going through my #usenet subscriptions on the eternal september server, trying to gauge which groups likely have content, and which content is likely not completely inane.
at one point someone wrote a program that allowed the creation of new groups, which litters the whole list with stupid jokes from the 90s. there's a group alt.hobbies beekeeping, and a group alt.hobbies.serial-murder.
one would assume you could prune these after decades of non-use.
@kyonshi My first forays onto Usenet were in 1988 and it was a great place full of interesting discussions and it stayed that way for six or seven years before it started to get dangerous and you had to obfuscate your email address because scrapers would collect it and deluge you with spam. Then the spammers began flooding everything with garbage and a lot of abandoned it by the end of the 90s. It's kind of depressing to think about.
I like the idea of the #usenet. It is so fascinating being distributed over the whole world. unfortunately nobody is using it anymore. partially because of spam, partially because people don't even seem to know it exists. which is sad, because here we have forums that go back to the 80s.
of course the one way to read those old posts is also the problem, Google Groups allows to post in the forums it provides archive access to. so there's people doing thread necromancy for 30 year old topics.
@kyonshi The heyday of Usenet was the late 80s to the late 90s. I just recently found out it still exists. I stopped using it over 20 years ago. It used to be where I spent most of my time online.
@Karlos_Cantana@Yora well, it has been on life support for a long time. Google Groups gave people access, but also made spam possible and frequent. By now it's either old diehards or pirates
@snork303 yeah. There's quite a lot of people hoping for stuff to get better. GG was used to get lots of spam onto the network, to the point that many servers simply filtered out everything from there
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