[ih] distributed network control: Usenet

[Dan Cross]

On Tue, Jul 20, 2021 at 6:45 PM John Gilmore via Internet-history <
internet-history at elists.isoc.org> wrote:

> Jack Haverty wrote:
> > What I was referencing was a non-technical design decision -- the notion
> > that there shouldn't be any single person, corporation, or organization
> > "managing the network".   The ARPANET, and IIRC all other networks of
> > the day, were under a single organization's control.
>
> The Usenet had no central point of control, and was contemporaneous with
> the ARPANET and early Internet.  Its software was even rewritten several
> times by different parties (e.g. A News, B News, C News, Notesfiles,
> NNTP).  Its global discussion groups (net.foo) were evolved by mutual
> agreement (comp.foo, sci.bar, etc) and then later successfully forked
> (alt) when the primary sites feared hosting discussions that others
> wanted to have (e.g. on sex and drugs).
>
> Does anybody know the status of the Usenet today?  I got off it
> years ago.
>

It's still there, still works, and perhaps amazingly, still has some
traffic.

The spammers have not entirely vacated the place, but have been greatly
attenuated; one suspects largely because it's no longer as tempting a
target as when it was in its prime.

There is occasionally interesting and relevant content, but there are also
annoyances. Those that are left tend to be those that never left, with all
that entails (both good and bad) and some are more extreme than others;
there's a lot of fighting as people have forgotten the age old 'net lesson
of, "don't feed the troll." In contrast to more recent offerings, the
trolls make their presence particularly known, and often one misses the
tools for moderation available elsewhere.

        - Dan C.