Usenet Newsgroups and IRC

[stryder]

When the internet was young and Mozaic (Web Browser) (wikipedia.org) was the browser of choice.  A lot of people still utilised FTP servers and Telnet to access Bulletin Boards,  One of the best discussion mediums of the time was Usenet Newsgroups.  The service in it's time had topics and articles posted up by those that frequented along with a number of news chains (Syndication pre RSS) and discussion through email was conducted.  Newsgroups pre-dated forums such as this.

In recent years the advent of many larger "social networking" sites has cast a huge shadow over the now ageing and dwindling services, but does that advent the demise of Newsgroups?

Well I suggest not.  Newsgroups while old and potentially littered with history of anarchic fallout from random posters and abusers alike is still likely a format for communication that some which are now seen as technophobes (pre-twitter/facebook) probably still use to this date.  The factor that newsgroups themselves isn't run by a single large corporation but a mesh of anarchic enthusiasts suggest that it is still alive and well, and the place to be if you don't want all your information owned by a large social networking mega corporation.

Newsgroups themselves can be seen as Twitter without a Character limit.... (although some newsgroup readers might have an upload limit if you want to share binaries.)

IRC (Internet Relay Chat) is also a chat system that predates most chatroom software and facebooks own poorly implimented attempt at writing DDoS software.  (Facebooks chat system can send so many update requests to a browser it can actually cause a router to DDoS through it's firewall filters thinking it's an attack)

IRC doesn't just handle chat, again it can allow sharing of files amongst it's users.

Neither are dead and are very much alive (and I'll likely look further into services related to these for this website in the future). 

Have you used or still use Newsgroups/IRC?  Have you any fond memories or funny stories?  Do you know of any particular servers/channels or groups to subscribe to of interest?

[C C]

Have you used or still use Newsgroups/IRC? Have you any fond memories or funny stories? Do you know of any particular servers/channels or groups to subscribe to of interest?

Talk-origins was moderated back in its day and thus maybe still exhibits some partial degree of sanity. http://talk.origins.narkive.com/

Posting to usenet often isn't reliable or even possible via Narkive. I used Google Group's web interface to usenet for a few years till they changed the format. Also subscribed to the free version of Eternal September, till it no longer seemed to work right for Thunderbird client. Actually, the groups I'd visited once were pretty much long dead or overwhelmed by spam and meds-deprived posters; and accordingly there just wasn't any incentive to solve the problem with ES.

Narkive, when it's not having a meltdown "Internal server error" fest, seems to at least filter the commercial trash. Though the mindless varieties of insulting and obscene gibberish remain for places like, example: http://rec.arts.tv.narkive.com/

Usually tamer and slower: http://rec.arts.sf.tv.narkive.com/

[Yazata]

One of the best discussion mediums of the time was Usenet...

Have you used or still use Newsgroups/IRC?

Usenet newsgroups were where I lived on the internet, back in the 1990's.

I hung out at a very good group, which was suddenly attacked by several pathological trolls interested only in creating havoc and in halting everyone else's conversation, and the group suddenly died.

Its members moved en-masse to a moderated discussion board very much like Scivillage, which still exists. (I lost interest after a while and no longer participate there.)

The Newsgroups' fatal flaw was that most of them lacked any moderation.

They were very very cool when they started, filled with engineers and scientists talking to one another in a virtual community. That was epitomized in the 'Sci-' hierarchy, which often had groups discussing particular experiments or research topics. There were newsgroups on all kinds of scholarly topics, including the philosophy and religious studies (of interest to me).

Then the general public discovered the internet. The quality of discussion started to plummet as children and aggressive cranks multiplied and anyone who knew what they were talking about left.

Then the spammers discovered the groups, effectively took them over and drove the remaining stragglers off.

Do you know of any particular servers/channels or groups to subscribe to of interest?

Not really, I don't even know how to access the old newsgroups any more and have been assuming that they are all dead. (Are there still servers out there hosting them?) 

The last time I looked at them, a few years ago, most were occupied by nothing but spam. And less and less of that, since even spammers belatedly realized nobody looks at them any more. (Thanks in part to them.) Many formerly active groups that I checked in on had no posts at all.

'alt.atheism' may still have some life, provided the newsgroups still exist. That one seemed to be a stalwart because it was so active and its participants were so hostile and abrasive.