💾 Archived View for rawtext.club › ~dogstar › usenet1.txt captured on 2020-11-07 at 03:27:54.
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usenet oddities issue 1 by dogstar 10/26/2020 originally published on rawtext.club dogstar@rawtext.club (issue 1? is this a textfile zine? uh, i don't know, uh...) i have been in the middle of a project editing an anthology of sorts of a usenet community that was both fairly infamous and poorly preserved - alt.suicide.holiday. i don't need to talk much about the exact nature of that group here, though i am willing to if you'd like, what i want to do is share some of the joys and horror from using usenet in the year 2020. (in recent years, .holiday has become a tld, i guess, causing past conversations about the group in many areas to suddenly contain a url. i grabbed it and put up the simplest guide i could for getting on usenet) i was able to find the occasional statistics around usenet traffic, and while i don't think it ever quite had a level of activity comparable to our day's social media, it's clear that usenet is not what it once was. the vast majority of groups will have, at best, a dozen spam messages, maybe a couple posts reminiscent of AM talk radio catastrophizing, and a single on-topic message that comes off as kind of deranged. if a group has a level of activity that exceeds this noise floor, it's either because the topic was highly specific enough to remain useful for certain communities (such as some of the alt.autos subgroups for specific cars), or there is something potent in the psychology of the topic itself to keep people around and talking about it into 2020 (alt.assassination.jfk). long story short, i've been doing some scrappy experiments to try and measure the traffic in usenet groups in october 2020 so far, and the results are pretty weird. for a heuristic, i've only been counting posts that were posted solely to a specific group, and not cross-posted between groups, to try and counteract some of the spam and noise that lingers around. -------------------- here's a few that i've dug into so far that i found for some reason compelling, maybe horrifying, maybe sweet, i don't know. alt.anonymous.messages - a utility of sorts that made total sense when i saw it. the posts are all pgp-encoded messages from anonymous remailers. what could the conversations be? mysterious! suspenseful! alt.cooking.chefs - while this might make people uncomfortable, i find it kind of funny that the current state of usenet is so mad max that literal cannibals are taking over abandoned groups. yeah, alt.cooking.chefs has become a forum for cannibal personal ads, more or less. in this group, as with all other groups about personal ads, you'll see a lot of thirsty people in 2020 posting from google groups, responding to posts from 1998 trying to get their attention. alt.checkmate/alt.usenet.kooks - a pretty fascinating one to me. these are sort-of epicenters for a particular group of radiation-hardened friends/trolls to bicker at each other in a way that is reminiscent of twitter or maybe something awful's fyad forum. i found talking with them to be fun but also kind of jarring as a lot of them seem to be older and kind of not in a great state of being. they crosspost a lot to a lot of different, random groups, stretching their legs out in the wide-open space of usenet as it were. alt.assassination.jfk - basically exactly what you'd expect, but compelling to me in that one of the most on-topic and active communities on usenet still is trying to truly dig into and solve this great mystery. sci.physics.relativity - one of the few i looked at outside of the alt.* hierarchy, this one is much like the above except it is instead, constant bickering over whether or not relativity exists. talk.bizarre - kind of a refreshingly lighthearted group after looking at the above, just random chatter and jokes that make very little sense. -------------------- anyway, there are a bunch more of these, but i can't quite tell if this is as compelling to anyway else as it is for me. long story short, if you want to hunt around strange communities using a protocol that imho has a lovely interface, there is still quite a lot to find. this whole post is a bit slapdash because i wanted to write up a bit about a topic i've been invested in in order to post a "hello" message on rawtext.club, so: hello!