Sascha Segan mourns the passage of Usenet. R.I.P Usenet: 1980-2008:
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.
I got on the Net — and Usenet — in ’93, and it was like a huge door opening for me, a way to hook up with people to talk about all sorts of goofy (and not-so-goofy) stuff.
Alas, Usenet has been largely doomed by three things:
- In this day of fancy-graphical-Facebooks and Twitter and all that, Usenet’s glamor has faded.
- Similar discussion opportunities can be had on various forums.
- Said forums don’t require each ISP to carry a full copy of Usenet on their servers, including sketchy pr0n sites and binary exchanges.
Classic Usenet is still limping along, but the lights are slowly being turned off, save for the archives that Google keeps (for which my thanks).
Comcast has eliminated its newsgroup servers. This is bad news for me, because they were a good way for me to find the old-time radio shows I so enjoy. Filling in those gaps in my collection will be much harder now, as I can’t afford to subscribe to another newsgroup provider.