UseNet: Difference between revisions

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Before there were [[Message Board]]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.

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Outside the Big 8, but no less important:

* ''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~~]] and [[Cloudcuckoolander]]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.religion'' and, of course, ''alt.flame'' (Usenet's equivalent to /b/).

* ''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]]s and [[Cloudcuckoolander]]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.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).

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[[Trope Namers|Gave the name to]] [[Eternal September]]. The term [[Roguelike]] was also coined on Usenet as the newsgroup for the genre needed a name.

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