UseNet: Difference between revisions

{{tropeUseful Notes}}

Before there were [[Message Board|Message Boards]]s, Wikis or the World Wide Web, before the Internet even existed in its present form ,<ref>which started around 1983, after the introduction of TCP/IP and DNS</ref>, there was Usenet, one of the first distributed discussion systems around. Until the rise of Web-based forums after 2000, Usenet was ''the'' place to discuss things on the Internet, and quite a few tropes regarding message boards in general started here.

* ''alt'': Usenet's equivalent to [[Image Boards|4chan]], right down to having 4chan's bad reputation; one old joke expands "alt" to "anarchists, lunatics and terrorists" due to the huge number of [[Single-Issue Wonk|Single Issue Wonks]]s and [[Cloudcuckoolander|Cloudcuckoolanders]]s that were (and, in several places, still are) present. Basically, anything goes here; topics range from serious discussions of technical issues that didn't fit inside the ''comp'', ''sci'' or ''talk'' branches, to "vanity" newsgroups created as a one-off joke and now picking up nothing but spam, something that's been discouraged since the mid-1990s but still happens nonetheless. Just like 4chan, it includes many, many groups (specifically those under the ''alt.binaries.pictures'' sub-branch) solely dedicated to images -- [[The Internet Is for Porn|and by images, we mean "porn".]] There used to be groups dedicated to pictures of all types, but the Web in general (and Google Image Search in particular) has made them obsolete. As for discussions, popular sub-branches include ''alt.tv'', ''alt.sex'', ''alt.religion'' and, of course, ''alt.flame'' (Usenet's equivalent to /b/).

* Various regions and domains may have their own private or semi-private branches, such as ''vt'' (for Virginia Tech) or ''microsoft.public'' ([[Microsoft]]'s official tech support forums). Often there was a hierarchy for an individual city, originating at a university in that city. Before Craigslist, the online classified ads for some random Anytown may well have been news:''anytown.forsale'' on Usenet.

Due to various legal and financial pressures (the former due to its use in copyright law violations or worse; the latter because Usenet requires lots of bandwidth and storage space, more than its dwindling numbers of users can justify), Usenet has become less accessible over time. Many major internet providers have either limited access to Usenet, usually by refusing to carry ''alt.binaries'', or have shut down their Usenet servers completely. No one entity owns Usenet; as most Usenet groups empowered no one central authority to block spammers, scammers, pedophiles or other purveyors of net.abuse, spammers could [[Do Not Adjust Your Set|effectively jam the signal]] by flooding channels with enough garbage to make them no longer useful. To fill the gap, specialist Usenet providers have appeared, and many ISPs simply outsource Usenet access to them or ignore Usenet entirely. Probably the easiest way to access usenet is through Google Groups, as awkward and buggy as it often is.

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