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Buying Guide: R.I.P Usenet: 1980-2008
Contents
- R.I.P Usenet: 1980-2008
- Usenet's Decline
Before the Eternal September, but after the Great Renaming, I learned about sex on Usenet. A few years later, on a Mac SE in a college basement, I met friends I still have today. We "spewed" about our teenage lives in ways that would be familiar to any MySpace blogger circa 2008, but that were radical, strange, and comforting in 1993. We made faraway friends, burned yearbooks to CDs and mailed them to Finland with way too many stamps. We were the first Net kids, really.
In a way inconceivable in today's Web-fragmented marketplace, Usenet was where you went to talk. Conceived back in the idealistic, non-profit days of the Internet, it was—well, it is, but it mostly was—a series of bulletin boards called "newsgroups" shared by thousands of computers, which traded new messages several times a day.
On the text-only Usenet of my memory, nobody knew whether you were a dog, or a kid, or Finnish—only what you wrote. There wasn't the obsession with photos and video that overruns today's social networking sites. Yeah, I know that sounds like "get off my lawn you darn kids" crotchetiness, but there's something really nice about just talking to people and not caring what they look like.
Serious conversations went on in forums like comp.sys.atari.8bit; more frivolous chatter appeared in groups whose names started with "alt," a freewheeling free-for-all that nobody owned, nobody managed, and nobody policed. It was a more innocent time on the Net, before most of the spammers, the crooks, or even the general public showed up. People hewed to a loosely agreed-upon set of net.manners enforced by self-appointed cops. The society worked—at least for a while.
Usenet was what the Web is missing nowadays: a genuinely public space, with unclear ownership. While different people hung out in different groups, everyone accessed the same group list and there was plenty of cross-fertilization. Control came down to a bickering cabal of scattered IT administrators who generally preferred to leave well enough alone. Compared to chat systems like IRC (and later, instant messaging and texting), Usenet encouraged thoughtful, long-form writing with lots of quotation and back-and-forth.—Next: Usenet's Decline >