alternatehistory.com

Provoked by a recent visit to soc.history.what-if. (Yes, it still exists. Yes, people still post there.)

For those of you who've never used it, Usenet was the great-grandfather of all online forums. Founded in 1980, it let anyone with a modem make posts, to which others could respond. In 1980 this was huge.

To oversimplify a complicated history, Usenet grew like mad until about 2000. It was reorganized in 1987 -- an event called "the Great Renaming" -- and got easier to access all through the 1990s. You needed special software (a "newsreader"), but these became ever more common, more powerful, and easier to use. And by the late 1990s, you could also access Usenet without a newsreader, through Google (groups.google.com).

Usenet had -- still has; it still exists -- certain advantages over other fora. It's immense. Anyone can post anytime, without registration. Most newsreaders provide for threading, sorting by date, and killfiling. There's an easily searchable archive of billions of posts, on any topic imaginable, going back almost thirty years. And Usenet, like the Internet itself, is decentralized; it exists on thousands of servers worldwide, and so is almost impossible to damage or shut down.

But Usenet had huge flaws too. It was ASCII-only: simple text, no pictures, no hyperlinks. Most Usenet newsgroups were unmoderated, and so vulnerable to spam, trolling, flamewars, and hipcrime attacks. And it required a modest level of expertise -- you had to know it existed, and then how to use a newsreader.

Usenet went into a steep decline after 2000, as other blogs and other fora (like this one) stole its posters away. In terms of raw posts, Usenet has continued to grow slowly, but that's because of spam, ads and binary files (if you don't know, don't ask). In terms of actual human posters, Usenet is probably down 50% to 75% from its peak a decade ago, and the decline looks likely to continue unabated. Usenet leaves behind a scrim of terminology -- "spam", "troll", "FAQ", "flame war" -- but the thing itself seems likely to slowly fade away.

So: was this inevitable? Or was there a way to make Usenet the one-stop-shop for everyone's online posting needs?

Earlier expansion and propagation? An earlier Great Renaming? Earlier and better newsreader software? A fad for celebrities to post on their own newsgroups? Delayed development of blog and other forum software?

Thoughts?


Doug M.
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