Prompted by discussions the other night at Tantek’s, I’m extraordinarily nostalgic for good ol’ Usenet.
Before it got shitty.
And by shitty, I’m not referring to the flame wars, haxxors, and crap like that. I mean before the spam beyond belief that flooded servers, became massively distributed, and forced everyone else to flee the communities there.
Mind you, I haven’t read/posted/lurked on newsgroups for about 3 years now.
If you looked hard enough on Google, you’d find some posts, bad poetry, and thoughts on Miso Soup in the archives that *cough* dejanews used to put out there. (Oh man.. going back to 1995)
Wondering:
a) Are people still active in usenet? Favorite groups? Worth going back?
b) Best newsreaders for Usenet if I wanted to try heading back there?
c) I used to work for and subscribe to Supernews. My current ISP offers free accounts with Giganews. Are these still the best sources for supplementary Usenet subscriptions should I be so inclined?
d) Do the newsreaders out there…or perhaps on some backend nntp server administration side…do they have any sort of spam filtering in place?
I’m wondering if there’s anything out there for Usenet that is similar to group/collaberative spam filtering that Cloudnet’s Spamnet which uses membership based feedback to more accurately identify and filter out spam.
Is it Worth it to bother trying to “TAKE BACK USENET” in that whole 80s sort of “Take Back the Streets” campaign?
Thoughts?