern forums still have difficulty with it.

There are a few other interesting characteristics - the specific nature of the tree approach and the availability of lots of specific groups gave it some uniqueness - Today you might see a bit of that in Reddit subs, Facebook groups, and other similar platforms, albeit lacking the tree.

1. Meatspace user groups / interest groups.

2. University lecture series (the type of weekly seminar that all graduate students and faculty in a given research area attend). You can usually attend as a member of the public if you have an "in".

3. Mailing lists and discord servers for specific projects.

Unfortunately they got too caught up in the crypto nonsense but the idea was sound - good communities have to be guarded and they occasionally "lower the drawbridge" to bring on newcomers, potentially with semi-public spaces. This could be a minecraft server, a facebook group or what have you.

Since the group is motile, they aren't affected by platforms being subpar. They can avoid stagnation by bringing in newcomers, but have a way to vet incoming people too before allowing them "internal" access.

[0]: https://trust.support/feed/moving-castles

(There was also a computer at MIT called "zurich.ai.mit.edu" that you could FTP to in 1990 and download really raunchy NSFL porn. I still have scars.)

The channel list in particular is way too low density.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hashcash

1) Start off with a trusted group of people (stakeholders)

2) Set up an invite-only system

3) Inviting someone means sharing some stake (i.e. some reputation) with them

4) To post you need some minimum amount of stake

5) With every post that's not downvoted into oblivion you increase your stake until you reach a certain equilibrium point. (So there's a limit and it's not about gaining status points.)

6) Posts that are downvoted into oblivion will cause their authors to lose some stake.

At the same time, paying ten cents to make a comment on Reddit or HN is very unappealing.

HashCash is older than Bitcoin, and Bitcoin sybil-attack protection is basically HashCash.

Early Usenet was like Reddit, without the corporate (and come on, blatantly left-leaning) censorship.

I’d encourage you to post a scientific or academic survey of Reddit’s political censorship. I think it’s common that everyone believes their own ideology gets censored when it’s probably not the case overall.

Usenet was a distributed set of news peering relationships, exchanging posts via NNTP. There was nothing to acquire, so that's not what happened.

Google merely set up a web interface to it, which was eventually extended to the abomination that was Google Groups. This was intended to be some sort of mix of Usenet group and mailing list, all via a web interface. In reality it was awful and I suspect development on it stopped 10+ years ago.

But what is called Groups now is something else entirely, as you said.

FYI, Google Groups are literally the “groups” of Google Workspace — every time you create a group of users to e.g. assign that group some GCP roles, that group then also gets an email address (that being the group’s global primary key), and that email address then implicitly becomes a mailing list all group members are subscribed to.

It’s actually very useful in a corporate Google Workspace context — it’s rare to need an actual mailing list given Slack et al, but they’re effectively “group email-forwarding aliases”, allowing messages to e.g. devops-billing@example.com to arrive in the inboxes of multiple people.

When Google bought the Dejanews archives I thought it was good, because Google was good at search and I naively still believed that the company actually wanted to make all information accessible. It's a real shame that all of the old Usenet stuff is gone.

If anyone here knows how to get the uuencoded part of that message, I'd be interested.

I wrote the first custom NNTP client for Deja. (This was a high-performance replacement for the community, open source client.) All it did was receive and dump articles in a format for the indexer. It did some light processing, including stripping uuencode content. So uuencode never even made it into the archive.

https://www.seroundtable.com/google-discussion-search-dead-1...

https://browsermedia.agency/blog/google-kills-discussion-sea...

I will say one thing I've found strange is how spotty old posts are. Even within the same newsgroup. I can easily track down old posts of mine but sometimes stuff is spotty within a single thread. I've not seen any true rhyme or reason to what's gone and what remains.

The technology is still up and running. Some of the people from the 90s are still there. But Usenet definitely has peaked in terms of users and postings.

I see you didn't hang out in alt.wesley.crusher.die.die.die much

Usenet was a cost to ISPs unfortunately. But, it wasn't centrally controlled or moderated either. It also was minimally technical to use, which served as a good filter.

But I guess reddit's subreddits may be the best alternative with viewership and specific groups/areas.

You know... it should be possible with tagging to take something like twitter reddit, and generate "views" that are groups. Maybe make some spec with three letters, maybe R and an S, and heck another S for the hell of it.

Balkanization and content gardens/API walls block integration of like minded content.

I don't blame the ISPs for this. At the time, you could be an ISP with what is essentially a low-end home Internet connection now, but it cost thousands per month.

What started the downfall of Usenet was Eternal September when AOL let their hoi polloi access the Big Boy Internet. The "Me-tooer" phenomenon was particularly irritating.

that, and the unfortunate but probably not unexpected flood of actual child abuse photos. this became a huge problem real fast. an ISP I worked for back in that day dropped NNTP like a hot potato when the company lawyers caught wind of the potential legal issues.

The name of the group you're thinking of was probably something like "alt.dinosaurs.barney.die.die.die."

And this is the major advantage of Usenet. You can’t be silenced by a mob, which leads to freedom of expression and disparate views. Sure there is spam and flames, but one gets all the tools one needs to deal with that. There is no committee deciding what posts should be kept or deleted. We are a lot worse off today than we used to be, largely because of the centralization of discourse.

Asking the user to implement measures and keep them up-to-date is detrimental to adoption from users that are aware of curated sources. Pretending this is net-neutral is misleading.

> We are a lot worse off today than we used to be, largely because of the centralization of discourse.

Usenet was centralized in practice, so I think you mean something else. It's not clear how much the curation of content stifles discourse when creating new forums is essentially free. Either way, I would tend to disagree that curated is worse. Everyone curates to some degree, even when they are free and open discussions.

Not all of the alt.* hierarchy was vapid.

There were also quite a few "for sale" type groups, I remember when the group for computer equipment was split into about five subgroups after it got too big.

Just editing to add - there were also a lot of regional groups, one of the earliest and probably biggest was ba.* There were also state/country level top levels and a few colleges had their own too

After alt.* was inagurated, the very first group was (IIRC) alt.swedish.chef.bork.bork.bork. Then there were alt.destroy.the.earth and alt.pave.the.earth, which were bitter enemies despite their opposition to alt.save.the.earth, because if you destroyed the earth there'd be nothing left to pave. Alt was also the home of the Big Seven sex groups, plus piracy in the alt.binaries groups. The talk.* groups had problems as well. Oh, and then there was alt.2600, which purposely had a moderator who rejected any and all postings: you had to hack USENET and assume moderator privileges to post there.

I think easily the closest thing we have nowadays to USENET is reddit. And, to be honest, if you average over its entire audience, it's more tame than USENET was.

This is the kind of internet we lost when it went all corporate.

See https://www.livinginternet.com/u/ui_alt.htm

(and I knew Brian Reid and John Gilmore in those days).

Of course it is, it's beholden to advertisers. Chairman Pao saw to its taming, right before getting canned.

That is false and nonsensical. Usenet is a federated network of NNTP servers; Google just joined that with their own implementation having an awful web front end, which they proceeded to revise in even worse directions. That happened right in the middle of a decline that was happening, driven by ISPs shutting down their NNTP servers. So it might have looked like Usenet is somehow transitioning to Google. Google did also acquire a Usenet archive, and then make it impossible to use.

Anhyway, Usenet is alive and (sort of) well. There are new posts daily in newsgroups like comp.unix.programmer, comp.lang.c. Even comp.lang.lisp sees some action.

See you there!

--

Hey look, comp.lang.awk has a new post, from the somewhat kooky, but topical, KPop 2GM

--

I'm currently using the news.eternal-september.org NNTP server.

Note: there is spam, but not nearly as much as you see through the Google Groups interface, and that's the interface that offers no filtering features.

You need a newsreader with killfile processing. I use the terminal-based slrn (S-Lang Read News). It has a score feature for assigning scores to articles based on matches on arbitrary fields. If you give something a -9999 score, it disappears. The fields have a lot of information. You can kill based on what server someone is coming from, or what client they are supposedly using, if you want.

What were some of the newsgroups you were interested in? When and why did you stop checking them?

[0] http://sdf.org/ [1] https://tildeverse.org/ [2] https://tilde.club/wiki/usenet-news.html [3] http://www.altexxanet.org/usenet.html

https://coderanch.com/

https://www.dpreview.com/forums

and

https://polyamory.com/

as good examples. There are a lot of dead forums out there, but there are also ones where the administrators make the effort to greet new users and make them feel welcome. For instance that last forum covers a fraught issue where emotions run pretty high but the administrators do a good job of "onboarding" new users.

http://www.faqs.org/faqs/C-faq/faq/

The worst part about Facebook groups, Reddit, and even most forums is the same questions being repeated over and over. You can do sticky threads and links on subreddits (not really sure how you would do it on Facebook) but it's not often done.

If you find it 'gimmicky' which I don't, but lots do, just focus on the 'Groups' app.

https://urbit.org/getting-started

To communicate you need a 'ship' (an ID). This could be a free 'comet' and a paid planet. Layer 2 Planets are relatively cheap, and they'll be yours forever too, so it's just a one time payment.

You can find them here:

https://subject.network/buy/

https://azimuth.shop/ (3.5 bucks atm in this one)

https://wexpert.systems/

https://mocbel.house/

Any questions, lmk. (not affiliated, just a fan)

I still haven't dived into it, it felt obscure and obtuse last time I checked, but are the cool kids actually using it? I.e. do you have any more link to this niche community, to check what's the status of the project?

~bitbet-bolbel/urbit-community

Justin Murphy also has a pretty cool guide here: https://imperceptible.computer/

You could boot a comet and message me (~piclyx-docsun) there with your HN name and I'll link you cool groups I'm in.

What I find weird about Urbit is that it isn't mainstream, but most groups I'm in are pretty active. The UI also adds to the experience, it is soothing.

Would be happy to show you more stuff.

Edit:

To answer the status, you could check the blog (https://urbit.org/blog) or you could join the network and follow the beginner groups (i.e. ~bitbet-bolbel/urbit-community).

Who exactly are you to stop people from enjoying something impractical and controversial? Accept the fact that some might have a more open and curious mind.

It’s more that I don’t want to interact with the general group of people that would be seriously attracted to Urbit.

I tried doing something with it once and my impression was that it is just needlessly/deliberately obtuse/arcane. There are much simpler alternatives.

Kids today will never know the pain.

That said, alt.binaries was a big reason that ISPs started dropping Usenet. The other being the ever decreasing signal to noise ratio as the entire system proved to be vulnerable to spam and trolls. Yet another example of why moderation is a necessary evil if you want to scale up a discussion group.

How many of us attempted to automate this process :-)

[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Parchive

Most public forums back in the day would have been vastly improved if they had been done as an NNTP server with each sub-forum as a newsgroup rather than doing them with something like phpBBB on an HTTP server.

Heck, most forums today would have better threading and post organization with NNTP than they do with the popular web forum systems.

Same goes for non-chat communication within companies. Newsgroups on an internal NNTP server would be better in most ways than mailing lists for topics in which people actually need to discuss things as a group.

I beg to differ.

NNTP's lack of moderation is a bug, not a feature. Between the spam and abuse, NNTP would be an utter cesspool in today's world.

I've seen Usenet, and I've seen Reddit. I'll take Usenet.

If Usenet was as popular as Reddit, you would hate Usenet just as much.

nntp://news.grc.com

I also worked for a place in the early 2000s which used an NNTP server internally (large corp) for company communication and discussion.

I ran it, and linked it to a new group. Nobody ever posted in usenet, and I suspect nobody read in there.

https://xn--gckvb8fzb.com/superhighway84/ is a more directly nostalgia inspired clone of usenet.

Tangential, but fascinating that we've binned these categories together. The latter is likely orders of magnitude more harmful to society.

More than once, I've had thoughts about developing some sort of discussion platform, but binned it because the thought of hosting it and having to deal with the not-fun problems of reducing spam and handling illegal content made it entirely untasteful. At least spam reduction can be done entirely on my own terms, but illegal content requires me to then coordinate with external companies or agencies, report content, figure out how to deal with and purge the content (or quarantine and hang onto it hand it over when requested), and live with the the pain of having to field DLNAs and other copyright claims.

I obviously have different feelings about piracy than I do about CSAM, but from a hosting perspective, both are just big pain points that make hosting a service where people can share non-text content a pain in the ass.

Yeah looking at you Mickey Mouse.

Seems to be oriented toward binaries though.

Some of them run their own NNTP servers as well.

EDIT: Turns out was from a cached point in time where it was doing that.

... which is not to say I love reddit or believe it has the same aesthetic as usenet, etc. ... but it's reddit.

https://pypi.org/project/nntpserver/0.0.3/

https://github.com/epilys/nntpserver.py

It's used in my link aggregator forum, https://sic.pm/ which also has a mailing list bridge functionality.

As a demo, I have implemented a HN mirror on NNTP: (quoting README.md)

hnnntp.py querying news.ycombinator.com (hackernews) API and caching results in an sqlite3 database. A public instance might be online at nessuent.xyz:564 (TLS only)

Compare: FPGA group on USENET, very little spam: https://groups.google.com/g/comp.arch.fpga

Reddit, full page animated old-spice ads: https://www.reddit.com/r/FPGA/

Also as much as you dislike google groups, just compare the UI of the above two.. ugh.. of course there is old reddit:

https://old.reddit.com/r/FPGA/

This is what ad blockers are for. I don't see any ads on reddit.

Ad blockers unfortunately don't work on those.

The other place I've found even more hyper-specific subjects is, ironically, Facebook. I, in general, stay off of Facebook but when I was looking for details on some very rare hardware, the communities there were actually the most active and useful.

You may be lamenting Eternal September and not the loss of Usenet itself.

It can be quite difficult to find online oases […]. HN is quite unique. Have you considered starting your own Slack, invite interesting people and build a new oasis? (Or Matrix channel.) It would take some work to get people to join, but it’s not impossible.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31582270

Based on your description of Usenet I think what you miss is the context around Usenet (exact period of life, young/single/student for example) and not the Usenet itself. You can find plenty of places where there are forum like discussions, but it won't be the same without the context.

That's absolutely not what happened. What actually happened was that binaries traders took over the Internet's best discussion medium and used to to shuttle uuencoded chunks of huge files to every single Usenet server in the world, and screamed bloody murder when anyone failed to keep up. This naturally drove the cost of serving Usenet wildly up, and independent ISPs dropped the service just as the retail Internet came of age, because haphazardly serving porn videos and pirated software to 0.5% of their customer base wasn't worth the cost of giant fast disk arrays.

Things like DejaNews were just the dying gasp of Usenet. Google didn't ruin anything (though I sorely wish they could have kept the archives online).

which can be said about usenet too lol

like, even fedi/ration with mastodon &co is not enough to overcome pure network effect of twitter and reddit

Back in the usenet days there was really only one place to host discussions, and that was usenet. But now there are lots of places. I guess this makes it harder to find, and makes it harder to jump from community to community.

Reddit is probably the closest thing. And I wouldn't judge all subreddits by the "front page" subreddits. I think the ruby and emacs subs are good.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/PTT_Bulletin_Board_System

Most importantly, I never read anything on Usenet that suggested, "If we do not have a robust advertising ecosystem, all this "free content" will disappear." Even regulators today are prone to believe this nonsense. Quite silly. I remember getting news and other content from Usenet without the presence of any advertising. With Usenet, the cost was the internet connection. That's it. No allegedly "necessary" trade-off between (a) allowing personal data collection and surveillance and (b) accessing "free content". Accessing mainstream news is still just as "free" today as it was then. Relatively little news or other "content" on the www is password protected. Except in the heydays of Usenet there were no advertising company-sponsored browser vendor Javascript engine-powered "paywalls" to try to annoy users into paying (more) money, on top of the internet connection charges.

every specialized sub-group now holds small portion of the web by/for themselves and only needs to interact with those of same mindset — no need to keep every single word in public forever.

but what you really missing is people of the same~ish age-group having enough time and topics to argue about

Not sure what you mean by this, but they sure were not fully clad with ads and tricks to get you to pay for some virtual gifts or pro-accounts.

You're correct about the niches existing. There are little corners of the internet that exist as the neighborhood pub. Not just small FB groups and Discord channels. But I also know blogs still going strong with their 200-1000 regular commentators. The only problem is the audience for those blogs is aging. Not exactly a problem for me since I'm aging too. But does make me a little sad for their longevity because they have a problem attracting new users.

IRC is alive and kicking.

It all depends on the community you want to hang out in. Usenet was tech-focused because the only people who knew about it or had access were tech-focused and the community was smaller (see: Eternal September).

One of your best options are niche, smaller or heavily moderated reddit communities or web forums that share the same characteristics.

The biggest difference: the maturity and culture (compared to when reddit started).

This isn't a problem that needs "solving". If you want a different community, you either need to find one or start one. HN is probably the closest demographic to what Usenet had, so advertising anything you start here would make sense.

I've thrown around the idea of a paid access forum with heavy amounts of curation, strict rules etc. The biggest obstacle is the network effect. The only ways I have thought of to overcome this initially are: have a launch date with pre-signups so that a chunk of people join at the same time, and, have some high profile individuals from within your demographic agree to join. Eg find some CEOs or CTOs, academics, thought leaders, commentators, whoever - people with big names within your target demographic - and have them sign on to participate. This will attract more people and might help with the initial network effect hurdle.

I haven't migrated from web foums to reddit or facebook groups though I'm sure there is much information in those places. I prefer that independent web forums introduce some friction to participating. You have to create an account, and some forums have limits for new members until they reach a certain post count. While the friction is small that does seem to discourage bad behavior a little.

I have easily found forums for subjects I'm interested in, but none of them are tech, so I don't know whether you'll find web forums on current tech subjects.

Back in the day, even some unmoderated groups were mostly self-moderated, such as the comp.*.oracle and comp.*.perl newsgroups. What spam there was, was posted by humans, not bots, and was quickly ignored to oblivion.

If you're interested, the Internet Archive is doing a dWeb Camp where a bunch of these folks will be coming together in the northern California woods to build further community.

I'm curious how much less toxic behavior on a platform like that would be.

Ok, they are not notary certified identities, but bit's pretty common and depending on the platform also demanded and enforced, with enough people following the demand. But I don't get the impression it made the platforms a better place.

People only learned to better hide their tracks, or don't care about it.

But, it of course would have an effect, for the simple reason that the expensive and long verification will filter out many casual users, so your user base is smaller and more dedicated from the beginning. But for this, you can also just open a commercial forum, maybe even with a fee for posting. That would probably have far more impact on the quality than any identity-check. I remember the Something Awful-Site seems to fare quite successful with that approach.

It still has toxic elements because the people who run the platform think a certain way.

It's up to the community how real time it feels. I know some servers that have global interest and there's usually someone to talk to regardless of when you ask a question. On the other hand I have also noticed servers where it's becomes obvious who is on EST vs PST.

Google groups hasn't been the main method of communication for a while.

There's discords for TV shows and Games, but I also see discord for development projects. Some even use patreon and have discord access as a subscription benefit where the developer posts beta builds.

For example, Uberduck https://uberduck.ai/ has an pretty active discord for developers. Uberduck have a free tier when you can synthesize TTS that sound like well known voice actors or singers. https://app.uberduck.ai/speak#mode=tts-reference&voice=cave-... And it has a paid tier if you want to clone your own voice.

EleutherAI's discord has a similar healthy discord community. GPT-NeoX talk there.

Two Minute Papers , the youtube channel run by Dr.Károly Zsoln has its own unofficial discord as well. Unofficial but Dr. Károly Zsoln has shared a twitter linking to it, so he is aware of it.

Lichess.org has a discord server.

I can't promise if your hyper-specific interests will have discord server dedicated to it, but there's many. In fact my university has a specific server for CS and Math and you can ask for help, and from the last time I checked, specific professors do come and answer questions, although more likely it's other classmates.

I'm not claiming it's a change for the better. I'm old enough to have caught the tail end of phpBB forums about every niche so I know what was lost. From a technical perspective forums are superior for long term discussions (especially for non-members!), but in terms where new stuff happens and where community forms - it's over. The closest replacement are specific channels on discord that allow sometimes for week-long discussions.

One of main social effects I see is that knowledge starts to get siloed. There are many technical details that exist online only on specific chats, which aren't google searchable. The main negative is that if you don't even know where to look or ask, it's way harder to figure out anything. There's also a positive: because people are forced to join they are more likely to contribute. In fact I have observed this in myself: often I only join some discord to look for one thing, but I just leave the server on afterwards. In many cases I see something worth responding to and morph from an observer into an active participant. This would never have happened on a forum. It's possible this factor is solely responsible for the current dominance of discord/telegram.

One future shift I can see is a move away from chats into VR. I don't think it's going to happen with zoomers, but alpha gen - assuming they grow up in VR spaces may find it natural to prefer literal talking as anime and furry avatars, with (almost) full nonverbal communication, instead of writing text messages to each other. In a way, it would be a return to the historical norm of human communication.

From a social trend perspective it's the same direction as the move away from forums into chats: worse information search (basically gone with VR). More emphasis on contributing and on personal relationships. The main disadvantage I can see is that it's going to place much stronger emphasis on people's characteristics: age, gender, native language.

Compared to what forums morphed into - reddit, hn, similar - these are another order of magnitude worse than old forums. See, consider yours and my reply. I won't remember your nickname nor will you remember mine. There are no avatars. It's borderline machine level information exchange with the author itself a faded out barely visible string.

This is likely something where it isn't something that can have an absolute worth put on the various technologies, but where it'll change from person to person, depending on how they like to interact with others, how comfortable they are in a real-time vs. asynchronous setting and so forth.

But that said, I do believe that all of the walls that currently exist (and yes, I know they've existed in the past, not like IRC was archived) as antithetical to the spirit of the Internet and the idea of sharing information effectively. We have yet to find the perfect medium that combines some level of privacy for those that want it but allows for information to be shared so it isn't lost to the annals of some chat log.

I also have my own NNTP server (although currently there are very few messages so far, but anyone who is interested in this things can join if they want to do). Currently the messages are only on my NNTP server, but it would be possible to be propagated to/from other servers too.

I set up NNTP instead of using mailing lists/forums, since I think that NNTP is better. (It would be acceptable to also allow subscribing like it is a mailing list, and web interface, but the NNTP must be primary.)

There is still some spam, but the spam seems to come from Google, as far as I can tell.

[0]It was one of the first newsreaders to take full advantage of character-addressable CRT terminals [Wikipedia]

The problem is discoverability. How would I find these places today if I hadn't already found them in 2001? I have no idea.

Unfortunately, the solution is also discoverability. Likely the biggest reason I still find these places satisfying is they're niche sites full of long-time contributors who know each other that have never become popular and never had eternal September happen because they're hard to find.

Ephemeral is a perfect term to describe the new internet.

Now with the internet feeling like it's just Reddit, Facebook, Google, Discord, LinkedIn, and Pintrest a lot of the fun inside jokes have gone to die, and the groups are so large that no-one even looks at a username.

I've found that niche subreddits are the exception to this rule.

It most certainly was not.

With this I could easily surface interesting articles or replies by insightful people, while avoiding subjects and authors in which I had no interest.

This worked at a thread level, so I could quickly see any new threads, and new replies added to threads I was following, skipping over everything I had already marked as read.

For me this was more effective than the communal post scoring that took over on web forums, reddit, hn etc.

The "boringness" of the front end would keep the riff-raff out - why would they bother when Reddit et al give them a much bigger and more meme-addled audience - and it'd be more like the second coming of old-school Usenet that so many older techies seem to long for.

If only I were a software engineer rather than a data scientist.

NextDoor sounds like something I don't want to check out (What happened to EveryBlock?) I'm not on Facebook, maybe there's some good local conversation happening there. . .? I'm surprised nothing has come close to BBS's yet in terms of meeting locals.

Along with the IRC Comic Chat in Windows 98 :’)

Perhaps it's time for a new USENET group, comp.misc.hn? I'd much prefer to read HN in a TUI with keyboard navigation than from a Web browser.

https://www.tomsguide.com/best-picks/the-best-usenet-provide...

I haven't test any of them but it SEEMS like Usenet is alive and kicking...

Also, HN not being subject focused works for me because I am interested in more than one subject.

One idea is if HN would introduce some tags, or categories so someone can filter if he's only interested in one subject.

During the high days of that group, there were a number of websites dedicated to the band, but usenet was the home (members of the band even showed up now and then). Then one day someone created the first web forum dedicated to it, and it quickly racked up far more users than the newsgroup. The writing was on the wall.

I went and created an account but I could not STAND the web forum interfaces at the time - compared to Free Agent with its conversation threading, the web's early discussion forums were a bad, mean joke. But ignorant people for whom internet=www spoke in their legions and it was only a couple years before nobody came to the usenet forum anymore.

I briefly got into Delphi Forums at the behest of my first gf and there was one decent place I hung out in for a few years, but looking back, the evolution of right wing ratfucking on the internet was in full swing and the people I had lively debates with in there eventually became (in many cases) Facebook "friends" as we all onboarded there.

And there I lingered till 2016. Reddit is circling the drain at this point, even the subs that are dedicated to my own politics have become appalling lowest common denominator echo chambers.

I would love to go back to Usenet, much like NYC disco scenesters of the 70s would love to go back to Studio 54, but in both cases, it was a special place and a special time, and now we live here. I wish I had a better answer, but I'm pretty sure that's the answer.

These are three decent groups for content similar to HN.

If you need a usenet provider, try solani.org (no cost) or individual.net (paid but excellent)

For clients, any *nix install will have slrn, tin, pan, or possibly knode. Thunderbird is on mac and windows as well as BSD/Linux.