
u/Parker51MKII

"The goal is not to convince the true believers. They will never change. Who you want to reach are the 'lurkers' ( early Usenet term for onlookers) who do t post but read and consider arguments."
x.com"I’ve now got a repo containing the Usenet comp-lang-cobol usenet threads from 1994 to 2020 as markdown. I’m experimenting to see if this corpus might help agents answer niche COBOL questions."
x.com"Usenet is a very strange and unmoderated wild west. It is very easy to fall down strange rabbit holes. I was looking at comp<dot>lang<dot>cobol recently, and I saw this post from 2000: "Are you having computer dreams?" 🧵"
x.comIHOP Hating on Gen X and Xennials?
We took our baby to IHOP, and this game was on the kid’s placemat. Like… “old-timey artifact to distract them with!”?
“Old Boring Movie”? Lol. This is a weird game.
Is "Eternal September" like "Susquehanna Hat Company" in Vaudeville?
Seems that every time I post something here about the Eternal September, it immediately shoots up to 5-10 likes. Not approval for thinking that the event was good news, nor even adding any new discussion or insight about the topic in the comments. Just likes, maybe a rehashed rant that wishes for a mythical past utopia of Usenet that goes nowhere.
Contrast that with more nuanced, thoughtful articles that convey new detailed information about Usenet, or describe realistic efforts to improve social media in the future, that stay at its original one like. Or other Vaudevillian hot topics like "Grokipedia" that immediately get downvoted to zero. Would "Grokipedia" get more points on Reddit if it was secretly funded by George Soros instead of Elon Musk?
What would you like to see on this Subreddit, and what would you like to do with that information? In short, to reiterate a previous administrative article, "Why are we here?"
Ask HN: When did computers stop being fun?
news.ycombinator.comWhy do so many 40+ year olds end sentences with “…”?
It’s so dramatic, and always leaves me on the edge of my seat until I realize their sentence is actually over, and there’s no continuation.
Is this a byproduct of having to send multiple, short, incomplete sentences because of technological limitations they might’ve dealt with, or do I just interact with a lot of mysterious people?
"Eternal September was a Usenet phenomenon. Every September new students arrived at universities, joined the network, broke etiquette, and learned the norms from the regulars. The community absorbed them because they arrived at a manageable rate."
x.comIs “Satoshi Nakamoto” Really Adam Back? - Schneier on Security
schneier.com"John Savard's personal website is still such a goldmine and also makes me very nostalgic for the days of old. When usenet wasn't just for pirating stuff and there were communities all around etc and the internet still had large p2p, decentralized aspects to it"
x.comMinutes/2026-05-14 - Usenet Big-8 Management Board
big-8.orgHow hard would it be to extend the concept behind the Fediverse to the entire internet?
The way I understand it, the Fediverse works by users using their clients and maybe a VPS to act as both a client and a storage/relay node for the data flowing through the network. This kind of reminds me of the concept behind torrenting, you download a magnet link that then reaches out to the network and downloads bits and pieces of whatever, that are from several different other users seeding back into the network. The only way to actually lose something is if every single person that is seeding that file stops seeding, so it's kind of like a Hydra in terms of resilience.
Off-topic and rude newsgroup posts by trolls
retrotechnology.comUsenet Posts from 1993?
While trying to look up how old my Sony SRS-88PC speakers I stumbled on what appears to be Usenet posts from 1993 discussing them.
I was very surprised to see posts from 1993. I was hoping some of you could explain to me what exactly I was looking at (hopefully link attached successfully). I realize I’m not seeing the posts as they originally appeared (Google hosts them now?) I remember the old Internet but I’m ignorant to Usenet, or what it was like to be “online” in 1993. Are most of the things that were created/posted in 1993 still out there but buried?
I know I could find some of these answers by searching but I just want to talk to real people.