I'm too young to have been a part of Usenet, but it seems to me that there's no good way to recreate the space described in the article without keeping most people out. My understanding is that the "Golden Age" of Usenet was possible mainly because only the people with the proper resources, knowledge, interest, and opportunity could even get to it in the first place. When you select a group of people from the general population with those traits and assets, of course you'll end up with a group that's more or less self-policing; the population will be small and largely homogeneous. It's hard to have conflict when your neighbors are almost identical to you, at least on a large scale.
In my estimation, the larger and broader a group is, the more it'll approximate human culture and interaction as a whole. It shouldn't be a surprise when the negative parts of those things (e.g. war, strife, hatred) emerge, just as much as the positive things (peace, fellowship, love).
"In my estimation, the larger and broader a group is, the more it'll approximate human culture and interaction as a whole. It shouldn't be a surprise when the negative parts of those things (e.g. war, strife, hatred) emerge, just as much as the positive things (peace, fellowship, love)."
Yes and no, I think. Physical space has some constraints that counter this in a way online spaces don't. Take a place like NYC, for instance, where there are so many people, from so many parts of the world, that it arguably begins to "approximate human culture and interaction as a whole." What you see here is that people start to subdivide the space and agree on expected behavior -- in public spaces, like the subway, people by and large try to reduce interactions. Then there are public spaces that are pseudo-private, like bars or cafes or restaurants, but each have their own understood rules -- at a bar you can start to talk up a stranger, at a restaurant you don't just walk to a random table and join in a conversation. There are also many private spaces -- apartments, or your own room in an apartment shared with roommates.
Contrast that with the typical online space, where it's not just that there are lots of people, but also no constraints. It's the equivalent of going on to a subway and yelling at someone about politics...
I don't think the problem with the modern internet is scale so much as a failure to build some constraints into its design. Everything is public at a very loud volume.
The constraint that no one in tech wants to consider is on full-text search.
If you want to regain the pseudo-privacy of physical spaces online, put your community’s conversations behind an authentication barrier and disable full text search of conversations.
Search engine indexing is what turns a pseudo-private space into a humiliating-public one.
It’s okay to let search engines index your forum’s existence, the sub forums it contains, and their descriptions. But do not let them index participants or conversations - either by subject, by participants, or by content. And do not offer full text search of post content to authenticated members. It’s okay to index keyword tags, but that’s it.
If you do this, you will regain the semi-anonymity that made the early Internet possible to enjoy. If you don’t, you will continue to suffer the trolls and abuse that full-text search enabled in the mid-90s (see also DejaNews, X-No-Archive: Yes, and Google’s purchase of DejaNews).
EDIT: If you truly feel that full-text search is so valuable that it must not be withheld, you have to do a lot of things to defend against abuse attackers - for example: charge money for search credits, deduct credits when they choose to reveal the text of results, warn users that their searches will be monitored for abuse, require users to be in good standing with paid membership and posting activity for at least 90 days, etc. Otherwise trolls will just use stolen cards to perform full content searches to identify users to harass and then report their findings back to a central forum. They may still do that after all the above criteria, but they’ll have to work excruciatingly hard at it. Yeah, they could manually scrape the site, but you can defend against that too (“you’ve participated on 12 days, so you’re allowed to view 12 days of old content” is a good simple test).
I broadly agree that infinite perfect archival, and searchability of that archive, make an online discussion effectively public forever, subject to broadcast forever.
But, even if you disable search, disable history, there's the fundamental fact that _anyone_ can record everything they see, easily and silently. You can't just have a private authenticated space, you need to be able to personally trust every single person you let in that space.
At that point, the features around archiving or search are a bit moot.
"It's impossible to stop a truly determined attacker, so we'd better not take any steps to fend off the less-determined attackers" is a terrible approach to building safe spaces. Some applications of that logic:
- We shouldn't bother checking for characteristics of credit card fraud at transaction time, because a determined attacker might get a fraudulent card through.
- We shouldn't bother checking IDs at bars, because a determined attacker might get a fake ID through.
- We shouldn't bother trying to prevent email spam, because a determined attacker might get a spam message through.
- We shouldn't bother making laws against recording people without their consent, because a determined attacker might do so anyways.
Please construct a more plausible argument than "it's ultimately hopeless". I'm willing to consider alternatives, but I'm not willing to consider fatalism.
I apologize, I may have made my point a bit unclearly.
I don't argue that "it's ultimately hopeless". I think, with effort, it's quite possible to create a pseudo-private safe space online.
I just think that the bulk of your benefit comes from vetting the intentions and judgement of your participants, and not from technological means like removing search.
If you're able to trust your participants, technological means can be like a simple fence/lock, keeping honest people honest, but don't otherwise add a ton of extra benefit.
If you're not able to trust your participants, removing search will help _some_, but it might not be enough.
Three of the four items you list work because the government will use force against those who break the rule which prevents rampant abuse. If you want a government run and legally protected safe space then sure. I suspect most people talking about them don't actually want that.
As noted above, fatalism is an uninspiring argument here. "This won't work because you can't use force against those who break the rules" is framing-by-assumption that success is either all or nothing. Success is not all-or-nothing when it comes to creating safe spaces. If you take steps and someone works very hard to break through your steps, they will probably succeed. That does not implicitly guarantee failure, especially if success is defined as "safety improved" rather than "safety guaranteed".
The illusion of safety is dangerous because it makes people act in ways that ultimately make them even less safe once the illusion is broken. The current issues with social media posts coming back to bite people after years is a perfect example. It works until it doesn't and then you're in the deep end of the pool realizing you don't know how to swim.
The damage done by the items on your list is mostly limited to the single attacker.
If it was just "determined attacker can do a search, and use the results privately" it wouldn't be a big deal. But they can then spread the result to everyone else in the world in a way that almost negates the barriers.
The recording option is closer, but search can be done retroactively, which makes a huge difference.
My own opinion is that if these messages are on public newsgroups/forums/mailing-lists, then they should remain public. Those who do not wish to make them known all the time should use private communication (or use a "non-archive" kind of communication, such as speech or live chat or whatever, but then you take a risk). (I do think that even (especially) for public "archival type" communications, you should perhaps be able to hide your identity from being tracked if you wish, whether by occasionally changing your account, using a different account name on different forums, or whatever else you might want to do.)
I find this argument really compelling. But, I also find it interesting to contrast this with HN's reactions to a court declaring web scraping legal a couple of weeks ago: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22180559
It is interesting but the proposal is entirely in line with that case as I recall. This issue was LinkedIn was complaining about scrapping of publicly reachable sites. And this new proposal is to keep the contents of discussions unarchived behind a login.
In some jurisdictions it's illegal to record a verbal conversation without all parties's consent. It's interesting that you don't often see anyone suggesting extending that right to online conversations.
I personally believe that stems from the popular social platforms forcing you to give up your controlling interest in copyright, preventing you from suing a troll forum for republication of your protected works without your consent, since you openly divested yourself of that right when you tweeted.
Under US law anyways, it is absolutely not okay to republish a written conversation without permission under copyright law to do so, unless you fall under the "fair use" exemptions. It is safe to say that most forms of attack would not pass a "fair use" test in the courts. So if more people were to sue over copyright violations and demand the unmasking of who posted and/or those who operate, that would certainly go a long ways towards resolving that imbalance.
Sadly, it's a very expensive process, and it's very cheap to violate copyright.
Do you want to improve SEO or do you want a safe semi-private public space?
If you permit full text search of content, you permit abusers to discover and harass your members, because they can just sign up to find out who posted something once full text search discovers it.
> Contrast that with the typical online space, where it's not just that there are lots of people, but also no constraints.
I feel like you're right about some communities, and wrong about others, and it's interesting to distinguish the two, because I don't think this is a distinction anyone usually bothers to make.
There are some communities where the same community divides its activity across multiple channels. Your average "same small group of people, different channels" Slack or Discord server is this way. IRC communities also usually end up this way after they grow to sufficient size, forking off channels of #foo-offtopic, #foo-announce, #foo-help, etc. phpBB forums are/were well-known for their structure of forums with subforums (where most forum admins would set up even more subforums than anyone needed, just because they could) but where there were certainly always separate "news" and "chat" and "on-topic" forums.
But other "communities" (more like societies, I suppose?) like Reddit, or Usenet, or Twitter, do basically none of this constraint-based splitting. You'll get topic-based splitting, but this doesn't change the tone of the conversation at all. It's less like being in a separate place with its own rules, and more like just having your conversation tagged with a topic so that people can find conversations like that.
I find that the only time this type of community/society seems to work, is when it generates entirely coincidental non-connected member subgraphs, i.e. when its members aren't just a random sampling of the larger community/society's membership, but rather mostly their own cultural enclave that happens to use the community/society's social network as a gathering place. Then they can have (probably mostly implicit) rules that are different from the free-for-all of the larger society's.
There are also [sub-]communities with specific explicit rules, like Wikipedia, or /r/AskHistorians/. I feel like these aren't really relevant to the question, because the explicit rules often cause a selection effect in the membership who bothers posting, such that it's not much different to just picking those particular people and saying that only they can post. So you can't really use them as an example of how to solve the problem of general Internet discourse being shitty.
>I don't think the problem with the modern internet is scale so much as a failure to build some constraints into its design.
Can you speak more concretely what you mean here?
Are you talking about technical "constraints" into protocols such as "http" or "TCPIP"? Or constraints into DNS? Or constraints on HTML markup language?
What would an "internet technical architecture designed to prevent negativity" actually look like? Is there an example repo on github or a computer science research paper showing the algorithms that would satisfy this ideal?
I'm not sure -- in the physical space, a lot of the constraints are social, but they emerged in the context of physical constraints. You could, for example, walk into a restaurant and start haranguing the people there, but generally people don't. Without even raising the possibility of the police being called, there's a whole set of inputs the would-be haranguer can see and respond to -- the facial expressions and other body language of disapproval by the others in the restaurant, the sudden change in noise patterns in the room as all the private conversations ceased and everyone shifted their attention to the disruption, etc. Such social signals are lacking or extremely muted in non-physical settings. Is there a way to bring similar social signals to the online world? Maybe some equivalent will emerge as we grow accustomed to being online (though, given how poorly people drive despite cars being a thing for several generations, I'm skeptical of our ability to fully adapt our social systems to some kinds of technology).
Or to take another example of constraints -- if someone in a bar spreads a false rumor, that misinformation can quickly spread to all the patrons in the bar, but it's reach beyond that bar will be slow. By that time more factual information might also be circulating, and the damage of the false information blunted. Online, by contrast, misinformation spreads so much faster than factual information that it is often nearly impossible to counter.
I don't know what the solution exactly is here, but I feel that public spaces need to have more speedbumps. In the same way that people are jerks when they drive and the answer is often "less driving, and slower," I suspect that the answer to bad online social spaces is "less online, and slower," but I'm not sure what that looks like.
> I suspect that the answer to bad online social spaces is "less online, and slower," but I'm not sure what that looks like.
Kind of like how HN limits us to a handful of posts per day before the “you’re posting too much” roadblock, causing you to really think about what you have to say and whether you want to burn one of your budget on it. Usenet could have used something like that.
>if someone in a bar spreads a false rumor, that misinformation can quickly spread to all the patrons in the bar, but it's reach beyond that bar will be slow. By that time more factual information might also be circulating, and the damage of the false information blunted [...]
I think you're being a bit optimistic about physical spaces here. Rumor mills are as old as the hills. News spreads more slowly IRL, but that goes for truth as well as falsehood. You claim that misinformation spreads faster online than truth and imply this is different from IRL info, but I don't see why this should be the case. The same underlying reasons that favourite one message over another operate in both domains.
> Is there a way to bring similar social signals to the online world?
You're assuming that people will react to those signals by stopping (or not starting in the first place). Many of the most disruptive people look for those signals as their goal, because they want to be disruptive.
Think about people who will interpret any variation of "ugh" signals as "oooh, I've found the buttons to poke to get fun noises". If you want to solve this problem, that's a large part of the threat model.
Another angle on this is the economic models. Physical social spaces are generally social as a side effect -- it's not how they make money. People go to a restaurant or a bar because they want to be around other people, but bars an restaurants make their money by selling food and drink, not by selling a "social experience."
The economic models we've seen so far online are different -- the product is "be social here" and I think that's problematic. Few people want to pay just to hang out, online or off. But those selling this space have to make money somehow -- so if you're Facebook, you make your money by advertising to the people hanging out at your place, meaning to make more money you need to get more people to come be advertised to, or convince advertisers they're getting more value per ad (and so you start intrusively data mining your advertising targets).
Usenet somewhat has that division of space, in that it's divided up into thousands of individual newsgroups, each of which is (ostensibly) about a particular topic.
It's more like having thousands of parallel NYCs, each one focusing on just a specific subset of the overall culture. To your point, they're still public spaces though where anyone can come in and yell about their thing, that is undeniable (and it happened).
>Take a place like NYC, for instance, where there are so many people, from so many parts of the world, that it arguably begins to "approximate human culture and interaction as a whole."
Except people are a product of context, so putting them into a new context creates a new breed, the new yorker, of which no human being aspires to.
The zeitgeist definitely changed as the general public gained access. Prior to wide availability conversations were close to Hacker News posts in that people were mindful to be constructive and meaningfully contribute to conversations. But that was only in the macro - there were still pockets of poor behavior and even groups dedicated to different standards, notably the alt tree was meant to be looser and groups like alt.flame were no-holds-barred.
Similar to modern-day memes, one of the alt.flame threads inspired a tshirt (which I still have, somewhere) sporting the quote "Go jump in a goddamn volcano, you f.... cave newt." And like memes of today you need some cultural literacy to get the reference, much less for it to be funny.
And keep in mind that HN is only able to be the way it is because of constant, vigilant moderation.
The Internet has simply grown too large over the past couple of decades for any unmoderated public space to not be taken over by people who don't care about community norms, individual bad actors, organized invasions, and psyops.
Usenet could handle the first two in small doses: people who don't care about community norms will eventually learn or leave, bad actors will get bored of trolling, and persistent individuals can be killfiled. But both of those two flooding in in large groups can kill a community. If bad actors harass and attack every new person every time they post something, the community can't grow. and enough people in a community who disregard the existing norms will simply cause the Overton Window to shift, establishing a new normal. And a killfile isn't a large-scale solution: when you have to have a triple-digit killfile just to get past the noise and actually see the useful discussion, the community is dead.
Usenet on the other hand has never been resilient against coordinated activity. The Meow Wars were one of the most deleterious things to ever happen to Usenet back in the day, and I'm sure it contributed a lot to people abandoning Usenet for moderated web forums.
Now that the Internet has had 20 more years to further develop invasion techniques, and the invading forces are even larger and more malignant than ever, unmoderated communities can't survive unless they're invisible. Even heavily-moderated communities have trouble handling incoming raids from 4chan and 8chan.
And then you have the subtle psyops, groups stealthily infiltrating others in order to promote an agenda. Imagine a coordinated effort to have new people join a newsgroup for a TV show and slowly push the Overton Window towards normalizing antisemitism. This is hard to detect and root out even in a place with moderators (see: Stormfront's psyop in /r/videos), and unmoderated spaces are completely helpless against this kind of assault.
>Usenet on the other hand has never been resilient against coordinated activity. The Meow Wars were one of the most deleterious things to ever happen to Usenet back in the day, and I'm sure it contributed a lot to people abandoning Usenet for moderated web forums.
>Now that the Internet has had 20 more years to further develop invasion techniques, and the invading forces are even larger and more malignant than ever, unmoderated communities can't survive unless they're invisible. Even heavily-moderated communities have trouble handling incoming raids from 4chan and 8chan.
You really hit the nail on the proverbial head... curated or moderated forums are really the only thing that can work in the face of so much noise, but without passionate ownership as we have here on HN or possibly a paid position of some kind I'm not sure what the answer is. PGP's web of trust model sort of addressed this but failed to embrace the nuance of human social interaction needed in modern society.
Google's circles kind of tried to do the right thing but failed there too. What I mean in a practical example is if my father who describes himself as slightly more conservative than Gengis Khan wants to send me some conservative screed that's fine I can handle it, but I don't want that to be generally consumable content in my "feed" and associated to me for all my friends to see, particularly as my views may be (and often are) wildly different. I need to firewall people based on multidimensional levels of interest and trust.
I abandoned Facebook over a decade ago because their business model is antithetical to that way of thinking and their regular and involuntary updates to privacy policy and settings simply clashed too much with my needs. A practical example at the time was something like my wife didn't want photos of her shared with anyone but family, but I had friended people she'd never heard of and FB let them or possibly even friends of friends see her in my posts. Since I couldn't guarantee perfect separation of interests thanks to their meddlesome tweaking I deleted facebook.
I suppose the trolls can claim a kind of victory because at least for me it's just easier to tune out and withdraw rather than slog through the noise.
I think you are correct, and inconveniently, the principle doesn't apply to only USENET.
The public square serves a vital purpose in public discourse and society at large, but it isn't actually where great ideas are born; it's where they're tested. Traditionally, salons and small groups are where great ideas are born and polished before being presented to a public. Otherwise, you're fighting a low signal-to-noise ratio that hampers motion.
Both are necessary. Neither is superior. They are complements.
I'd hived the idea from elsewhere, and this piece discusses it in the context of trying to form a new community (largely failed), but the ideas may interest:
Salons in 18th and 19th century Europe generally revolved around one or a few wealthy patrons of the salon who not only funded its operations but also attracted the luminaries and intellectuals to its doors.
The analogue of patrons on the internet would be forum moderators, website owners, group creators, etc. But only to a certain extent because the owners and maintainers of an online forum are far less personally engaged with the conversation and daily goings on.
Of course the scale is much larger on the internet, and we don't actually deal with one another face to face. Banter is usually restricted as well and discussions are highly focused, in contrast to salons which were more of a social club.
I don't think online forums are the equivalent of saloons. I believe saloons were fairly scarce, thus if you got banned from one, you could not simply pop in another or make another account. The penalty for breaking the rules was fairly high and that made people leave some of their "crazy" at home.
A coffee shop is pretty much the modern version. In England coffee houses played the role in the Enlightenment. [1] Salons were more associated with France and were a bit different but related concept. [2]
Is a coffee shop really the modern version -- in context?
I think the whole relevance of the "coffee house" in the Enlightenment was that it was a space where different people were talking to each other and sharing ideas.
Does that happen in coffee shops anymore? Do strangers talk about more than pleasantries, if that?
> Does that happen in coffee shops anymore? Do strangers talk about more than pleasantries, if that?
Even in Vienna, which is somewhat of a self proclaimed coffee house capital of the world you can't really have any prolong conversations with strangers to exchange ideas. Beer houses of today are probably more suitable for discussions.
People do meet and have discussions in Starbucks. You're probably right though that it's not really the same thing--if only because there are so many ways to have discussions that don't require physically sitting at the same table.
I want to give a tongue-and-cheek answer and say "Discord and Slack," but more realistically I think you're right. Coffee shop, living room meet-up, face-to-face interactions among peers.
Everyone thinks there was a golden age in a lot of platforms where a small group enjoyed a short amount of time together. When I started lurking around HN in 2010 they were saying the same thing, Reddit was identical, AOL, Internet forums, Usenet, BBS etc...
I think they're not wrong either.
I was rather invested in what used to be a small subreddit that is now huge.
It's a shitshow now sometimes but back then most of the posters were regulars and could recognized each-other.
Moderating was a lot easier and context and what have you could be taken into account.
I know i could trust one person's expertise, that another often would take a specific stance, another that was always an asshole but very careful to stay on the edge of getting banned and what was technically allowed generally got downvoted.
There was space for public meta discussions about sources (not)accepted by the community that actually had an impact, etc
Experiencing the transition has made me value small communities much much more.
Small communities - you might as well say community communities. Not picking on you, just agreeing, to the point of asserting that "community" can't exist past a certain scale. Dunbar's number and all that.
Unsubscribing from any subreddit over ~50K users (incl defaults) really improves the reddit experience.
The one problem specifically with reddit and other 'frontpage' type communities is that they don't surface where the actual conversation is in the way vbulletin or other forum software does. With the old reddit code, however, you could go to https://old.reddit.com/r/subreddit-name/comments and see a comment view of the entire subreddit. This would bring the current conversation to the top regardless where it is in the standard view. Really improves the experience for smaller subreddits that don't have much traffic otherwise.
Unfortunately they seem to have removed the feature in the new code. You can still use it in old per above however.
> With the old reddit code, however, you could go to [...] and see a comment view of the entire subreddit.
Depending on the newsreader, you could essentially get the same thing by having the thread with the most recent comment move to the to of the thread list. Then, expanding the thread would show new comments in bold font to distinguish then from ones you've already read or previously downloaded.
Being able to see new posts is something that's lacking in reddit and HN (though reddit does provide this feature on subs you moderate or have reddit gold).
The tried and true thread model from usenet, email and vbulletin-style forums leads to long-standing topical conversations that easily stretch days and weeks, commonly months and sometimes years.
The continuous fountain of content model at reddit/hn/digg/etc is good for retinal adhesion but not so good for exchange of ideas.
Right, the unifying thing there is basically about community size. The same thing happens offline. The fact that you had a highly educated user base made a difference too. Early internet users either at a university or affluent and interested enough to pay a lot of money for that use (pre-flat rate AOL.)
A lot of the challenges today are related to community size. Also, a lot of the problems are either solvable or already solved, but just relate to platforms wanting maximum user growth/monetization so they disregard those early learned lessons. Just take a look at the stuff Randall Farmer has written. These are lessons dating back to easy online communities in the 1980s.
I think you're mistaking "educated" for "similar". The community don't necessarily have to be educated, but it helps a lot if they're broadly similar in some way. Same background, same age, same goal, same education, same interests, something.
(And lets be honest, the reason size is a problem is because beyond a certain point, you can't do human moderation).
I genuinely miss my LAN forum though. I've spent a lot of time talking to different people from my city there, playing video games and just socializing. Ten or twenty years later we've met each other a few times in real life, and the nostalgia is strong in everybody I see.
I was heartbroken when I've realized that one of the forums was hosted by an ISP that is no more. I've got some content archived, but damn did I feel weird like some part of my life is gone, wiped off the face of the internet.
That was probably the beginning of the end even if it held on for quite a while after that. (And a lot of other changes were happening at the same time.) Especially outside the alt. hierarchy, which was always more of a free for all, real names usually associated with university, company, or government email addresses and a culture built around a certain exclusivity tended to keep flame wars and and other disruption to a manageable level.
That was the original "Me Too" movement. I remember all those Me Too posts popping up everywhere.
(AOL users were notorious for block quoting long parts of text they agreed with, and reposting with Me Too! above. It's like "This." but less hip, if that's possible.)
Spot-on. I was on Usenet for a bit in the 1980s, and loved it. After I was out of school, though, it was effectively unavailable to me until internet access opened up in the 1990s.
In the meantime, though, there was a similar but smaller network that operated in a similar fashion: FidoNet's Echomail system. For younger readers, FidoNet was a network of dialup BBS systems (usually single-user) with a central list of nodes distributed weekly. Echomail was an add-on that worked in much the same manner as Usenet; a message posted in a forum would be propagated to other systems sharing that forum. Strictly speaking, both still exist today, but like Usenet, FidoNet is a shadow of itself, and most FidoNet nodes are using the internet instead of dialup modems these days.
I recall FidoNet having a lot fewer problems with spam and bad actors than Usenet, though, mostly because troublesome nodes could and did get de-listed.
I am old enough to remember Usenet. All you needed was an Internet connection, a usenet client, and access to a usenet server.
Most ISPs provided usenet access just like they provided an e-mail address at the time. So it was no more difficult to be involved in usenet than it was to have e-mail.
In modern terms, usenet would be reddit if it was distributed (so anyone willing to set-up their own server could run a node and let people connect to it). But for end-users it was as simple as having an e-mail account and a client application on your computer.
During the "Golden Age" of Usenet, which I believe many people to consider to be pre-Eternal September, the number of Americans with any form of internet access was just a fraction of the population. I am finding varying figures online, but they seem to hover at <15% of the population of the United States.
Given the costs of that access and the costs of the computers. It was both a very small and a very specific type of person that was accessing Usenet at the time.
I've been digging up numbers over the past few years. In 1980 there were 2 million computers in the US, doubling every 2 years. By 2000, there were 168 million computers, only 6 doublings rather than the 10 the 1980 estimate would have provided. That suggests about 16 million users as of 1990, possibly 24-32 million by 1992.
As of 1995, total worldwide Internet usage (then largely in the US, though also Europe) was 16 millions. As of 2019 it's 4.5 billions.
Yeah I got my first modem in 1985 (hence the username). Anyone outside of academia was all BBS, not Internet back then. I’m shocked to hear Usenet even had 140k active users in 1988.
Oh man, I had a 300 baud modem for a very short time. Then my parents found out how much it'd cost to use it (long distance to nearest BBS or provider) and they sent it back. Ugh.
I did eventually get to use a 2400 baud modem though, and even ran my own BBS for a while. Fun days.
I think people do not appreciate just how expensive it was to get online.
In 1988 Compuserve (more than 250,000 subscribers) was charging $11 per hour, The Source charged $8 per hour, Delphi charged $6 per hour, and BIX was $9 per hour.
Long distance rates to BBS's were nasty, too. Thus the joy in finding any and all ways to get free calls. In ... 1992? i think it was I had a provider that offered dialup shell access for $8/hr on an 800 number, and that was the best legitimate price around for a good while. I built people networks off that box.
And that included intra-state long distance which could actually be even higher than inter-state calls. For quite a while I used a subscription BBS in a relatively nearby city. Phone calls were still expensive and there were all sorts of tricks/tools to minimize the time you spent online. (e.g. software that let you download new messages on specific boards and read/reply offline.)
That in itself was a significant enough barrier to entry for the general public. Most people prior to Eternal September were unaware that the internet existed, or falsely believed it could only be accessed by university students. And outside of the G10 countries getting online was a major technical barrier.
From my days on usenet (rest in peace, rec.arts.poems) one of the more obvious trolls had to resort to accessing the newsgroups via his local library, after he ran out of ISPs willing to take his money.
On the positive site, I know of one intercontinental marriage facilitated by RAP.
It's funny because I think this is true of most online communities I've joined. People will say on here things like "HN has changed now that its big" or "HN is not how it used to be", and I'm sure some would say the same of 4chan as well, and reddit, and probably even Facebook.
No, it never survived the late 90's campaigns against the RIAA trying to stop piracy at the ISP level. Thats when all the big ISPs yanked support, especially after alt.binaries was sharing damn near everything.
And they were big bandwidth sinks due to the distributed model usenet has, so it was easy for ISPs to yank the carpet and look at the immediate gains.
Usenet wasn't dependent on binaries groups in the 90's. There was plenty of active discourse. Non-commercial hosts could easily drop binary groups. Commercial providers were the ones stuck in a bind.
The massive cross-posting of troll threads in the late 90's is what helped kill it off. The lack of effective moderation controls is the biggest weakness of Usenet.
> RIAA ... especially after alt.binaries was sharing damn near everything
While this didn't help, I don't think it was a key factor for ISPs. Most ISP NNTP services didn't carry binary groups anyway for bandwidth cost reasons. There were some issues with groups that linked to where to find copyright covered material, but the RIAA and their ilk were going more for the direct sources at the time. The public list/pointer resources were actually useful to them as lists of places to chase down.
Of course this led to people paying for external NNTP services which did carry the binaries groups. These services were obvious targets for the RIAA and other such groups unlike the ISPs.
> they were big bandwidth sinks due to the distributed model usenet has
This was a far more important reason, even without carrying binaries groups Usenet could consume a large amount of bandwidth. As well as the incoming load, and the bandwidth used sending data to clients, back then modem access was common and NNTP lead to people leaving the line open to download a huge pile of stuff (most of which they'd discard without reading anyway) meaning ISPs would have to invest in more modem racks, impose unpopular limits, or be perpetually busy, any of which would lose them custom.
Another significant issue was the cost of building and maintaining the servers required too. To run an NNTP service for a noticeable amount of users with reasonable performance you needed an arrangement with impressive IO performance stats for the time, and the access patterns (constant & random) could be murderous to the drives, sometimes chewing through them as fast as they could be replaced.
Yeah, exactly. I worked for a small employer in the early mid-90's who maintained a NNTP feed (and had for years), and ultimately had to shut it down because it had basically become a giant unmanageable firehose of porn and piracy. The actual human-written text content had dropped down to the 1% level or worse.
Usenet died for the same reason Facebook won: people exploit "free" forums in ways that ruin the experience. It's simply not possible to have an unmoderated discussion environment in an unrestricted internet, which is why we're having this discussion on a moderated site.
I don't think the RIAA's efforts had much effect on Usenet, since in that time-frame the RIAA all but ignored Usenet. They were much more in shock-and-awe over Gnutella (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gnutella) at the time.
What I think led to the decline was at least a combination of:
1) an overrun of SPAM - Usenet was first to be hit by the spam flood, email SPAM came later as Usenet usage died off.
2) the 'newness' factor and the 'new shiny object' factor of the web drew away existing users, and resulted in new users never joining (i.e., pictures, fancy formatting, etc. all made plain text character Usenet posts look "old-fashioned"). And once you have a situation where new users don't join, and some number of existing users continue to depart, you are on a downward slope to disappearance.
Both of the above helped contribute to ISP's dropping NNTP service. Bandwidth costs for #1 (plus bandwidth if they were carrying alt.binaries.*) and a drop in NNTP usage due to #2. They (ISPs) no longer saw offering NNTP as a sales factor for obtaining subscribers, and once NNTP was no longer a "hook" to bring in subscribers, it was only a matter of time before they decided to just drop it entirely.
And of course ISP's dropping NNTP accelerated the issues around #2 above.
Another reason was due to the actions of former New York attorney general Andrew Cuomo in 2008 where he got several major ISPs to block access to Usenet newsgroups that were used to distribute child pornography[1]. IIRC, those ISPs discontinued Usenet service not too long after that.
There are a number of free text only usenet providers out there. Why couldn't the ISPs simply stop carrying the binary groups instead of discontinuing their usenet service entirely?
Who do you use? I had Cox because they were the only one left offering usenet (albeit capped).
I was a really late adopter to torrents because of my background in usenet, sometime around 2010 all the alt.binaries I used to frequent went dead or were broken with little par2 support.
It was a great time back in the early 2000s, though.
If I'm honest, I don't download as much as I used to, but I do miss the niche communities based on those groups, though. They have since moved to IRC but for the most part its all gone from what I can tell.
Cogeco in my case. No cap either, which is pretty cool.
Those little niche communities on usenet were what originally got me so excited about the internet. Both participating in ones that interested me and just exploring all sorts of interesting little communities.
The problem is that binaries are transferred in a non-binary manner. Base64 was the preferred way. Except it was also used to push images back and forth as well for pertinent conversations.
For any method of communication, you can transfer content that someone else tries to prevent.
Upper bounds on per-user bandwidth would help. Though for significant messages, one still has sock-puppet accounts (or aggregates of like-minded individuals with copies of the source message pooling their resources). And, of course, upper bounds create knock-on restrictions (should the system be allowed to transmit public-domain large-volume data? A bandwidth limit blocks that "valid" use too).
It's fun to game-theory how such limits can be broken.
Who cares about piracy? It exists over HTTP, too, and in a far greater volume than a modern USENET-equivalent could ever hope to achieve, and it's not like ISPs need to be sucked up to anymore: they've already taken their ball and went home on this matter, proverbially-speaking.
Unfortunately, technically banning binaries merely means binaries will be transferred in a more spacetime-inefficient manner.
You can mathematically prove atop Shannon's theorem that if the system can transmit comprehensible text information between two users, it can transmit binaries. Worst-case scenario, the users could use the text information layer to just say 'one, zero, one, one, zero, one' at each other, etc.
(Socially banning them can certainly "work," in the same sense that social banning works in any context: pushes it underground out of the moderators' lines of sight. Depending on what you're trying to accomplish, that can be good enough).
I have given this some consideration, and what I ended up with is super low tech: require a user registration where users can't just sign up for N accounts and limit all accounts to 10 MB a day. Too little to share any meaningful binary data and way more than a person can type in a day.
In my original consideration you could only sign up with government ID -- actually the original problem was what to do prior to the day reddit banned your community, so that you could keep going.
In either case it was pretty trivial to picky bag of existing IDs, if I ever solve that for the general case, you will find out.
many interesting usenet groups were long dead before that due to spam... the things you mention are more like pulling life support than the cause of death
That's a bit ahistorical. The "September that never ended"[0] (aka "Eternal September") was in 1993, the Canter and Siegel Usenet spam[1] was sent the following April. The DejaNews acquisition[2] wan't until 2001.
I feel like this is a broadly applicable human phenomenon akin to Isaac Aasimov's "Psychohistory" in the Foundation series. It also feels easy enough to capture that someone's already done the research on it.
HN is kinda dying as a community, though moderation isn't the whole story. There are also some long-standing bugs, and misbehaviours of the voting system.
Being able to downvote replies without any refutation, to me, seems like a massive mistake; it just teaches people not to say anything interesting, because they won't get a response anyway, even when they're wrong in a subtle or interesting way.
The formatting available to users is maybe close to the right amount, but the implementation is broken (for example, it doesn't end URLs when it sees >, so you end up with broken URLs when you go out of your way to protect them). It could probably also do with proper first-class block quotations, people end up putting them in <pre> blocks or italics, and it's not always clear.
I've been here almost 10 years now, and I don't think so. I think the overall quality has remained about the same.
> Being able to downvote replies without any refutation, to me, seems like a massive mistake
If downvoting is going to be used just to express disagreement, I agree it's too easy to do. (A number of commenters have posted links to comments by pg where he has said that's what downvoting is for, but I still think it's too broad.)
If downvoting is going to be used only for posts that are seen as adding no value to the discussion or the site, that's a much narrower category, and it doesn't really lend itself to "refutation".
> it just teaches people not to say anything interesting
The way around that is to build up enough karma that you don't care if you get downvoted. Of course, then you have to police yourself by not saying unpopular things just to be difficult, but only if you genuinely think they need to be said and are adding something to the discussion and the site. But people who have built up enough karma are going to have learned to do that anyway.
> Of course, then you have to police yourself by not saying unpopular things just to be difficult, but only if you genuinely think they need to be said and are adding something to the discussion and the site.
It seems like you're impugning their motives here.
Do you honestly think that most people whose thoughtful comments are downvoted are engaging in bad faith, “saying unpopular things just to be difficult”?
> Do you honestly think that most people whose thoughtful comments are downvoted are engaging in bad faith, “saying unpopular things just to be difficult”?
No. Remember that I was talking about a particular subset of users: the ones who have enough karma that they don't care if they get downvoted. In order to get that much karma, such a user will have already made a lot of thoughtful comments that were made in good faith. I was just observing that, once a user has enough karma not to care if they get downvoted, the feedback mechanism that regulated their behavior up to that point--karma--no longer has much impact. When put in that kind of position, it has been known to happen that a person might change their behavior. But I would hope and expect that a change for the worse under those circumstances would be rare.
I guess I just disagree that the behaviour required to gain a karma cushion is "good", or "better" than the behaviour that stagnates or moderately shrinks karma.
I personally think that playing in to the echo chamber is a subtler form of abuse; making the people in the community progressively more unhealthy by carefully avoiding anything that looks or feels challenging.
I don't think a healthy community is one which encourages people to fat eachother up on sweet nothings and uncontroversial shower thoughts.
It seems to me that the most popular replies are often the ones which present an obvious, widely-held opinion as though it's controversial outside the group; which enables holders of the majority opinion to think of themselves as underdogs and free thinkers.
I think a lot of harm is done by rewarding people for defending the majority opinion as though it's controversial.
> I guess I just disagree that the behaviour required to gain a karma cushion is "good", or "better" than the behaviour that stagnates or moderately shrinks karma.
It seems like you think that upvotes are not being used to identify posts that add value, but simply as a signal of agreement with groupthink. Am I reading that right?
Also, do you think that downvotes are similarly misused? (I.e., to slap down controversial but value-add posts?)
My own experience is that the posts of mine that have gotten lots of upvotes have been thoughtful ones, not simple "party line" ones, and the posts of mine that have gotten downvotes have been thoughtful ones as well--just thoughtful ones that the majority disagreed with but didn't have any good refutations of. But my experience might not be typical. It is certainly more plausible on its face that both upvotes and downvotes would be misused, than that downvotes would be misused but upvotes would not.
> It seems like you think that upvotes are not being used to identify posts that add value, but simply as a signal of agreement with groupthink. Am I reading that right?
I didn't say anything about upvotes or groupthink, I know that's for sure. If you would like to understand what I've said better, your first step should be to read it for the first time.
There is nothing wrong with upvoting something you agree with, that makes a lot of sense. What I take issue with is downvoting something sincere because you disagree with it, but without supporting an alternative position. If the only signal is "this comment deserves to be gray because people disagree with it in their own personal ways", then nothing is learned.
> I didn't say anything about upvotes or groupthink
Ok, fine, if you insist on my quoting your exact words, here is how you described what you call "the behavior required to get a karma cushion":
"I personally think that playing in to the echo chamber is a subtler form of abuse; making the people in the community progressively more unhealthy by carefully avoiding anything that looks or feels challenging.
I don't think a healthy community is one which encourages people to fat eachother up on sweet nothings and uncontroversial shower thoughts."
This is what you think upvotes mean, since getting a lot of upvotes is how you get a lot of karma. I don't see the point of quibbling over whether "groupthink" is a valid description of this; the point is that none of the behaviors you describe are using upvotes to identify posts that add value.
> If you would like to understand what I've said better, your first step should be to read it for the first time.
Please dispense with the snark. As far as I can tell, you are the one who is failing to read what you wrote, not me. Or at least you are failing to draw obvious inferences from what you wrote, like the fact that getting a lot of karma requires getting a lot of upvotes, so by describing the behaviors you think get you a lot of karma, you are describing behaviors that are rewarded by upvotes.
> There is nothing wrong with upvoting something you agree with, that makes a lot of sense.
It does? How does this square with the extremely negative portrayal you gave of the behavior required to get a karma cushion, which I quoted above?
> What I take issue with is downvoting something sincere because you disagree with it, but without supporting an alternative position.
I agree with this, but I don't see how it relates to "the behavior required to get a karma cushion". To get a lot of karma, it's not enough to just avoid downvotes.
Not all upvotes, but specifically writing things for the sake of avoiding downvotes or getting upvotes. If you write things mainly because you predict people will agree with you (and thus, at least not downvote), then I feel that's not going to make for particularly good discourse. I'm still mainly talking about downvotes here, I don't think the problems should be solved by changing the behaviour of upvotes.
> none of the behaviors you describe are using upvotes to identify posts that add value
Yes, because I'm concerned about the bad outcomes of what can be described as an economy based on avoiding unexplained downvotes.
> It does? How does this square with the extremely negative portrayal you gave of the behavior required to get a karma cushion, which I quoted above?
It squares with it just fine, but you have again misunderstood the point I am making, that other people seem to have understood just fine.
Consider making an effort to interpret what I've said in the ways that make sense, rather than searching for ways to interpret it that make it sound inconsistent.
P.S. you are yourself and not anyone else, so don't try to say what other people think, as though you know it for a fact.
> specifically writing things for the sake of avoiding downvotes or getting upvotes
Now that I've cleared up my earlier misstatement (see my other post about 7 or 8 minutes before this one), let me go back and take another look at the underlying point here, which is: how should upvotes and downvotes be used?
We agree that downvotes should not be used just to express disagreement. But to me, that seems to imply that upvotes should not be used just to express agreement (whereas you said you think it's fine for upvotes to be used just to express agreement). Even if people aren't specifically trying to write things for the sake of avoiding downvotes or getting upvotes, if upvotes are used just to express agreement, I think that creates the same kind of problem that using downvotes just to express disagreement does. People respond to incentives even if that response is unconscious.
To me, both upvotes and downvotes should be used in response to whether or not a post adds value to the discussion; a post can do that even if you don't agree with it, and it can fail to do that even if you agree with it. I think a downvote should mean "this post adds no value to the discussion and makes it harder to have a value-added discussion by adding noise". And an upvote should mean "this post adds above average value to the discussion".
In short, while I agree that usage of downvotes needs to be fixed, I don't think it stops with downvotes; I think usage of upvotes needs to be fixed too (if we assume that you are correct and that upvotes are mainly being used just to express agreement).
> We agree that downvotes should not be used just to express disagreement.
We do not agree on that, I did not say that. I think that downvotes are a perfectly good way to express disagreement. My one real caveat is that downvoting should only be an option when you have provided or upvoted a reply to the comment you are downvoting. That is, it is reasonable to downvote something you disagree with, but only if you disagree for a reason that has been expressed.
You may have your own ideas about upvotes, I think they're more or less okay. There are obvious downsides to upvote systems, but they serve a legitimate purpose, and there's no really straightforward alternative.
> specifically writing things for the sake of avoiding downvotes or getting upvotes
I agree that this is a bad thing, and I see that I did not properly describe the strategy I was advising. I did not mean "write enough things specifically tailored to whatever is going to get upvotes and avoid downvotes, so that you have a lot of karma". I meant "write enough things that add genuine value to the site, and eventually you will have enough karma that you don't care about getting downvoted". But I wasn't clear about that, which is my bad.
> you have again misunderstood the point I am making
Which point? Your point that downvotes should not be used just to express disagreement? I understood that point just fine from the start, and what's more, I agreed with it.
What I was having trouble understanding was your description of the kinds of posts that get upvotes; I now realize that's because I misdescribed the strategy I was advising, so we were talking at cross purposes. See above.
> that other people seem to have understood just fine.
Nobody else is posting at all in this subthread (the one starting with my original response to your "HN is kinda dying as a community", it's just you and me. So I don't know what "other people" you are talking about.
> Consider making an effort to interpret what I've said in the ways that make sense, rather than searching for ways to interpret it that make it sound inconsistent.
> P.S. you are yourself and not anyone else, so don't try to say what other people think, as though you know it for a fact.
Consider that maybe the actual issue had nothing to do with any of these things. See above.
I made a generic, non-specific comment about people using religion to manipulate and swindle a few weeks ago. As expected it got -4 because it had too many trigger words for the snowflakes. Then it was flagged into oblivion. I don't mind harsh downvote even when unmerited. What shouldn't be allowed is groupthink as an excuse for completely erasing non-incendiary discourse.
I wouldn’t say HN is going down hill but one thing that I’ve noticed more of is downvoting because people disagree with the comment.
That was never the intention behind downvoting privileges if I remember right. Down voting exists to bury flippant, inappropriate or insulting comments.
We really cramp quality discourse when we automatically hit down just because we disagree.
I think this is a reflection of the culture at large, online and off, where so many argue in bad faith or refuse to accept basic facts as true.
In online communities where so many are anonymous or psuedo-anonymous, it becomes easier and more mentally healthy to downvote an opposing position than to reply with a well reasoned response only to find out your dealing with a bot or someone who insists the sky is green.
I'm not sure how we fix this, though the signal to noise ratio is higher here than many other sites, so I keep coming back.
>That was never the intention behind downvoting privileges if I remember right. Down voting exists to bury flippant, inappropriate or insulting comments.
PG said it was OK once, because upvoting for agreement is also OK, and now it's permanently baked into the culture, despite the obviously incorrect assumption that merely because the actions are symmetrical, their effects are also symmetrical.
It's also funny that people have been saying HN has been going downhill or "turning into Reddit" since the beginning. It's common enough that it is (or used to be) specifically barred in the guidelines.
I think there's a tendency for many people to consider everyone who came to a culture before them to be authentic, and everyone who came after them to be the ones destroying it. The Eternal September effect is real, but it also panders to nostalgia and a sense of entitlement that says things were better when we and our culture were more relevant.
You can't downvote replies to your own replies, that's the one I'm aware of. Maybe there's another level based on karma that was introduced since I got where I am.
As someone who’s been on HN for about 9 years, it’s funny to read this. I don’t see how it’s gotten any worse during my time here.
I think HN’s community is fantastic but you either get it or you don’t. I really enjoy the signal to noise ratio and I’m happy that silly comments and jokes are downvoted or moderated.
I read HN with showdead on and personally I think the moderation is spot-on.
I get HN's community, and I enjoy it. That said, I often think twice about posting anything meaningful; I know I'll get a bit frustrated when I put myself out there in good faith, and people have nothing to say, but downvote anyway.
I know that some very bright and lovely people have been totally turned off of the place by this, and this behaviour of the system doesn't really help anything.
> I read HN with showdead on and personally I think the moderation is spot-on.
I too use showdead, I think the moderation is generally good (though I think at times I've been handled somewhat unfairly). The times when there's a dead post that I don't think should be dead, it's usually from a person who has worn out his welcome with other comments. This is why I say moderation isn't the main problem, contrary to the parent reply.
> That said, I often think twice about posting anything meaningful; I know I'll get a bit frustrated when I put myself out there in good faith, and people have nothing to say, but downvote anyway.
I've notice more and more people say this and it's a sentiment I feel myself too. Personally I don't come on HN half as much as I used to because I just don't fancy putting myself out there when, at times, it can be a flip of the coin whether your gain or lose "points" over it.
I know it's just numbers and it shouldn't bother me; but it does. Judging by the comments others have posted, I'm not unique in that regard either.
In any case, HN will keep rolling on albeit the signal to noise ratio will gradually worsen over time as people get more apathetic about spending their time writing a high value post.
>Personally I don't come on HN half as much as I used to because I just don't fancy putting myself out there when, at times, it can be a flip of the coin whether your gain or lose "points" over it.
I just accept that Hacker News culture can be vitriolic and petty and that anything I say that's even mildly controversial to someone might be downvoted, and I'll probably never know why, beyond the obvious fact that at least one person disagreed for some reason. It's much easier to participate here once you stop caring about it, though.
My account's even been rate-limited now, and rather than letting that serve its intended purpose of driving me away from the site altogether, it just helps me focus on writing better comments which sometimes get downvoted even more than they otherwise might.
Like the movie says, it's Chinatown. This aspect of Hacker News culture is never going to change.
>The times when there's a dead post that I don't think should be dead, it's usually from a person who has worn out his welcome with other comments. This is why I say moderation isn't the main problem, contrary to the parent reply
It really annoys me when I see this happen cross subject/thread. Someone's opinion about zoning has no impact on the correctness of their opinion about low level disk IO.
With a minimum level of karma, you can vouch for a dead comment which will resurrect it. You click on the time the comment was posted and then click vouch.
I think the “drive-by downvoting from people with nothing to say” problem could be solved by requiring down voters to type even a short rationale. Good ol Slashdot did this well 20 years ago with the “reason” drop-down you needed to select from when downvoting.
I'm occasionally surprised by downvotes and wished I knew why they were issued, but overall I would rather permit silent downvotes than have every disagreement spawn another comment.
The tit-for-tat exchange of conflicting earnest opinions has degraded many other discussion systems. My wife used to comment a lot on a newspaper that used Facebook comments. Some articles would have hundreds of comments, with 3/4 of them coming from a small core of people rehashing fundamental differences of opinion.
Without downvoting, many people can't ignore bad comments because "someone is wrong on the internet." Leaving bad posts untouched looks like an implicit signal of community approval. But countering predictable comments with predictable responses makes the whole discussion worse.
My favorite comment chains here are ones where I upvote the original, then the counterpoint, then the refutation to the counterpoint; everyone in the chain is making good, fresh arguments or observations.
My least favorite comment chains are ones where someone opines aggressively, which spawns a sarcastic reply, which leads to a heated response... In those cases I'm happy that I can downvote everyone involved without having to add any more text.
4chan partially solved this problem by using inside knowledge to identify 'newf*gs' and push them out. Triforce, fingerboxes, etc. The weirdly complex boardculture was self sustaining because new people couldn't even keep up with the conversation without lurking for a year or so.
And then of course, the newcomers started taking the abrasive and politically incorrect culture at face value.
4chan has largely been a place where people can express counter-culture views. Whoever and whatever could not be criticized in public, that was the place to do it it.
The left is currently unable to directly admit to themselves that they are in power (they teeter on awareness of it: where once they were concerned about tone-policing and voices being silenced they now say things like "deplatforming works") in the universities, the news, the entertainment media, and so on. And so 4chan (although largely /b/ and /pol/) is the place where you can tweak the noses of the left just as it was once the place to tweak the noses of the Scientologists, the right, and so on. Should the pendulum actually swing the other way, you would see the shift.
My archives of the chans dates from 2005 onward. You can see the expression of what was "naughty" shift one way or another tacking into any political or cultural wind.
In any case, 4chan's "solution" has been to simply embrace the idea of Eternal September and say, "it's up to YOU to ignore things you do not like." Having watched various communities succumb to stifling moderation like HOAs descending into controlling nightmares, I would say that there's a very crude wisdom to the approach.
"Any community that gets its laughs by pretending to be idiots will eventually be flooded by actual idiots who mistakenly believe that they're in good company."
4chan was started by people too awful for Something Awful, and I mean you're self-aware enough to recognise that they used slurs to scare people off, so you _know_ it was always a horrible place.
My impression is that 4chan did a Mother Night on itself. They started with ironic Hitler memes and edgy teenage shit, but eventually people took that seriously and all that were left were edgelords and nazis.
I know it's comforting to believe that there were never any real racists on 4chan until relatively recently, and that it was all naive shitposters and kids making edgy memes, but it's far more likely that actual racists have always hidden behind the pretense of 4chan's ironic culture and anonymity, and have always been active there.
In the olden days you could read between the lines to see people mocking the very culture their post was supposedly glorifying. Later this nuance disappeared as the board was overrun with actual Neo-Nazis.
The folklore was that the neo-nazi forum Stormfront saw an opportunity and started astroturfing legit Nazi views on boards like /new/, causing this transition (and thus changing the course of western politics for years to come).
I never looked deeply into it, but I don't think the transition happened entirely naturally.
On the flip side, they were only "alive" because people -- like me, like you -- posted to them. So they're dead, but like Lazarus they can be resurrected by commanding them to be alive, through the simple mechanic of using them, and encouraging others to come participate.
Something like that happened back when Slashdot was bought by Dice.com, and lot of users just up and left. Some people started building new, similar sites, but a lot of them agreed to go to Usenet newsgroup comp.misc, which had been long dormant by that time, with nothing but occassional spam posting.
Since then, comp.misc has been a rather nice place.
EDIT: Corrected the newsgroup name. Note to self: don't drink and type.
I opened up comp.misc and the first post was from 9 days ago arguing that women can't code, and the insinuating tirade of arguments.
I don't think you'd find that on HN at least.
I feel like since just anyone can sign up for Usenet these days instead of just the technologically motivated, communities like them have been altered significantly.
Yeah, I haven't been there myself in months (I forget, plus do not have a NNTP reader in my phone), but I don't remember it being this bad before.
Still, there are still interesting threads, and with judicious application of PLONK (something you can't do on modern web forums like HN, by the way), you can make the worst idiots out of your sight.
I frequent alt.ham.radio, comp.sys.cbm and comp.os.vms (which is quite active). I lurk on some others that are generally used for notifications, such as alt.bbs (and alt.bbs.ads).
I'm always up for more newgroups to hold my interest. Another poster mentioned comp.misc is active, so I'll probably start checking that one out as well.
Thanks, I've subscribed to the ham radio groups (don't really do anything with commodore or VMS [anymore]). Do check out comp.misc, it's got some regulars and things can be a bit curmudgeonly but it's quite active and not spammy.
> of course you'll end up with a group that's more or less self-policing
...don't forget that the supposed golden age of Usenet included a bunch of assholes, and that you could usually call or email their sysadmin at their university / work and get that person to have a quiet word.
For pure institutional memory from primary source. I went to the archives and read a lot of the posts on comp.infosystems.www.announce circa 1990-1994. Origins of Mosaic. Glory days at CERN. And that day had its share of cranks. Perhaps 25% of the populations ;)
But even the cranks had a certain elan. The made up private research centers in the email sigs were optimistic: Paragon Institute of Cyber Consciousness, and such
Whats interesting about IRC, with xdcc peer to peer file transfers, it already acted as a distributed peer brokerage back in the mid 1990s. Trying to bootstrap a laer like that today requires enormous overhead
I remember back in the early 1990's as the web took off people bemoaning the fact that the oiks from AOL were bringing the tone down.
Back then studying for a PhD was almost the defacto minimum requirement to have access. Few undergrads outside computer science had access.
As an illustration, back then, once I got into a usenet discussion with some called Martin Rees ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Martin_Rees ) on the nature of science.
People see Usenet and the wide-open access to all. What they fail to see, especially for its crucial first formative decade (1980-1990) was the very formidable gates that did exist: institutional access through selective research universities, and a handful of tech firms and government agencies.
It was a bit like Disneyland's legendary E-Ticket -- once inside the gates you could wander freely and sample at will. But there was a price to be paid to enter: technical ability, inclination, and most of all access to the institutions. Those institutions also provided a brake on some of the worse forms of abusive behaviour -- individuals could be identified, sanctioned, and removed from the system. The small number of site administrators (initially literally a handful, later still capable of fitting within a single conference room or lecture hall) also reflected a balance of centralisation and decentralisation which seemed to mostly work.
Much of what was good and bad about Usenet derived from these gatekeepers, and that is a point very often missed in subsequent treatments or discussions.
Don't forget that Usenet itself has its own safeguards as in the news.admins and the newsgroup moderators should that particular newsgroup have it enabled.
Otherwise, it was and still is the wild west in terms of content and quality.
Technology both represents and influences our culture. For example, usenet and other forms of Internet posting in the past were more long form. They types of thinking and discussion were different. These days it's much shorter leading to shallower comments. Thinking in longer form vs short form influences us.
Usenet itself may be a thing of the past but some of the useful elements can be reincorporated going forward.
> In my estimation, the larger and broader a group is, the more it'll approximate human culture and interaction as a whole. It shouldn't be a surprise when the negative parts of those things (e.g. war, strife, hatred) emerge, just as much as the positive things (peace, fellowship, love).
Given how vicious and downright nasty politics can get in incredibly homogeneous small towns/organizations/communities, I don't think the size of a community has all that much to do with this.
As soon as everyone is not friends with everyone, people start behaving in incredibly shitty ways. If the community does not police that behaviour, the resulting interactions become quite visibly toxic.
If the community does police that behaviour, then they are still toxic, but in a less-visible manner.
>there's no good way to recreate the space described in the article without keeping most people out.
I have to disagree. You don't have to keep them out, you just have to provide an option to mark and filter them.
Then, it's possible to see the full spectrum of comments and interact with everybody. However, if discussions become too big, the filters can be used to remove the noise.
Creating such a system will be brutally eye-opening for some people but it will inevitably come. The minimum viable product will be the Chinese social graph. If China plays its cards right, they have the tool to overcome Eternal September.
I've been toying with the idea of running some "chatroom experiments" - chatrooms each with different functional gimmicks, one of which would be capping the user count allowed in each channel. I think reddit's robin [0] was onto something really cool and I wish they'd explored it more in-depth.
There's no good way to recreate the space described in the article without keeping most people out.
Right. Anonymity plus the ability to create an unlimited number of accounts guarantees spam.
Originally, to have a USENET address you had to have an account on a time-sharing computer of moderate size, or run your own node. Both were hard to create in bulk, which kept the noise level down.
What can we use now? Facebook real names? RealID? Proof of work?
Golden age often comes from a nostalgia driven perspective of what life seemed to be at some point. In many cases it involves individuals who had similar views and beliefs which made them feel more comfortable around each other. In other cases, it is just the brain looking for things that made someone feel good, even if it only accounted for a short picture of what the good/service/experience really was.
I learned Usenet in 2009 as a Uni freshman because the University blocked p2p software and monitored http traffic to stop people downloading loads but for some reason my Usenet usage wasn't detected.
I mean that's over a decade ago now, but it seemed like it was still pretty big back then - albeit just for piracy.
> I'm too young to have been a part of Usenet, but it seems to me that there's no good way to recreate the space described in the article without keeping most people out.
Hahahah no. So the biggest problem of usenet wasn't really the throngs of the "Eternal September" people (I hate the expression, btw). It was that nearly every Usenet group had its resident troll with too much time on their hands and an extreme obsession. So you'd post about, say, plans to build a 2nd railway track between Chachówek and Radom, and you'd get some dude go at you about how useless that would be and how improving transport between Warsaw and Radom would destroy the public infrastructure of the entire country. This is not theoretical, I've stumbled on usenet archives from _a few years ago_ recently and have seen the dude still going.
And it was everywhere. Operating systems? Some journalist going off about how Mac's better than Linux in Every. Single. Thread. General "whine about the world" group? Some random libertarian to tell you that actually it's you who sucks.
It wasn't many people, but they were active enough to ruin everyone's day. You could mute them, but unless you muted every thread that included them (and nearly every did) you'd still be exposed to them. And, because I happened to meet a few of them personally: if you further restrict the space by means, credentials and "interest", all you're going to get is a higher concentration of these people.
"So the biggest problem of usenet ... was that nearly every Usenet group had its resident troll with too much time on their hands and an extreme obsession."
This is what kill files were for, which every half-decent news reader of the time had (something that's still lacking in most contemporary web forums).
So trolling wasn't really a problem, because you could easily filter out the trolls. Same with spam, especially once Bayesian spam filtering was invented.
No, the real challenge that Usenet faced was the World-Wide Web. People were enamoured with the new shiny, with hypertext, and with embedded pictures and styling, which Usenet did not have.
Web forums were also a lot easier to use. You didn't need to download or learn to use a news client. All you needed was a web browser, which everyone already had and knew how to use.
Also, web search results on your topic of interest usually pointed you to forums, not to Usenet newsgroups.
If Usenet was better integrated in to the web, it might have stood a chance.
> This is what kill files were for, which every half-decent news reader of the time had (something that's still lacking in most contemporary web forums).
...that just didn't work, as I even wrote: with active trolls _most_ threads had the troll somewhere in them. They tended to dominate the groups and saturate everyone else's time.
> Web forums were also a lot easier to use. You didn't need to download or learn to use a news client. All you needed was a web browser, which everyone already had and knew how to use.
Oh, and frequently had better moderation. Maybe because of accumulated experience, or maybe because they were less cliquish than usenet was.
> If Usenet was better integrated in to the web, it might have stood a chance.
Usenet better integrated with the web is called a web forum. Some, like Discourse, are even pretty good, they're far easier to set up than a non-alt usenet group. The one thing going for Usenet is modempunk nostalgia.
> This is what kill files were for, which every half-decent news reader of the time had (something that's still lacking in most contemporary web forums).
Agreed, but the problem was that every new user began with an otherwise empty killfile. And so they had to be quite thick-skinned to outlast the barrage long enough to build up a respectable kill file to quash the noise, spam, and trolls.
Unfortunately what often happened is the new user was overwhelmed, disappeared, and never returned.
> No, the real challenge that Usenet faced was the World-Wide Web. People were enamoured with the new shiny, with hypertext, and with embedded pictures and styling, which Usenet did not have.
This had a very significant effect. The draw of the web, new, shiny, and fancier than plain text Usenet postings, had a huge effect in cutting off the influx of new users to replace those who disappeared.
Usenet always had a dramatically diverse group of participants. However each peer -- how you connected, likely through your university -- had an authoritative position over participants, and was the singular authenticating partner[1]. So if you were a shitbag, so to speak, your university could do something about it, which can be as simple as removing usenet access which left one with no alternatives. And given that you only had one usenet account, any newsgroup could ban you without one being able to just pop up again.
It started to fall apart when the nodes on the network included every ISP, etc. When people who have no authority over the participants, and no real punitive avenue if they broke conventions, it started to fall apart. Even if you got banned from that node, there were thousands of other nodes to jump to and continue your abuse.
[1] When you went to some university, the account they provided you was your authentication on Usenet. You had that single account and it was your sole key to the network.
Usenet was full of people like me: educated, tech-savvy and interested in a whole wide range of obsessions.
The first time I "met" people who weren't involved in tech online was probably Friends Reunited (school friends) and then Facebook. Reddit, Twitter, Instagram, Snapchat and TikTok are all far more diverse than Usenet ever was (although I only ever use Twitter these days, so that might have changed).
I therefore can't accept your view that it had a dramatically diverse group of participants. It has an even less diverse group of users today, and it's worth remembering we should probably not talk about it exclusively in the past tense: it's still an active thing.
On the authority thing: the OP link suggests a public shared space has to be owned collectively, and therefore the policing model that Usenet lacked (other than a few good actors at the edge of the network like you suggest), will eventually be its downfall. We see this in unmoderated spaces all over the Internet today.
All public spaces are at risk of anarchy without some sort of policing, once populations reach a certain size. This is not a uniquely digital/online phenomenon.
I wonder if it's possible to create a protocol where policing is built in somehow, whilst retaining the public commons features that the OP desires.
> When people who have no authority over the participants,
I don't think it's exactly a matter of authority. A university wouldn't care about someone merely being a troll in Usenet; they'd have to be breaking a law or otherwise acting egregiously to attract disciplinary action.
Instead, I think it's a matter of reputation. A smaller community is one where everyone is likely to be familiar with everyone else on an individual basis, and a community with a technical barrier to access imposes a transition cost on someone wanting to take their ball and go elsewhere.
In my opinion, both of these things act together to change one's target audience and engagement style. In such small Usenet-style communities, a user is speaking to that community at large. In larger forums with less individual reputation and lower barriers to access, the forum instead becomes more of a performance place: people are speaking to a subset of like-minded supporters.
Twitter is a great example of a very large forum with a near zero-barrier, where I can shout at an adversary while speaking to like-minded people.
> Usenet always had a dramatically diverse group of participants.
How so? It was universities, tech people in corporations and a few folks that just had PCs as a hobby. In short: upper middle class (because those things are expensive), educated (because it really wasn't as simple as it is today) and with time on their hands.
There may been some diversity in political leanings, but on the fundamentals, education, social class etc?
It depends on the time frame you're looking at. Sure, the very, very beginning was that isolated, but by the mid-to-late 1990s, almost any first-world country resident could get to it if they really wanted to. Varying degrees of how hard you have to "really" want it still, of course. But you certainly had non-trivial "alt.anything.you.can.think.of" communities for LGBT, any radical political position you can name that existed at the time, obscure anime fandoms, or anything else you can think of. The mathematical principle of "regression to the mean" ensures that you get a non-trivial diversity (by pretty much any standard) long before you get to the point that "everybody" can get on there. You do not need access by literally 100% of the possible population before you get "diversity". (After all, the internet is still not there yet either even in 2020.)
(The only exception is if by "diversity" you mean "exact proportionality of representation"... but that's not the same thing. If you want to say that, go ahead. At that point I will agree with you that there wasn't exact proportionality of representation... but then, there isn't today either, nor is it even clear how one would get there, especially as you crank the requisite "exactness" up. Two decimal places? Four?)
Yes, sure, but that's like saying that country clubs are diverse because members have different hobbies. If they really want to, anyone could join, it's just easier for some than for others.
My point is that it's a diversity of opinions (maybe; they tend to be closer together on the important things, too, demographics predict politics fairly well after all) and of hobbies or interests, but not of backgrounds, i.e. where the rubber meets the road. I understand that people usually do not mean "the conservative child of lawyer A and the progressive child of investment banker B chat about their shared interests with the apolitical child of entrepreneur C", but "the child of a lawyer, the child of an office worker chat with the child of a day laborer".
Again, I don't mind it not being or having been like that, I don't see any intrinsic value in diversity by itself. Calling it diverse just sounds like a misrepresentation of what it was.
This sounds remarkably elitist. And honestly if one were to analyze the trolls of the world, I'd wager "upper middle class" (or simply middle class -- it was hardly so exclusive) and "educated" would be a dominant trait.
A single university is an wide spectrum of participants. Yes, there are some demographic commonalities, but there are so many significant differences. Now add universities across the spectrum and across the globe.
> A single university is an wide spectrum of participants.
Is it? Sure, you'll have people studying physics, law and economics, but they'll be pretty similar in background. I'm not saying that usenet was a hive mind, far from it, but it certainly wasn't very "diverse" with regards to the background of participants.
"Usenet always had a dramatically diverse group of participants"
Who knew this was debatable. Every race, creed, religion, and demographic (even if skewed slightly to the higher end). Every political lean imaginable. People in sports programs, arts programs, and every other nature.
The notion that this group has some natural agreement is not reality based.
These conflicts didn't really matter because nobody used real names anyway. Online identities were very much expected to be disposable, if necessary. Real names and real-world reputation wpuld only enter the picture in more "serious" spaces where moderation actions and social expectations were correspondingly a lot higher. Modern social media merged the "real names only" expectation of the most academic Usenet groups with the conflict-orientation of alt.flame.flame.flame and www.4chan.org. Disaster is the predictable outcome of this, often with non-trivial real-world consequences.
The point is, the web ate all the other info-sharing protocols, except for mail (which does look worse than ever, but still works) .. and as a result its near-impossible for a new user to easily share their content from their own computer to the rest of the world ..
My greatest hope for an open social network that people actually use and truly threatens Facebook & friends still rests on something built on top of email. A social-client that uses the email system as its transport layer, basically. It even already has calendaring for events! Heh.
Disagree. The Internet was still mostly a curiosity when IE3 was around, but people were becoming aware of it. I'd say things really took off in the IE5 timeframe.
Pretty much every installation of Windows in the mid '90s and onward had Outlook Express installed and it was definitely capable of interacting with usenet.
> If they'd included an NNTP reader, we'd be still using USENET to this day.
How does this square with Eternal September being caused by (paraphrasing) "too many normal users with access"? AOL giving its customers NNTP access is frequently cited as one of its downfalls.
I don't necessarily agree on why, but I do agree that Eternal September had major repercussions for how technology proceeded, and especially how marketing people managed to spread their insanity into the OS stack, as it were.
The problem with Eternal September was, that we suddenly had a major influx of people who thought they knew how to use the Internet, suddenly on the Internet.
They didn't, really, know how to use the Internet.. no, sir!
AOL had its guardians and angels, COMPUSERVE had its governors, and so on - so when this all hit the near-total benevolent sovereign dictator anarachists that were holding the Internet together, it was, literally, a Cultural War.
Eternal September was fucked; suddenly there were shit-posts everywhere, and oh so much entitlement from the 'paying consumers' who were suddenly interested in alt.binaries.*
Someone decided that Internet services should be deprecated/ignored - and decided not to build true "Internet OS"'es, but rather "Internet Applications" .. and appstores .. and so on.
Now, it is my strongly held belief, as someone who weathered that fateful day and ever since with a sense of absolute wonder at the stupidity of humankind .. if the brainfucked horde that made up Eternal September didn't have the experience of suddenly getting "on the Internet" from some shiny CD from some TLA with its own custom browser, but rather - the OS was set up to better guide behaviour over the stack from the outset - my belief is that we would still have NNTP, and possibly more of these kinds of services.
Instead of the behemoth (and now totally out of control) web monstrosity.
I mean, at some point, if we step back and see what really makes the Internet, its that there are more ports than just :80, and anyone can make one to another. You just have to have the right bits.
The problem is, our borked OS'es aren't making it sufficiently easy for the Internet to work - for the user - without requiring a long list of third parties.
So, I also think: someone has an opportunity to change everything by making an OS stack which, out of the box, contains a user-publishable/accessible Global Filesystem, which makes the Web seem like UUCP over a soggynoodlenet...
With regards to Eternal September, you're exactly right. Prior to that AOL invasion you had relatively small bursts of new people joining with no predetermined cultural expectations who had to assimilate into an existing culture. When AOL hit usenet you had a massive number of people with their own established cultural expectations due to the walled and managed AOL garden colliding with the existing Internet culture, and the Internet culture was overwhelmed.
Prior to Eternal September the primary conception of the Internet by those on it was that it was a tool. After Eternal September the primary conception was that it was a channel for consumption and entertainment.
It was less the barrier to entry than a combination of limitations in the rate of new members in a subgroup (you may get burst of new members in September but the total number added over the course of a year was manageable) and a process of cultural (with regards to expectations of behavior and discourse) assimilation, made easier by the fact that there was no prior cultural expectations on the part of new members.
Remember that usenet newsgroups numbers in the tens of thousands, usually focused on a very specific interest. New members joined either to gain knowledge, be among those who share an interest, or occasionally to troll. Trolls were easy enough to add to .ignore files, and the others had a desire for the benefits the newsgroup offered and thus were inclined to respect whatever rules were in place in order to receive that benefit.
The general model of a usenet group is echoed on the web with message boards, absent the unified means of distribution and discovery.
People miss the quality of discussions on Usenet, but don't ever think about why the discussions were better.
Biggest factor I think that made the discussions better is that folks were not connected all the time so discussions would span days or weeks. You had time think between posts. Folks would log on once or twice a day. Obviously there were exceptions. Today a reddit thread has about a 24 hour shelf life because of its global nature, and then it dies. Furthermore the most intense discussions will happen in bursts and then flame out. People aren't engaging in discussion they are shouting their opinion into the ether and moving on.
Second factor obviously is the tremendously larger and more diverse population on the internet. More people mean more new topics posted and less time to discuss topics. The actors are less technical overall than those who had internet in the 90s and early 00s.
I think you're very right about the slower pace fostering better discussions.
It plays out in other places, too. I've noticed that, since moving to Slack, the quality of electronic communication at my company has taken a serious nose dive. I think precisely because Slack makes it nearly impossible to have a deep conversation over a long period of time.
I've also noticed that the quality of discussion in face-to-face meetings tends to be inversely proportional to the number of people present. The more people, the quicker you need to be to speak if you want to get anything out there before the flow of conversation moves on and whatever you have to say becomes a non sequitur. The less time you can take to compose your thoughts before presenting them. The people who place the highest value on measured speech generally don't open their mouths at all, unless someone puts them on the spot.
The worst incarnation of this phenomenon that I can think of seems to be Twitter. Twitter doesn't host conversations. It hosts a conversation-themed massively multiplayer live action game in which participants compete for scorekeeping tokens known as "likes" and "retweets".
I agree. I am less glib and more quiet now than when I was younger and get crowded out of meetings quite quickly. I used to just speak my mind, but now I prefer to mull things over.
Reddit is also like Twitter. Karma has certainly evolved into a game. The focus on Reddit has always been to shift content to the "new" topics as well.
The primary difference between Reddit and Twitter, at least for me, is that I somehow became addicted to the former and could care less about the latter, despite trying.
True, kind of why love letters (and letters in general) were better back in the day. People took more time to think about things, and magnus opus was a thing.
It really annoys me that increasingly its required to join slack / discord / telegram channel in order to connect with developers of projects I'm interested in.
I understand spam is a problem, but its such step backwards from just subscribing to alt.whatever.
The glory days when NNTP was built-in to most email clients, so mornings were spent with a cup of coffee answering emails and keeping up with project conversations.
The future of our world looks to be hyper-siloed with incessant privacy leaking and no one actually seems to mind.
"It really annoys me that increasingly its required to join slack / discord / telegram channel in order to connect with developers of projects I'm interested in."
The Freenode IRC network is full of developers and users providing support for open source projects, and is still highly active.
For example, Freenode's #ubuntu, ##c, and #vim channels have about a thousand users each, and plenty of them are developers. There are plenty of channels for smaller projects too, usually with developers of those projects hanging around and answering questions.
Come join us! Sure, it's not Usenet, but it's not a proprietary walled garden like slack, discord, or telegram either. You can actually keep text logs of the channels you're in and IRC clients are pretty full featured. The only thing I miss from the proprietary competition is embedded images/video, the lack of which is sometimes actually a plus.
Thank goodness for gmane. I hate mailing lists with a passion when nntp does the same thing with less overhead. Plus, when you join a group, you get to see the entire history. It's hard to reply to a message you do not have.
As a corollary I plan on writing a rfc to add SNI support to nntps, so you can virtualhost newsgroups for different domains (e.g. nntps://news.example.com/announce and nntps://news.corp.com/announce can be served from the same IP but refer to different groups).
It's not just leaking. You cannot use Discord anonymously.
Signing up for a new Discord account via Tor means you are prompted for a phone number, which is a single API call to a data broker away from full name, email, and home address.
You cannot join anyone's discord chats without the digital equivalent of showing an ID.
A lot of us mind. We're just being excluded from more and more conversations.
> You cannot join anyone's discord chats without the digital equivalent of showing an ID.
This only happens via Tor and oft-abused VPN providers. "Showing ID" has two benefits:
1. It helps mitigate a lot of unsophisticated spam attacks, taking off server load and annoyance off users.
2. It helps to some extent with mitigating criminal affairs because any potential criminal that falls in the gap between "doesn't realize IP addresses may leak location information" and "knows how to use compromised hosts as proxy" can be picked off by the authorities once they're noticed.
Anonymity is gone and it's not coming back. We have to adapt and we don't get a choice. At least there's some minor upsides to it.
>Anonymity is gone and it's not coming back. We have to adapt and we don't get a choice. At least there's some minor upsides to it.
The choice starts with us, the developers building this antisocial software. The industry is in desperate need of a collective attitude adjustment before we pass the event horizon of the quickly approaching tech dystopia.
I am more disturbed that these groups are not search index-able. If you want to find an issue that someone encountered in a game for example. You won't be able to search to find it.
From what I've seen in numerous channels for software projects on freenode, spam is not a problem on IRC. A project choosing to use discord/slack/etc instead of IRC is a real disappointment.
IRC lacks backscroll. Even if you park a bot in your channel to act as recording secretary, there's no low-friction means of getting at that history without going out of band. This means that spam doesn't persist... but neither does consideration and consensus.
It's occasionally. Freenode has a few days a year when someone is running a big spam campaign and everyone scrambles to get up defenses against it until it dies down.
I can count on one hand the number of times I've noticed it, and I've been on freenode for the better part of two decades. Sometimes people spam, but it's such a minor problem that this cannot possibly be a rational reason for people to avoid freenode.
Keeping a decent Usenet spool running was no joke. I'd say the primary reason Usenet died is ISPs and schools stopped hosting their own news feeds. You had to go commercial, by around '96; and by '98 that'd pretty well killed it off. It was harder to put stuff up on Usenet than the web, and once you had it was gone in day or weeks.
I don't know what "store and forward" publication would look like today; the "common carrier" concerns about being responsible for something someone else posted to your spool seem to be larger and murkier today then they were back then.
You touch on the very difficult legal conversation that was just bubbling up when the commercial providers stepped in: Companies that had their own Usenet servers had to not only keep a massive storage pool with serious bandwidth, but they were without question hosting illegal material.
At a certain point before that it was flying under the radar: most people seemed to assume that it was just text since that’s all the technology supported, but of course 7-bit encoding, multi-part archives, and parity files all had changed that. Once the rights groups got wind, the clock was ticking
Some “scene groups” chose to encrypt uploads and change post names, but that only served to splinter the usefulness of it since most of those became group specific.
For everyone else, it was ISPs committing more and more resources to fighting to keep illegal files off their network, and end-users scrambling to either grab stuff fast before it was taken down, or move to a grey market “full archive“ provider for a fee.
Somehow, as bittorrent took off, the newsgroup technology never ended up having to “pay the piper”. But that is definitely something that could happen very easily in current day.
As usual I am obliged to point out that what killed Usenet was software piracy. The amount of work it took to run a competitive news server with reliable binaries was unbelievable, easily the most expensive and fussy hardware we had at the ISP, and if your service fell behind or dropped any binaries, users would absolutely lose their shit: Usenet was an all-or-none proposition, so if you weren't going to buy a rack full of NetApp filers to run binaries you might as well not run Usenet at all. The protocol centralized before web interfaces made centralization palatable to users, and then died.
Do you mean newsgroups like alt.binaries.* ? I completely forgot about that. They ate up all the bandwidth? I'll take your word for it.
Source code sharing was pretty important I remember. That was how I first got Perl source code to compile, although it was probably not in the alt newsgroup tree, it must have been in some other that escapes my memory.
They ate up disk and CPU. It was the nature of NNTP, at least at the serious provider levels, that you had to be able to keep up in real time with a certain high level of responsiveness, or you'd miss your window for posts and there'd be holes in your binaries (because Usenet is perhaps the dumbest imaginable way to transmit a large binary, a Usenet binary was a chain of separate posts, all of which were needed to reassemble the binary).
You could run a Usenet server without binaries, just to host the discussions and source code sharing and whatnot. But customers would have none of it: if you didn't have binaries, you weren't serving real Usenet, and they'd go to ISPs that did, and when ISPs generally stopped serving Usenet because it had become the world's lamest warez and porn distribution network, they moved to centralized NNTP services.
> (because Usenet is perhaps the dumbest imaginable way to transmit a large binary, a Usenet binary was a chain of separate posts, all of which were needed to reassemble the binary)
I just realized that this is superficially similar to how bittorrent works...
Not at all. BitTorrent is forward error corrected. It splits binaries up into chunks as an optimization, and ensures that you don't need a precise sequence of chunks to reassemble the file; an error correcting code ensures that you only need k of n chunks. Usenet binaries were literally just raw binaries, uuencoded(!), and split up into n chunks, of which you need all n chunks. Those streams of chunks were then broadcast to every node on the network, despite the fact that only a subset of nodes ever wanted any particular binary.
It was and remains the most batshit file transfer mechanism ever devised.
Not that I'd know: but at some point after the nineties Usenet figured out PAR files too, so you wouldn't quite need all the chunks because NNTP servers would drop some of them occasionally -- though to your point, yes, every NNTP server would de facto mirror everything.
They actually fixed that problem around 2001! It's been over 15 years since I've done anything with Usenet binaries so I'm shocked I was able to recall the PAR file technology. Essentially, if you posted 50 parts of your encoded binary, you would generally post an additional 5 or 6 PAR files. Downloaders could then utilize a PAR file on a one-to-one basis to replace literally any of the 50 original files. It's been a long time but I used them extensively and it was a good way to correct errors or missing files.
It still is. It's not quite the glory days of the alt.binaries.*, though.
Now people share using nzb files, which means the actual posts on USENET are often just title-less binary blobs, impossible to know what they even are without the nzb files, which are often shared via private or semi-private websites or other channels.
I'm not following - in part because I'm too young to have ever used Usenet/NNTP. Did you have to offer hosting binaries? My (limited) understanding is it's a decentralized thing; couldn't you just do discussions over some niche topic (like web forums still do today) and have value in that?
- When someone hosted a usenet server, they were actually downloading (and keep in sync) a complete mirror of the sort of “globally agreed-on data”. This was part of it’s biggest appeal that the time of limited bandwidth: you could connect directly to your ISPs server with low latency and it wouldn’t matter how busy the other servers were.
- The technology itself never supported binaries, it’s just that people figured out that you could encode binary data as text, post the text as a message, and have everyone else reverse the process.
- Some providers actually chose to only host some of the groups (alt.binaries.movies would be an easy one to avoid hosting for example), but that offered limited help if people decided to upload pirated content to other groups. As the restrictions tightened, many discussion groups completely lost the ability to discuss things when a “scene group” came in and started uploading hundreds or thousands of files as messages.
Looking back; I suspect that even if there was a restriction of 10KB per message and the same level of policing, piracy would still overwhelm usenet with millions of 10KB “messages” per HD movie
I used to use Usenet in the early 90s, I was even a sysadmin at the time and helped my university install it. NNTP, huge hard drives, constant network stream, it was a big deal but so excited to manage and read it.
But I quickly felt the need to have some kind of upvoting system in order to wade through the noise. At the time, I used jwz' genius "BBDB" emacs extension, which allowed you to weigh posts based on authors and subjects. The potentially most interesting articles would magically bubble at the top of the discussion group and this would tremendously speed up my consumption of all the groups.
But obviously, this is not as effective as the crowdsource voting system that reddit uses. The combination of reddit's voting system (for the voting) and RES (for the customized author tagging) makes the reading a lot more efficient than Usenet ever was.
I personally don't have a problem with the fact that reddit is proprietary. The amount of knowledge and entertainment that I gain from reddit way outweighs my slight philosophical discomfort from the proprietary aspect.
And if one day, reddit fails to meet that criterion, another site will replace it. Digg has shown us that these sites are a lot less permanent than they seem.
I think the secret to reviving Usenet is to make it harder to use. The hassle of using irc is like a proof of work that doesn’t keep out all idiots, but helps.
I haven’t used Usenet in years and the only people I know who still use it, use it for movies and music and stuff.
I spent a lot of time on alt.food.tacobell and alt.destroytheearth and alt.music and places like that.
They worked for the same reason bbs boards on fidonet worked. I think because there wasn’t anything better and they were hard to set up and use. So only people with enough time or passion or smarts to overcome the setup and management were involved.
I expect that once people stop trying to pyramid scheme crypto, we will eventually get some sort of “pay a penny per message with tips and escalating costs for violations” that is protocol based so can be run by volunteers rather than “core developers.”
It needs to be just confusing enough to keep out people, but useful enough to keep in enough people.
Sorry, but the ship has sailed. I ran a BBS and FidoNET node (and even a hub) and it was the golden era of computers for me. Sadly, there's just no way that we could ever drum up the sustained interest to (re)build a semi-private network with a high technical bar again. People simply don't have the time. It was the era before smartphones and social media and Netflix and most people came home from work and watched cable TV or read books and most average people never conversed with other people outside their immediate sphere. It was new and novel but that feeing is long gone. Now people get into arguments online and don't even appreciate the long chain of technology that makes it so instantaneous.
Believe me, I would ditch all of this tech and go back to 1992 in an instant if it was a viable option but let's be real: we've been discussing this in the semi-annul Fido and Usenet HN posts for years and yet, here we are.
The only way this could happen is if some techno-elites with name recognition decided to recreate it. Even then, it would probably die quickly. Remember Ello?
I remember Usenet and the science newsgroups. The author of the parent article mentioned the problem with trolls. There was one who was especially infuriating and unforgettable. He was from Dartmouth and used the screen name "Archimedes Plutonium". People would be discussing some topic on the science newsgroups and he would post off topic rants proclaiming the plutonium atom was god. Of course people took the bait. Dartmouth decided that was part of free speech. I think this was the origin of the advice "Don't feed the trolls".
That guy was in my kill file...along with a few others that made sci.physics and similar otherwise unreadable! I do miss those groups and do check in from time to time but they are still heavily weighted to crackpot theories rather than general questions, reasonable discussion and new results. Sad.
I miss USENET, but I reallyreally miss kill files. In principle one can locate substitutes for various sites like HN, but in practice it often seems ineffective and unreliable.
>Decentralized / Shared Ownership - a genuinely public space no one “owned”
>IMO, this last aspect is what made Usenet truly special.
>The idea that no one was bigger than any given (news)group was baked directly into the software. Everyone held the keys to the castle.
[...] Sadly, it seems we’ve given up on the idea of online communities as shared spaces — but studying Usenet is a great way to be reminded of what’s possible.
I took the opposite lesson from USENET history: shared spaces where _everyone_ has equal say and power is _impossible_.
(Much of my thinking in the following paragraphs is influenced by Clay Shirky but his essay seems to be deleted from the internet.[1])
Any digital shared space that needs to function for the long term will always create a formal (or informal) power structure where a subset have disproportionate influence. Therefore, any idealism of a shared space where everyone has equal say or power will devolve into unequal power. This has happened with all "digital shared spaces" of any significance outside of USENET such as Bitcoin (democratic home computers --> China ASIC miners), or Ethereum (a few influential developers choose to reverse the DAO hack), or Wikipedia (super editors with special powers to reverse edits). The repetition of that human history across many digital domains shows that only a subset will hold the keys to the castle.
I was an avid user of USENET in the 1980s. I learned C Language by asking questions in USENET (comp.lang.c). I also had my first long discussions on economics on USENET. I have a fondness for nostalgia but that doesn't change the fact that reddit/Stackoverflow/HN are far more useful to me than USENET ever was. I think that private ownership of those entities improves baseline quality of discussion. Sure, Mastodon is decentralized but the discussions there are not as interesting to me as the front page of HN. We techies don't like to admit that decentralization makes shared spaces worse on many dimensions which is why I abandoned USENET because it wasted too much of my reading time.
There aren’t too many truly successful forums I know of, but I think the key is some form of benevolent dictatorship and transparency so the community can fork or more quickly depart.
HN might be the last forum working forum where I participate and it’s pretty topic specific.
There are still some dev projects that use irc (maybe pandas), but email is expensive to support because it’s 1:1 in that my answer only helps the recipient and it gets mixed in with all the other stuff.
I recently had a problem with the Altair python viz package and submitted a question on GitHub but found their google group [0] from searching and had someone help me in the middle of the night EST. That was neat.
I think my take away is that there doesn’t need to be a single protocol like nntp as long as there is effective search.
Although I do miss my morning coffee and Usenet. Phenomenal porn too.
I'm a huge fan of Clay - wish he'd bring his essays back online :/
I think he's right re: _equal say or power devolves into unequal power_
Maybe the key is not giving everyone equal power, but distributing power in away that captures each member's preferences for who should wield that power?
Getting a home Internet connection in 1997 I was still lucky enough to enjoy Usenet. Back then I spent the bulk of my time answering emails and Usenet posts, rather than surfing the web or gopher space. The almost identical interface shared by email and Usenet was what truly captivated me.
Usenet was also great due to it's subscription model with a pull paradigm. Instead of getting all emails in a mailing list pushed to you, you could pull only a selection of newsgroups and messages to read, depending on your mood. I loved this way of interacting with people in the nineties.
Like already mentioned, Usenet promoted thoughtful answers, as opposed to quick superficial answers like on IRC. I spent a lot of time on the latter, nevertheless Usenet was where I learnt critical thinking and massively improved my English. Thank you for that, rec.autos.sport.f1, a newsgroup which is still active by the way.
Having gone through a reasonable amount of Internet eras, IMHO the main roadblock to a perfect community, no matter which protocol is used, will always be an elevated number of users. Thus, a possible solution is to have more communities with less users.
I couldn't agree more; In the 90s, my main internet usage was lurking various news groups. Everything that I wanted was on usenet. I could get answers to programming questions, tech support, source code, software, quality images, and plenty of reading material. I am not sure when my net habits changed, but I was still setting up leafnode as late as 2003.
Indeed. I forgot to mention what you just did. Usenet, despite its distributed/federated technical nature, which made the network extremely resilient, centralised the way we searched for information on all sort of different topics.
There was no need to use dozens of different protocols or visit different websites. I remember I had my newsgroups grouped by topic like programming, operating systems, science, sports and so on.
Back in the day...guess around 91 or 92... I was taking a full feed from UUNET using a Trailblazer modem. Clearly had to drop the binaries not long after but kept the rest until around 97 when a local ISP emerged that also had access to a feed. Memory lane!
In the late 90's my main access to it was via my ISP. It was one more reason to sign up.
> Surpassed in ease-of-use by browser-based forums (didn’t need to be installed)
At that time browsers came with NNTP clients. Both Netscape and Internet Explorer (in the form of Microsoft News and Mail, later Outlook Express, later Windows Mail). While the experience was better with a dedicated NNTP client, using the system didn't require installing anything the user wouldn't already have.
As a side note, I twice set up NNTP servers to replace e-mail discussions in two companies with reasonable success. Public discussions were so much neater in that format.
> [...] how to build better online communities by studying internet history.
I love that part already, even without reading the full article. Yesterday, I had an interesting experience (yes, storytime):
I started using a fountain pen again a while ago, and wanted to research why I've some pain in my wrist after using it[1]. So I stumbled upon an old thread, which basically asked how to develop a "well-refined handwriting"[2].
This thread was from 2004, so just short after when I started to use "the internet". The conversation was all in all very polite, respectful, with some tips from other members, and often some kind of "well, you could try it like this and that" or "I found something here, where xyz showed you could do it like this", "I prefer to do it like this, but ymmv.", and etc.
The thread spans 19 pages, and, interestingly, is still active almost 15 years later.
What stroke me the most was the change of tone towards the end. There was a lot more "you HAVE to do it like that", "THIS is how it WORKS!" and there like. Also, they started discussing what "well-refined" means at all. 15 years later. There was a lot of, let's say, "whining" towards the end of this thread (that school nowadays needs a lot of parental involvment, nothing works, and everything is bad).
I am left confused. Something has changed in the last 15 years, and I'm not sure what the reason is.
[1]: You guessed it: It has to do with the way I'm holding it. Now, back to topic!
I think you bumped into something here. I noticed trends over the years in various communities. I personally call it the “proverbial 12 years old” effect. I came up with it when I noticed that on days when school was out that some public fora became a lot more degenerate (trolling, low-effort, accusatory tone, and so on) and often it was noticeable age played a factor.
It’s probably wrong to call it that towards the many fine young users on any platform, but there is definitely some correlation.
There is also a trend when a social media platform becomes suddenly very popular : not all have the means, the inclination or the ability to be respectful.
As others mentioned, training people to be excellent towards one another and forming and following a netiquette takes time, and unfortunately needs to be enforced (even at HN which I feel has a pretty good to high standard for discussions and little tolerance for bad faith disruption)
> Despite the english name of the website, it's a german page, so no use in linking it here I suppose.
No, please do link it here. First, there are many Germans here who would appreciate it. Second, people like me who cannot read German can still auto-translate the page to English and read it.
Key part: Usenet was effectively a public space. Nobody had their hand on the OFF switch.
Much less important part: Usenet was full of horrible behavior for many years before people started complaining about "Endless September." If there was a golden age it was before my time (1985).
Prior to "Eternal September", maintaining a personal killfile[0]/scorefile was only a minor chore (indeed, adding someone to your killfile could be accompanied by a sense of glee), but in the next few years the addition of spam to the mix made it overwhelming, giving an edge to moderated mailing lists and discussion boards.
YMMV, of course, depending on which groups you frequented and their community norms.
pg's "A Plan for Spam"[1] provided a lower-effort solution eventually, but by then it was too late as the onboarding experience for new users had become hopelessly polluted and toxic (new email users at least had a grace period before their address was discovered).
> Interface - UI made it easy to scan many posts quickly
This is the thing I really miss. The NNTP client I used in the late 90 / early 00s had a far better UX for dealing with large groups and complex nested threads (such as those seen in groups I used to frequent like comp.language.* and alt.fan.pratchett) than anything I've seen implemented via HTTP+HTML since.
Part of that is due to bandwidth constraints no doubt: the client was working from a local database of content that the UI was pulling data from for display so achieving everything it did on "old web" tech could impose a massive bandwidth cost on the provider and UI latency cost on the user, but with modern UAs this could be largely replicated with the various client-side storage options. There would still be an issue for users who moved between different browser instances regularly, a bunch of "read/purged/etc" data would need to be synced between clients via the service which increases the design complexity, but something noticeably better than most (all) web based forums offer should be eminently possible.
For dealing with "bad actors", the problem is anonymity. Systems such as moderation, adding people to an ignore list, etc are all defeated because bad actors can get unlimited anonymous identities. Ways of combating that (such as a signup form checking IP address, or other patterns) remove some anonymity which isn't really that great either.
What I'd like to see is the ability to get a personal identity SSL cert with tooling (browser plugins, for example) to make it easy to use on signup pages. This personal cert could have several fields, depending on how much information the user revealed to the certificate authority.
The primary field would be how much they paid for the certificate. That way people can be as anonymous as they want, and can get new IDs if they need, but they have to pay for each one. Then forums could require new users to have a certificate that cost at least a minimum amount, whatever is required to keep trolls away (that is, trolls who constantly sign up with new IDs). I'm thinking that $5.00 should be enough for most purposes. (There would be a minimal cost to cover the CA's expenses, however anything above that can be specified by the user depending on if they want a bronze level or platinum level certificate)
There could be additional fields that the CA verified, such as name, address, etc. These could also be marked as "Supplied to / verified by CA", but not included in the cert (so only the CA knows that info, and can have a policy of destroying their records shortly after verification). Or if needed (such as for financial transactions), name and address could be part of the cert.
The whole idea here is that forums could better control when troll users register multiple accounts -- yes, with the "completely anonymous" version of the cert the troll could keep buying new ones, but that is still a higher bar they have to cross than they do now.
>For dealing with "bad actors", the problem is anonymity
I wish it was this simple :^)
Consider Facebook, where people post mostly under their own name and photo. Even a casual visit to Facebook quickly reveals your hypothesis is wrong; it's nearly the exact opposite of reality.
Contrast that with HN, where users range from pseudonymous to fully anonymous, and where discussion is kept to a much higher standard.
It bears repeating - the discourse on HN is kept to a much higher standard. Active moderation and community guiding, performed by intelligent agents, is the real answer to the woes. Anything automatic, anything with a guaranteed outcomes will be 'gamed' and put to bad ends.
--edit--
There's also the separate but equally important matter of privacy. As internet spaces became both the town square and also gentlemens' clubs and also private homes to multitude of discourses, we need privacy from various actors' prying eyes.
Discussion here may be kept to a higher standard, but that also means that a lot of things I'd be interested in are censored.
Not sure what the solution is, but it would be nice to have some sort of ML-based approach that would tune the content I see to my wishes, rather than the wishes of the average denizen or the moderators.
>a lot of things I'd be interested in are censored
Same for me.
Frankly I accept HN is a space to discuss a limited range of subjects, and keep other subjects to elsewhere. It's annoying to a degree, but it the longer run it works.
The only way this works on HN is through active efforts to remove some of the anonymity -- I'm not talking about actually finding a contributor's real-world identity, but making sure that the same person doesn't create 5000 accounts and just switch to the next one when one gets banned.
This requires at the minimum logging IP address that someone signed up from, and treating with suspicion IP addresses that are pooled (such as from a VPN or TOR, etc). There are also other heuristics to prevent sock puppets and voting rings, each of these removing some amount of anonymity.
Whereas what i proposed, people can still maintain full anonymity, and if they really need a separate ID so that they can log in to the same forum under a different ID than they normally use (for things like whistle blowing, etc) then they have that option -- just buy another $5 (or cheaper, or more expensive) certificate.
It would be up to the forum (or the auto moderation system, for assigning points), to decide how much to trust a user with a new cert, based on how much they paid for it (as an example), or how much PII they provided to the cert provider.
Another thing this can do is allow someone to be anonymous, but with a chosen pseudonym, and allow their reputation from one site to benefit them on another site (by proving that a given reputation score belongs to them). Of course, this is almost sounding too much like a "social credit score", so it may not be acceptable on those grounds.
Way to start with a false premise. The main way on HN is efforts, both by mods and by users, to buoy up good content, and push down bad content.
>[is to] remove some of the anonymity
Not even close. Preventing cheap creation of new identities isn't inherently tied to identification of users; there already deployed alternatives.
One example, TeamSpeak uses proof of work - a computational process that's expensive to perform and cheap to verify - to protect identity creation. Works wonders, and allows anonymity just fine.
At any rate, the thrust of my argument is different, and cuts deeper into your idea:
any automated process, any guaranteed outcome, will be subverted and put to bad ends. To grow & maintain a good community you need active management by intelligent agents (ordinarily, people). And not just by selected mods - it helps when typical user is well aware what is up and able to fend for himself.
You're posting this to an HN thread on an article that cites as one of its principle sources someone who's only engaged anonymously or pseudonymously with the Internet for the past decade.
You're now reading a comment by that same person.
The fact of bad-faith actors under real names across multiple platforms is ample evidence that requiring real names is not itself sufficient. The examples of Homer, Voltaire, the Federalist Papers, Mark Twain, Willy Brandt, and numerous others shows that anonymity or pseudonymity can give rise to great works and thoughts. It's often the only way certain thoughts, or communities, can find voice.
Impunity seems far more likely a core problem, and one which, when identified as such, should be able to be addressed without necessarily piercing the veil of identity.
Technology is not the only realm of solutions -- social and civil conventions should also be explored thoroughly.
>For dealing with "bad actors", the problem is anonymity.
I hear this a lot, and I always feel that it's misguided. I believe the greater problem is proximity. The problem is proximity, not anonymity. ie, People will treat total strangers like trash if there isn't much proximity. For example, verified twitter accounts make comments that people would never make in a face-to-face interaction. (without an audience) And, you don't even need computers to witness this: road rage does not have a "walking rage" analogue. Normal, calm people who don't get into fights will treat another driver like trash. But the vast majority of them would never escalate this sort of confrontation if they were both pedestrians.
I'm not suggesting that anonymity can't contribute, but I don't believe it's actually the root cause. eg, HN is largely anonymous, and for the most part it's a very nice community. There are a few reasons for this:
- Heavy moderation of what articles are available for comment. (so, less moral outrage, and more informed discussion)
- Heavy moderation of inappropriate comments by the moderators.
- More importantly, heavy moderation of community values by community members: comments which disagree are completely acceptable as long as they're constructive and devoid of personal attacks, slander, etc.
- Most importantly (and most controversially) all of the above points, as well as the focus of HN create a gatekeeping effect. HN is generally full of thoughtful and intelligent people
"something awful" took this exact approach, charging I think $10 one time fee for an account. It's a token, but enough to stop banned people from creating lots of accounts as it starts to add up.
Making people pay for the privilege of posting online isn't a good idea - getting people to use a forum for free is hard enough, just try getting Internet people to fork over "the price of a cup of coffee" as well.
If you want decentralized spam resistance at scale, Web of Trust is the only solution that works. To register, I contact a node that adds you for free by filling out a captcha, talking to them on IRC, etc. They add me at a trust level just above zero. If I start off by posting spam, my account instantly dies.
So I have to first post a bunch of productive comments that people respond to, and then I can start spamming.
random observation: Usenet was a direct inspiration for creating Matrix.org, in terms of providing replicated conversation history with open (well, semi-open, in usenet’s case) federation. Usenet’s collapse under spam, alt.binaries, google groups and eventually reddit/fb/stack overflow left a massive hole on the open internet for open communications.
The problem that remains is still one of solving the abuse/spam/reputation problem, but there’s enough progress that hopefully this time things won’t collapse again :)
I am sorry to say this (not really, I was young) but I was a USENET troll back in middle school. I remember coming home from school and running up to my computer, turning it on and connecting to the internet, downloading new messages to see what mayhem our (my friend and I shared a handle) latest provocations had caused. We eventually had an entire forum revolving around our posts, about 50% of messages were from or related to us. It became tiresome in time & we stopped.
One anachronism that sounds almost unbelievable to younger internet users was this: another user threatened to (and did) take down my ISP and report me to my ISP "for abuse." It sounds so incredibly quaint in the 21st century, but time was you were expected to behave yourself online, potentially on penalty of your provider cutting you off. How times have changed.
I still use Usenet (although I would like to find more newsgroups that I may be interested in), and actually only started using it in late 2019 (and read another article posted to Usenet by someone who also did). Usenet is still in use (although maybe not so much compared to before). (Note: I don't use binary newsgroups, and the service I use doesn't include them anyways. That is OK, because it is the text newsgroups that I am interested in.)
The flaws they list I think are often not as bad as the alternatives. Additionally, there are mitigations for them, such as kill files, alternative interfaces, etc.
I also think that you should continue to use NNTP, both Usenet and otherwise (when making your own newsgroups which are not part of Usenet, I suggest Unusenet to avoid namespace collision; it uses reverse domain names as name spaces, like Java and some other stuff does; and like Usenet it can be federated, but usually isn't). This is a better alternative to mailing lists and web forums, although it is possible to have multiple interfaces to the same messages (you could have web forum, mailing list, and NNTP, all interoperable with each other).
I would like to find more Usenet (and/or Unusenet and/or others; I think there is also something called "Rock solid network", apparently?) newsgroups for some stuff I am interested to have, and would like to promote use of NNTP.
(I also think that those who make available Usenet archives should implement proper From-munging. The only one I downloaded so far, does not do this.)
Reddit is easily the best model for social media, if only the software was better. The key is prioritizing community over individuals. Subreddit admins have a ton of freedom, so long as a very small bit of their energy goes toward a few basic universal rules. This gives them a real sense of ownership.
Healthy social media must support and defend pseudonymity, because it’s the only way to juggle the fact that everything on the internet can be recorded by at least one other party. And the only way to defend pseudonymity is to treat every user the same. Twitter’s “approved” users violates this and Facebook violates it in many different ways, but Reddit just prioritizes communities over individuals. This is the root of the solution.
When people treat Reddit like it has some broad character or quality, I have to disagree. Those people just haven’t found a subreddit that they love, probably because they haven’t tried to. And I don’t think that needs to he changed or automated. If a Reddit-like site was the only social media, all these people would be motivated to create or build their own communities.
The only issue that killed Usenet was the illegal content, namely MP3s and child pornography. Back in the early 90s, I knew people that were using Usenet for regular porn (not kiddie porn).
But it was the MP3s once music piracy got big that became huge. The weight of all those binary posts, plus the risk of housing child pornography is why most ISPs shut off access to Usenet.
Reddit is an excellent upgrade on Usenet. If you have a specific interest, it's usually well-maintained by a moderator or the subreddit dies. And unlike Usenet, the best comments usually bubble to the top, so you don't have to read every single comment, the voting mechanism works on well-run subreddits.
Federating applications allows one to balance the competing factors of building a local community with its own identity and having that community participate in a wider whole. The hard part is convincing users to use the federated applications.
I had fun writing my Master's thesis on 'Flaming' back in 1995. There was a 6 month long flame war between the denizens of alt.tasteless and those quiet, kind, kitty lovers in rec.pets.cats.
And what about Kibology - where is Kibo now??! ;-)
Ah yea, "Eternal September". I'm just old enough to have gotten on usenet when ES was in full swing, but you could still get a glimpse through the dust of stampeding trolls and the campfires of the marauding neverdowells of the lost great edifices that stood in that land before. I have to confess that I was one of those trolls: Edgy McEdgeLord saying things and acting in ways that I'll never dare with real people in a real room.
I would like to see AI moderated feeds of some sort, tuned to the preferences of the seed group. It would be a interesting social experiment at least.
If you make a usenet anyone can use you'll just have another twitter or reddit. The reason usenet was different wasn't the technology but people. If it had been centralised it would've been the same.
I agree with the notion that early on, participants were pre-qualified by having to clear a small hurdle of hardware reqs and technical chops to connect.
The mobile phone changed the barrier to entry forever on Internet 1.0, but if the satco's decided to launch petabytes of storage into space and require a specific basestation/modem to access the signal, that small hurdle would limit participation to those that made an effort and effectively leave 99% of Inet1 behind.
Perhaps not the best example, but all it takes is a small technical hurdle to limit participation.
First, as noted, Usenet was small by today's standards, with Brian Reid and others' reports putting total active users at 140k (posting) from 880k with access, as of 1988, and just shy a million in 1995. Total worldwide Internet usage in 1996 was about 16 millions (through growing rapidly).
Those would be failed-social-media-site numbers today.
Usenet, like Facebook, formed on and around academic communities, and specifically highly selective institutions. This created several barriers to entry / points of control, which were both highly discriminatory and highly effective at helping dissuade some of the worst forms of misbehaviour. For a while.
The type of organisation of a discussion ... matters a lot. Usenet's fixed groups kind of worked and kind of didn't, and we've seen a few additional models come up since. Ad hoc structures (which Usenet didn't support at all), personal "salons" (think a typical blog -- Charlie Stross's comes to mind, also some social media hosts, Yonatan Zunger at G+ for those who were there). Location, time-centred, event/project based, and others. Clay Shirkey's concept of fluid organisations (something that can be dated back at least to Alvin Toffler's Future Shock, 1970, and "ad-hocracies") captures some of this.
The liability and business-model problems (both upside and risk) are really huge, and cannot be overstated. I suspect a number of social media / user-generated-content site/service closures, including quite probably Google+ and Yahoo Groups, have much to do with this.
Factors-promoting-growth and factors-promoting-continued-survival differ hugely. The elements which create a viable and attractive social network are almost entirely nontechnical. The elements which are required for a social network to continue once it's attained (or exceeded) critical mass are highly technical (though also call on a complex mix of other factors, business, social, legal, and more). Critically: the lessons and methods that get you successful won't keep you successful.
Founding cohort is a huge factor for initial success and growth.
Starting a new social network with the express goal of becoming the next Usenet, or Facebook-killer, or whatever, is almost certainly doomed to failure. Even more than starting any social network is. Probably better is to address the needs of a specific, paying, interested, and motivated community, from which there may be a future growth path.
Tim Ferris's downsides of fame article posted a few days back makes some really good points about bad actors and scale -- you only need a few dimwits at a million to a billion followers / fans before negative encounters start becoming really common. Human brains simply aren't built for mass social network interactions, whether as one of the many or one of the few.
Any concept in which nominal success criteria are principally predicated on scale means winner-take-all dynamics, and that there can be at most only one winner. Maybe a winner and an also-ran or two. Given numerous factors including several mentioned above, the winner will likely be determined based on starting conditions and a lot of raw luck. Possibly exchangable for ruthlessness.
We've existed in a technically-mediated world in which the winners have tended to be US or Wester-based private corporations. The next decade or several may see changes to that. US hegemony of the Internet has been strongly criticised. Several of the possible alternative hegemons don't strike me as notable improvements.
Given inherent monopolisation of technical communications, questions of closed vs. open protocols, and of private vs. public ownership and control, should be asked.
Changing open standards is extraordinarily difficult. I'm inclined to say impossible. More typically, they're supersceded. Sometimes by other open standards, increasingly of late, not. The reasons for all of this would make for some extraoridinarily interesting academic research across numerous fields.
Agreeing on how to do things is the most underrated technological innovation of the past 200 years.
Usenet's client-independence is often stated as a benefit. I've argued that myself. Given variations in message formats and posting behaviours encouraged by highly different client mechanics, I'm not so sure of that. The Web is the worst possible applications development environment, but it does impose, not infrequently by force of law, a consistent UI/UX and format. Supporting both a useful level of behavioural consistency and a diversity of access tools would be a good but challenging goal.
In my earlier Usenet piece I talked about the obvious advantages of decentralisation. I've been using several decentralised networks of late (Mastodon and Diaspora principally). I'm not so certain the advantages are entirely obvious any more. I think the questions "what problems is decentralisation supposed to solve, and what new problems is it creating?" need to be asked.
I'd like to believe decentralisation is a positive. I'm not sure I can.
And I was wrong about Ellen Pao and Reddit. She was doing well under an extraordinarily challenging environment, in which communicating basic facts was all but impossible. My apologies for my earlier comments.
> I'm not so certain the advantages are entirely obvious any more.
What was it about Mastodon and Diaspora that caused you to reconsider the benefits of decentralized networks? Genuinely curious as I haven’t used either very much.
It's mostly a sense that advocates of radical decentralisation seem to be operating a bit more on hopium than a solid rational basis, and that the actual goals and mechanisms aren't clearly or coherently articulated and reasoned.
Both Mastodon and Diaspora are mostly working out quite well, and have done far better than numerous other platforms or services. Mastodon has active development and generally has been implementing new (and for the most part good) features at an impressive clip.
Diaspora not so much. Which is a significant concern of itself. Failure to sustain development is a concern. Diaspora has on the order of a million users (w/in an order of magnitude), and ... wants for love.
More generally, my sense has been that both platforms have some magical thinking about scaling and what dynamics will or won't appear, which may eventually collide with reality. Mastodon's had somewhat more experience with this to my knowledge, notably with an extreme and intolerant political group adopting the platform (and being promptly defederated by most of the rest of it).
But I've seen pretty regrettable behaviour by others, including numerous (mostly small) instance admins.
The Wil Wheaton incident, in which the actor was harassed and bullied by a small but hyperactive set, was quite regrettable. Lessons were learned from that.
Ownership, control, and continuity of larger instances has been iffy. I don't think "everyone rolling their own instance" will happen for quite some time. Which means that some level of multi-user tenancy, at scale, will have to be a norm for the forseable future. That's another issue, crossing numerous concerns.
BBS systems are still alive (SDF has one, and it's reasonably good and well-read). So is IRC and mailing lists, the latter of which encourages the behaviour that Usenet had.
I'm convinced the way we'll return to the golden age is if we all jump off broadcast social media if it's not anonymous. The amount of people I see demanding special treatment because of their follower count or whatever, or insisting they're to be free from all criticism is insane. I remember my parents telling me to never upload photos of ourselves onto the internet, now 20 years later we seem to have forgotten that little bit of common sense
What I got from this article is that the main reason to return to Usenet is the lack of requiring moderators. Wouldn't you still need moderators on a big enough Usenet instance? There's also the issue of what happens in an unmoderated community of any size (4chan).
EDIT: Also, I don't see "having more thoughtful discussions" as a good reason for needing to return to Usenet. Not every discussion has to be thoughtful, and really, most aren't.
As a sidenote, 4chan has moderators, they are just called "cleaners". And 4chan is far from the wild west people imagine it to be, with the exception of some general cesspool boards like /b/, /v/, /pol/, etc. that cater to the lowest common denominator and are super general in terms of topics discussed (which naturally attracts a ton of people).
More niche boards (most of which happen to be categorized as SFW) have some pretty good material, tend to stay on-topic, and are indeed suited well for a civil discussion. My personal favorites would be /o/ (anything car/vehicle related), /toy/ (for stuff like assembling/painting/working on models), /lit/ (for literature), /diy/ (self-explanatory), and /sci/ (science&math).
Yes, it isn't super concentrated serious material with no fun allowed, e.g., there are occasional threads where people do things like build a motorized bathtub and then proceed arguing about feasibility of making it street legal. But the quality of discussion there isn't that bad at all, and the moderators are pretty strict about banning people and deleting threads for either being unrelated to the theme of the board or for NSFW stuff on SFW boards.
What I got from this article was sheer nostalgia, mixed with early-internet optimism. The fact is, on the internet these days, you can't allow everyone to have an equal voice without threat of moderation, because more often than not people will use that voice to spew hatred and vitriol just for fun. In the early days it was somewhat easy for good people to shout down or ignore the bad actors, but these days there are more bad actors than there are good people--if this isn't the case, it's surely the case that the bad actors simply have more time, and the good people ultimately flee and do something else with their time.
Agreed, especially since it's often that the bad actors aren't even human, and simply explosive in number. Moderation is hard, but ignoring it is a recipe for disaster.
I have a lot of positive feelings for Usenet, but it wasn't because of the lack of central control. Most of the positive was that the internet was smaller, and the people on Usenet were often very influential. I got to talk to movie producers, scientists, business executives, rock stars and lots of very engaged, interested regular people.
The problem with Usenet was that it was that it slowly was infested with pirates (of the copyright kind), troll, netcops and spammers.
> pirates (of the copyright kind), troll, netcops and spammers.
Don't forget the mentally ill, who ruined a lot of science newsgroups. It became hard to find solid discussion among university-employed experts once the newsgroup attracted cranks who wanted to propound their ideas, e.g. "Perpetual motion machines are possible!" or "I have deciphered Linear A!"
Even if you killfiled the mentally ill, a lot of the experts got bogged down in pointlessly trying to refute the cranks, so you would see their replies and it totally destroyed the group's culture.
That said, I am not sure why you find pirates a problem. Sharing binaries actually goes back to the golden age of Usenet, before Eternal September.
There were quite a few enthusiastic believers in the impossible, but that happens in real life, too.
The reason pirates were a problem was they were the excuse for removing Usenet as a service for ISPs. Binaries were most of the bandwidth, legal and storage cost.
The concept of evaporative cooling (from other comments, not the OP) is really interesting.
If you buy the principle, then a way to encourage quality posts and discourage poor posts would be to:
1. Limit the number of posts a person can make.
2. Reward posts that get responses with the ability to make more posts.
Obviously you'd want to add some filigree to these principles to allow members of a conversational thread to post with abandon once they've already joined.
USENET was before my time (was born in 1987 but only started using computers seriously in 1999) so I really don't know how it was. But, out of curiosity , I've payed a USENET provider for some months to try it. Downloads pretty fast most of the time, and you can find some pretty obscure shit, or things that aren't released yet in torrent. But ultimately it's not worth it.
The author of the article isn't really referring to binaries. NNTP was wonderful for text-based discussion. It still could be, but not having moderation to alleviate spam/etc is a real concern.
Ah OK. Your comments about download speeds on a post about recreating communities like old-time USENET used to have created the impression that perhaps you were missing the point. I can see you were not! Cheers.
Discrimination is the key, discrimination, hierarchy, an elite, but an elite drawn from the mass. I wrote a little on this within the context of LinkedIn a while ago myself: https://blog.eutopian.io/building-a-better-linkedin
I wonder what the technical hurdles would be to building a USENET client in a browser these days.
If not directly implementable, a USENET-to-HTTP proxy running in the cloud (to address the issue the author identifies of "didn't need to be installed") could obviously be done (and has been done, or near to it, a couple times).
My understanding is that the client isn't the technical challenge, it's the (federated) servers, and it's more of a business challenge. In particular, "who pays for them." Usenet servers used to be something ISPs maintained & your ISP subscription would include (usually) a certain number of hours of internet access per month, an email account, access to USENET and perhaps a couple other things.
As it fell out of favor in the mainstream ISPs stopped supporting it/paying for it & it became a niche service to pay for separately, if I understand correctly, and the only people willing to pay (by and large) are people sharing pirated software, media, etc.
For a while, I used a commercial NNTP service which was free for text-only newsgroup access. I think I stopped once I started university, as there were better distractions.
With a quick look on a partial NNTP server (requires registration), the only groups I used to look at that are still active is the old/retro computer one. Most of the posts are people still using these computers day-to-day, and finding problems with Javascript-heavy websites or outdated encryption.
I think the biggest problem is who is building it, and why. Open source is certainly a boon, but when insidiously magnanimous corporations start contributing and start spreading their influence, that's when rot creeps into the project.
I remember that in the late 90s, there was some effort at implementing distributed voting on Usenet with an out of band protocol. The newsreader I used implemented it iirc.
This could be implemented in a decentralized way cryptographically. Subscribe to people whose vote you trust by accepting their cert, you can also have a web of trust.
I think brining usenet back is problem solving in reverse. Usenet will not bring back the joys of early internet, but attempting to revive an old technology through the collaboration of other curious and passionate people certainly will.
I'm old enough to remember when every dial up and early ADSL ISP included access to their own first-party usenet server. Now I'm paying 3x the cost for 100x the bandwidth, but no usenet server.
I wonder if the flamewar I started back in 1988, when I suggested that "Lost in Space" was better than "Star Trek", is still going on. I should check out rec.arts.tv.startrek and see.
Usenet did not die for the reasons stated in the article. It died because all of the major ISPs succumbed to pressure from the media companies and stopped providing news feeds.
what was the total population of users on usenet before 2000? any community turns to a mob above a certain level and rapidly becomes useless. If you wish to revive usenet style community, build something that is only technically capable people get to use and aim to gather approximately the same number of users. some of the new decentralized media are probably heading for this point .
Obligatory link to Aether as the modern, decentralized Usenet. I highly suggest everyone looking at this post download the app and join some tech rooms. Just repost links and help build the community up, quite literally "for science".
For anyone on Linux that would rather not install Snap, Aether is a standard electron app. You can unpack the snap and run it as a regular application using unsquashfs.
It also looks like there is a blacklist for Aether (https://static.getaether.net/Badlist/Latest/badlist.json). If you're concerned about using this application because someone might post illegal content, this could be used to prevent that from being a problem. (I'm not a lawyer though. There may still be legal risk in running software like this.)
I'm surprised I had to scroll down this far to see this. Usenet is still very much alive. It's not what it once was, but I regularly participate on several technical newsgroups that are still fairly active. The signal-to-noise ratio is not great, but killfiles (filters) can help with that.
"Yes, Usenet still exists, technically. In terms of active use, outside a very few limited newsgroups (mostly peers of technical mailing lists), it's dead to today's Internet users."
I suspect just as many users get just as much value today out of Usenet as they did in the early 90s, it just seems failed by comparison to explosive growth of the web.
I was a usenet user back in the day, but I don't actually know how I would access it now. Is there any other way than using a commercial provider? My ISP certainly doesn't provide access and haven't for I don't know how long.
(Disclaimer: 30 years ago, I got on the Internet as a junior operator. My first task, after setting up email for myself, was to build the company's new USENET feed. This was the start of a very fast, loud, bumpy rocket ride... and now here I am, a grumpy old man, wishing we still had USENET... /disclaimer)
All we need, is for the OS distribution vendors to include a way to mount a global, public filesystem - without involving any third party beyond a DNS request.
Imagine if Linux and MacOS users could point their machines, immediately upon install, to a global filesystem - and start publishing to it themselves, directly from their own machine - without involving third parties, or servers, or whatever.
Alas, the OS guys won't do this, because they've decided to make money from ads and tracking peoples habits, so have stopped being decent OS vendors, these days.
But I keep thinking to myself, surely some kid is out there gluing IPFS and Debian together in a way that just makes sense. It really does make sense.
I guess, it'll happen soon enough. And when it does, so many big fish are going to find themselves hungry.
"dealing with bad actors", as the author puts it, is censorship by another name.
Anything truly a public space is going to be filled with things you don't like seeing. That's the messy part of real freedom for a whole crowd of people.
I recently wrote about 2k words on this exact topic:
> For a moment, put aside the fact that you may or may not want to read any of that, or spend time thinking about any of that. Any time that doesn’t happen, considering how many people are on the internet and the theoretical ideal of any-to-any communication, then some communications are being censored (or you’re posting about the weather/your kids). The why and the how of that censorship should interest you, even if you like or benefit from it most of the time, such as not seeing constant spam in your DMs.
> Who is permitted to create accounts to speak? What money, rights, privacy, or information must they give up to do so? Who doesn’t have access to the prerequisites for an account and is excluded from the public square? How many different accounts are people permitted? Can people create new accounts anonymously? How much or how often are they permitted to post? On which topics? How many people are they permitted to message? You can’t follow every single account on Twitter, for example. You can’t DM a million people in one day.
>"dealing with bad actors", as the author puts it, is censorship by another name.
First, one must accept that bad actors exist, and that all forms of moderation are not merely attempts at political or cultural oppression.
Second, one must accept that all public spaces, both online and offline, enforce some degree of restriction on how one can legitimately interact with that space. I cannot, for example, walk nude in any public place, or shout obscenities at people with a megaphone without suffering both social and legal repercussions. Those repercussions are the result of society, even in the context of a "public" space, attempting to deal with a bad actor.
Online, one has the further restrictions imposed by the architecture of the software itself, beyond whatever rules are enforced by the nature and moderation of the platform. Hacker News won't let me make death threats or dox people, and the software won't let me upload pornographic images.
So, yes, dealing with bad actors is censorship. By your definition, merely requiring participants to obey the law is censorship. But "censorship" at that point becomes so abstract and general a concept that it ceases to become a threat to anyone but anarchists and bad actors, and becomes self-evidently necessary to have any kind of a civil society or constructive dialogue to everyone else.
Also, it seems weird to see an attempt at a full-throated defense of maximalist freedom of speech from someone who claims to require an NDA with a non disparagement clause for basic social interaction[0].
> I cannot, for example, walk nude in any public place
To use your example: do you think this is reasonable or just? Do you think it’s a sane thing to use force to enforce such a thing?
> Also, it seems weird to see an attempt at a full-throated defense of maximalist freedom of speech from someone who claims to require an NDA with a non disparagement clause for basic social interaction
If that’s what you read from that post or that comment, I have done a terrible job of communicating. You seem to have misread a discussion of social media’s corporate censorship into “full-throated defense of maximalist freedom of speech”, which it is absolutely not. If you re-read it carefully you will not find that conclusion supporter anywhere in the text—I specifically avoided it because I do not hold those views.
Then, again, when you parsed the circumstances under which I formally ask people to keep my private information private: it is drastically far removed from “basic social interaction”.
You seem pretty bent on fiercely mischaracterizing the things I have said or do.
If you’re not actively trolling and really have sincerely read these beliefs into the words that I wrote, perhaps a third bit of my recent writing may be relevant to you: https://sneak.berlin/20191201/american-communication/
I can only tell you that your beliefs of my views, articles, and life are inaccurate and not supported by the data available.
In the event you are actively trolling, well done. I slept on your comment before replying, because few things in the world make me type more fiercely than people making demonstrably false statements of fact about things I do or believe.
When all social communication happens via app on one or two platforms, and a dozen people have full access to every private communication for billions of people and the ability to decide what communications you can and cannot transmit via the primary and sometimes exclusive methods you use to speak to your friends and family, an extremely dangerous situation results.
It is within the power of Facebook, for example to selectively allow or disallow discussion of COVID/nCoV based on user, region, geolocation, location history, et c - even in DMs, even on Instagram or WhatsApp.
Imagine if a regime insisted that they censor a specific term or set of terms within their country, or be blocked GFW-style.
I doubt it’d even require that much new code. They already have DM censorship mechanisms in place to combat spam and other forms of automated messaging.
When you have no other contact info for those with whom you communicate, it gives them a point and click information blackout ability, even for “private”, person-to-person communications.
Everything from protests to genocide can be made impossible to discuss, and thus invisible.
They have full location history for a lot of users, too. Imagine them temporarily shutting off DMs for every user who has ever visited a specific location for the duration of some national security emergency specified by a government. Only temporary, of course - but suddenly the protesters of the concentration camps can’t send or receive any messages from anyone. Nobody else notices or is affected, so it doesn’t even make the news.
It’s an extremely dangerous state of affairs. I don’t even think Facebook realizes what a huge menace they have inadvertently produced, if for no other reason that I don’t think the national military in the country where most of Facebook’s SREs reside has pushed the issue with machine guns yet. Those guys don’t mess around.
To answer your question directly, because websites aren't citizenship. I read a lot of different webpages, with varying levels of quality content. HN, Gab, and 8chan are among the list of websites I have loaded in my browser before. I imagine you've visited them at least once too - or do you rely entirely on conjecture and gossip to tell you what they contain?
Forget about that, though. This isn't about any specific website. Indulge me with a hypothetical.
Imagine for a moment a future in which a web browser exists on par with something like a Gopher or Usenet client: a historical curiosity, used only by a tiny fraction of weird people, a few thousand worldwide, tops. The majority of content is posted and consumed via native apps, communicating with centralized services from cryptographically secured devices that do not allow any sort of inspection, debugging, tampering, ad blocking, memory dumping, hot patching, or other runtime-modification fuckery. It's an end-to-end chain, determined entirely by a small group of people at TSMC, Apple, Comcast/Cox/et c, Facebook, and Google.
The apps all still use HTTP (with TLS) to talk to their APIs, of course. But you can't go to webpages, even ones you don't like, because there aren't any. You can't start a new website, because nobody uses browsers any longer.
This is the trajectory we're on. It has nothing to do with whether you like whether or not specific sites like Gab or 8chan exist or not, or where you fall on the freezepeach spectrum of opinion.
Now, out of the hypothetical. Let's talk today. These censored platforms are engaging in an all-out assault on the web. Instagram has banned hyperlinks. Browsers on mobile cannot be extended via plugins or extensions. Gmail is censoring inbound emails not sent from a small whitelist of providers. Google Chrome is about to defang effective adblocking via a plugin API change. Apple, in their iOS, has hidden the Taiwanese flag in mainland China, and has replaced the gun emoji with a picture of a squirt gun worldwide. There's no hack or workaround for this. Entire swaths of potential businesses have been prevented as a result of this type of overarching design: bake censorship into everything.
If the world continues on the path it's on, soon the web will be gone and mass publishing will be centrally controlled, as mass publishing has been for almost the entirety of the history of mass publishing. The free and open web where virtually anyone can start building an audience was an anomaly, a first of its kind in history, and several extremely large and well-funded organizations, Facebook and Apple primarily among them, are working to bring an end to this historical deviation.
I really, really don't want that to happen. And it has positively nothing at all to do with the sites you listed.
> Should I assume you originate that kind of content?
No, you shouldn’t. Slashdot (in its golden age, which was also a golden age of inventive trolling) and 4Chan has shown that there are a subset of internet users who, while not creators of that kind of content themselves, actually enjoy the trolling, it brings them merriment.
In my estimation, the larger and broader a group is, the more it'll approximate human culture and interaction as a whole. It shouldn't be a surprise when the negative parts of those things (e.g. war, strife, hatred) emerge, just as much as the positive things (peace, fellowship, love).