Usenet usable?

[swestrup]

Okay, so there is still spam on usenet, but it seems to have decreased by two orders of magnitude since the last time I visited. Could it be that its demise at the hands of the spammers, and its subsequent fall into obscurity have made it once more a safe place to chat? I'll definitely have to do more research.

I can't DO an LJ poll here, but I do have an open question to anyone who reads this: Once upon a time net news was THE reason to get on the Internet. Now I don't know if anyone even knows what it is. Have you ever read the newsgroups on usenet? Would you know how to if you wanted?

Comments

[montrizzle.livejournal.com]

No and no. Tried a few times, didn't like how it worked.

[ramaxela.livejournal.com]

Despite my age, I used to post frequently to Usenet. Nowadays I just lurk in spurts.

~A.

[tjernobyl.livejournal.com]

I used to read Usenet (mostly talk.bizarre and alt.tasteless) on a local BBS before I knew what the Internet was, or had any means of obtaining access to it. A couple years later when the spam problem was getting out of hand and the web hadn't evolved to the requesite point yet, we used it to obtain pornography. It might be time to return to it now; most webboards I've seen have had a fairly awkward UI. Only LJ has been satisfactory, but it is fairly special-purpose, and it's still awkward to track discussions that one is not participating directly in.

[ellenk.livejournal.com]

I've read them a few times, usually if I wanted to find specific information on something that I couldn't find elsewhere. It just seemed like there were far more flame wars then actual information out there and I got frustrated. Maybe I just didn't find the right newsgroups.

[miseri.livejournal.com]

rec.arts.int-fiction
rec.games.int-fiction

The first is mainly a forum for authors and developers, the second mainly for players. I don't visit much these days, but I know they're still quite active. I also know I've only seen spam there maybe twice over the past four years.

Open response.

[denizsarikaya.livejournal.com]

Have I read it? No.
Would I know how to? Yes.

If it is usable, that would indeed be nice. :)

[thothmeister.livejournal.com]

I don't know how bad spam used to be on it, but I used a sneakemail address for my reply to field on the Pegasus Mail forum in December. It took less that 2 weeks before I got a 90% bandwidth warning on that address from there.

[ims.livejournal.com]

I think I gave up on Usenet round about 1996, by which point all serious discussion seemed to have shifted to mailing lists (I don't think the problem was spam as such, just rather unrestrained posting from people with little to contribute). I have heard that Usenet had got better again since (I suspect due to these unrestrained posters having moved to mailing lists), but I've not been back. I could probably recall how to find it again if I wanted to.

I do rather miss spending far too much time reading the newsgroups...

[taxlady.livejournal.com]

I do rather miss spending far too much time reading the newsgroups...

That's the main reason I gave up on Usenet. Yes, there were a bunch of idiots posting crap. Yes, there was spam, but I didn't get much to my SpamCop address ;)