Usenet Newsgroups Part III – Founding, Fame, Influence, and Foreshadowing

I am going to start this post with an example.  I am going use Derek Smart as an illustration of the influence Usenet newsgroups have even today.

If you know anything about Derek Smart and are under 40, it is probably because you saw a headline about him.  Maybe it was related to Alganon and the whole lawsuit there.  Maybe it was that time he said DUST 514 would absolutely fail. It could have been something around Gamergate.  Or it might have been related to him calling out Star Citizen for promising more than they could possibly deliver and getting his account revoked and refunded, something that became an ongoing venture for him.

Your credentials are no longer valid Admiral Smart

Maybe it was even related to one of his video games, though those tend to get less press coverage than he does.  I think Connor over at MMO Fallout offers the most reliable coverage on that front.

What you may not understand is why he is making headlines.  As Jason Scott succinctly put it in his Great Failure of Wikipedia presentation (listen here), the first question of the internet is always “Who the fuck are you?”  In this case you may rightly ask, “Who is Derek Smart and why does he get press coverage?”

The roots of his fame reside in Usenet.

Back in 1996 when his game Battlecruiser 3000 AD shipped, he went on to Usenet to engage with his customers, potential customers, and reviewers of his title.

And by “engage,” I mean he went to fucking war with anybody who had even the most minimal negative thing to say about the game.  If you posted anywhere on the newgroups about his game, he would find you.  He gained a reputation of tolerating no criticism and conceding zero points against his work in terms so far from subtle that you simply couldn’t travel from where he was to subtle in a single lifetime.

He was so active in certain parts of Usenet that he drew in spectators and opponents from well beyond the horizons of his video game.  He became a topic undo himself and people battled over statements he made about almost anything, a maelstrom Mr. Smart felt happy enough to feed.  HE became the topic.  A whole series of people and groups made it their business to log on and spar with him every day.  But the tales of those who opposed him have faded while his fame remained.  He bootstrapped himself into the realm of Usenet legends through hard work and an uncompromising willingness to piss people off.

His ability to issue the hottest of takes, as we might say these days, remains undiluted.  He gets headlines because he delivers the goods that get people talking.  He has done little to earn him or his products headlines in the past two decades save for being himself.  I, like many, have stronger opinions about him than any title he has ever shipped.  I have never even played any of the titles he has shipped.  I was merely pulled into his Usenet vortex back in the day.

So he gets headlines because of things he did back in the late 90s.  His time there influences his presence in the post-Usenet social media focused world.  But so much of Usenet does.  Usenet was the text base training ground for everything that would become the internet in the 21st century.

Spam, bots, flame wars, self-promotion, sock puppets, memes, influencers, content moderation, and online personalities were all gelled from the public arena of Usenet in the 1990s.

Some of those things got their names later… though spam was very much a Usenet original… but they were all prefigured by Usenet.  And its decentralized nature would let all of that drag it down in the end.  But it took a while.

So now I am going to relay the history of Usenet through the prism of my personal experience… but I’ll link out to sources if you want more details or more relevant information.

Salad Days – 1979 to 1990

Usenet came into being as an idea, if not a fully formed concept, in 1979 with the release of UNIX v.7 with UUCP when some enterprising students used the functionality to create a shared news group connection between Duke University and the University of Northern Carolina.  By 1987 work by many others had created a level of interoperability across the growing internet. (Source)

I skip all of that being in middle school 1979, where I am simply fascinated by the Apple II (not a plus or an “e” but a stock II model with a cassette player to load programs) that our school has in what is a nascent lab consisting of half a dozen units donate by Apple.

My Usenet story starts in 1988, when I get a shell account from a company called Portal, which is being run out of a residential house in Cupertino around the corner from where I went to middle school and about two blocks from Apple’s then Mariani Ave headquarters.  I know it was in a house because to sign up you had to physically show up to setup your account.

Since I go to a California State University school, which as an institution is devote to training and education, as opposed to the University of California, which is research oriented, I do not have access to the internet through my school lab account… and I have been hanging around with Potshot, who goes to a UC school, enough to become interested in what this whole internet thing has to offer.  Plus I want to play Rogue, which is hidden well enough on the Control Data Cyber mainframe at my school that I can’t find it and the lab staff won’t share.  My account is limited to using SPSS, though the lab staff do relent and give me the dial up number so I can work remotely from my computer.  I still need to walk to the lab to pick up my printouts, but those wait for me in a cubby patiently until I have time to get over there.

Anyway, I get the account and pick as my first even email address my three initials @cup.portal.com.  I went with my initials because a friend I met playing Air Warrior on GEnie worked at Sun Microsystems gave me his business card and his email address was his initials @sun.com and I thought that was pretty damn cool.  I have, ever since, attempted to get my initials as my user name for at least my personal email.

At this point I have a Macintosh SE and am using a 2400bps modem and some of the utilities that have been built for the Mac for FTP and Gopher.  I have yet to discover the Eudora email client that will be the core of my email experience in the 90s, but it is out there having just been created.

Until I find that, I do my email and newsgroup reading from the command line.  Neither get a lot of use.  As it turns out, I don’t really have anybody to email.  Friends and family that do have email don’t check it regularly, and most don’t have it.  My girlfriend goes to another CSU school and doesn’t have a school issued email address because he major doesn’t require it. (Neither does mine.)  I mostly use it to message our Air Warrior group that meets for lunch every couple of months at the Chinese restaurant at the corner of 19th and Taraval up in SF.  (The restaurant seems to change name/ownership at least once a year, but always has the same menu and staff, and may well to this day for all I know. Sam Wo is still around, why not other places?)

Meanwhile, newsgroups are interesting but kind of sparse.  Over the summer I can read all of the groups I subscribe to in the time it takes to boil water for tea, and I have lots of time to sit and watch the kettle.  And I occasionally get bullied when I do post because having a Portal account means I paid for access, which some see as sullying the purity of the internet with capitalism.  You have to earn your place on the internet according to them… which mostly means going to the right school or working for the right company.

In the end when I finish school, quit Safeway, and get a real job I shut down the Portal account as an unnecessary expense.  Of course, then I start a BBS, so my judgement about expenses is not really to be trusted.

The Rise of News Groups and the Breaking of Norms – 1990 to 1996

I farted around with my BBS, which honestly ended up being a good investment as it got me my first few jobs and taught me about modems and being online about 15 minutes ahead of when that suddenly became a marketable skill.

The BBS was fun, I was part of a small community, but a BBS is a little isolated pool of data and to get people to visit you need to find a way to replenish your little pool, to bring something new to it.  So that often means calling a lot of other BBSes to see what new things they have.  But there is an upload/download economy in play and if you don’t contribute then you can get cut off from access.

I end up writing a month BBS list/guide for the 415 area code with another person that we upload every month around the SF Bay area.  I also eagerly distribute Tidbits, a Mac focused text newsletter that shows up regularly.  Oh yeah, I am all about the Mac at this point.  I also have a coax 5Base-T Ethernet network in the house I share with my girlfriend that lets me connect to the BBS without having to dial in or use the local console.  File transfers are fast.

I eventually come back to Usenet as a source of news and downloads… the binaries groups… and setup a UUCP account and use a package called uAccess that lets me dial in and download all new messages for the news groups to which I subscribe.

uAccess from ICE Engineering

This reproduces the directory structure I detailed in the previous post which this software works from.  It is here, where I can read newsgroups at my leisure in a decent UI that isn’t a scrolling terminal where data that goes more than 50 lines off the top of the screen is gone forever, where I start to get deep into Usenet.

It is during this time I run into my first bot.  Serdar Argic, the Zumabot, who responds to every mention of Turkey with statements claiming that there was no genocide of Armenians and that, in fact, it was Turks who were the victims.  The repetition of mixed made up references, the response to inappropriate threads (you might get a reply if you were asking about cooking for Thanksgiving if you mentioned the main dish), and the non-sequitur replies made it pretty clear that it was an automated response program just reading and reply based on simple pattern recognition.

But what do you do about this sort of thing?  Usenet was a distributed network with no central authority.  Among other things, the saying about the internet just routing around people trying to control or stop it was being proven.  Up until then norms and social pressure were enough to keep people in line and behaving the way the original users thought was correct.

Meanwhile, the eternal September was well under way, with an onslaught of new users from online services such as AOL showing up and ignoring convention and flipping the bird to those who replied with strident lectures on “That is not how things are done here!” and “Read the FAQ, it is posted on the first of the month!”

Then there was the rise of internet service providers.  I gave up my UUCP account when local ISPs started offering SLIP and PPP connections which hooked your PC up to the internet like it was another node allowing you to use apps and utilities that were often restricted to work where you might have a live net connection.  You needed this for a little app called NCSA Mosaic, the first web browser, which gave the internet a simple yet consistent UI which made everything much more accessible and was the wave of the future.

Somewhere in there I was at my peak involvement, a time when I got involved with voting on the creation of new news groups in the primary domains.  Each new group there required a charter, a sponsorship, and then a minimum number of votes from the general Usenet community in favor of creating the group.

During that era I won the wet blanket award for being the person who voted “No” on more newsgroup creation votes in a given year.  My theory was that every group that could get together a charter for a vote would attract a self-selecting group favoring the groups creation.  A lot of those votes were very one-sided because only the people who wanted the group would hear about it and vote at all.  So I would vote “No” on every group just to put a little pressure on those trying to create the group.  I know my voting against the group got at least a couple of them past the minimum total vote threshold.  There were a few other people like me who subscribed to the newgroup that promoted all such votes who voted against every group.  And there were about twice as many who voted in favor of every single group.

In the end I don’t think I made a bit of difference either way… I recall getting one angry email about a group that failed, but it didn’t fail because I voted against it but because the group couldn’t even muster the minimum threshold of votes… and I got bored with that after a couple of years.

The Green Card Lawyers Destroy it All

As those who felt they could still guide the internet struggled to figure out what to do about the Zumabot and all these new people who simply were not reading the FAQs or following the social norms, husband and wife lawyer Laurence Canter and Martha Siegel showed up and posted an add about the Green Card Lottery, a way to gain US citizenship, to something like 5,500 different newsgroups… and not cross-posted, which would mean you would see it just once, the polite social norm at the time, but individual posts to each group which meant you might see the Green Card Lottery ad over and over again as you moved through newsgroups.

So what?  What is one ad?

Well, they did something that had not really been done before, a commercial advertisement that they claim made them $100K for pennies worth of effort.  It was such fertile ground that they went into the Usenet spam business.  This opened the Pandora’s Box of potential and illustrated the Tragedy of the Commons all in one fell metaphor mixing swoop.  Spam was now going to be a way of life as minimal investment in digital distribution over a shared public space yielded a return that made it worth the effort.

There were efforts to fight this, but they were hampered by the open, egalitarian nature of the medium.  Somebody could issue a cancel command and remove, revoke, disappear, or whatever you can to call it, messages deemed to be spam.  A method for that was built into the system.

The problem was, who gets to say what is spam, who makes the decision as to what stays and what gets deleted.  It all goes back to that “first question of the internet” above.  Who are you to tell me what is spam?  In the end there was a compromise and some new groups were created to carry the cancel messages that would remove specific flavors of spam and your local admin could choose whether or not to carry those groups.

That worked… if your admin carried the groups and you were concerned about a specific spammer who always posted from the same host or used the same syntax.  The Zumabot could be silenced fairly effectively, but the genie was out of the bottle, to invoke yet another metaphor, and randos and those willing to put even minimal effort into evading the blocking attempts were able to skate past and put their messages up in front of thousands of people daily.

I can say I saw posts from Serdar Argic and the green card lawyers, I dove into the discussions about what to do, saw those trying to push back as well as those who saw the potential of spam and sought to capitalize on this new, untapped frontier.  As with any social media site, this became its own special section of the internet with personalities rising in the name of one cause and somebody else seeking to oppose them for some set of reasons.

Waiting for Facebook or Something Like It – 1996-2008

In 1996, despite the onset of spam posting, Usenet newsgroups were still useful and often represented distinct online communities who, as it goes, could be cliquish and hostile to outsiders, but who had no other real public space to meet up in.  Sure, you could turtle up in IRC, but that could be even more insular than a moderated newsgroup and more susceptible to disruption from individuals unhappy with the status quo.

At this point I was reading newsgroups at work as my employers for the next decade or so tended to have servers set up to support Usenet.  I recall even Microsoft Outlook had a built-in newsgroup reader at one point.

I have a bit of a time capsule at home, my PowerBook 190cs, which I used for work in 96 and 97.  Looking at the desktop today I can see all the hallmarks of internet usage.

The 1997 time capsule screen

UULite to drag and drop Usenet binaries I saved off, StuffIt Expander to open up apps, JPEGview to look at… pictures… and Telnet and Fetch for FTP and a drag and drop text converter.  A simpler time.  Somewhere in there is Claris Emailer, which I did tech support with for a company coming up.

(Historical note: The soxmas12.mov is the QuickTime movie version of the 1995 video Trey Parker and Matt Stone put out to pitch the idea for South Park.  You can watch that video here.)

But Usenet newsgroups, as a useful source of information, newsgroups were starting to show the strain of unfettered access.  Too many randos, too many flame wars, and too much spam was piling up.  The sense of community of the early days was slipping away in all but the most obscure groups.

Meanwhile, other opportunities were arising.  The world wide web was a thing… and such a popular thing that I have a past post about the problems of getting a dial tone some evenings.

Early web sites could be primitive.  We were amused by simple things.  But the online forums that used to be the domain of the now fading BBS community found new life in a web fronted format to such an extent that, once again, if you are under 40 the term “BBS” probably means a web forum to you rather than a computer at somebody’s home or business with a modem attached to it that let you dial in and access it.

My online time shifted from newsgroups to gaming company forums, or guild forums, or gaming news site forums like those of Firing Squad and others.

Meanwhile, GeoCities and other early social networks began to spring up.  People began putting up their own web sites and there were web rings dedicated to specific topics.  I had a web site of my own, more generally oriented, from 1999 until about 2008 or so.

Blogs, first as web logs, then as individual content sites, started to show up, with Blogger going live in 1999.  There was a cornucopia of sites showing up.

Then there was Facebook.  I mean sure, MySpace showed up first, but MySpace came and went so fast as a peak place that it feels like a flash in the pan.  And there were other services, like Google’s Orkut, that showed up, lingered, and were shut down.

And all of that pulled people away from Usenet.  Somewhere around 2006 I stopped reading Usenet newsgroups at all.  There were Podcasts and I was starting my own blog and the MMORPG community that spanned both those mediums was much more welcoming than the cold text of Usenet.

By 2008 Facebook had become a juggernaut.  If you wanted text then there was the burgeoning site called Reddit, which seemed to take the wind out of sites like Fark and Something Awful.  And if you wanted short format, there was Twitter, which was starting to be taken seriously.

Porn, Death, and the Ashes – 2008 onward

In the end, the binaries groups would be the demise of Usenet.  The internet is for porn, and there had long been porn binaries groups on Usenet, but in the 21st century companies began to get squeamish about hosting that sort of thing on company servers.  And then somebody said there was child porn in there somewhere and the run for the exits began.

In some ways, Usenet shrank back down to its past vision.  If AOL and your local internet service provider were no longer going to bother hosting it… and once the binaries were gone there seemed little point to keep the spam filled newgroups around as well… then you might get back down to a cozy little community.

Except, of course, the spammers.   The cost to spam was so low that they kept on spamming even as the user based crashed down to a tiny fraction of its peak.

The symbolic end of the line was when the founding point of Usenet, Duke University, discontinued support of the service in 2010, followed by University of Northern Carolina, the original connection from Duke, in 2011.  Usenet wasn’t dead.  It was far too distributed to be killed by any one disconnection, but its day in the mainstream was clearly gone.

Usenet Newsgroups Today

You can, in fact, still connect and read Usenet newsgroups today.  They are all still there… or the hierarchy of the groups is still there.  The archives are elsewhere, either stored by Google or the Internet Archive or on a bunch of CD-ROMs like the ones I have… though I am pretty sure storing things on CD did not last much longer than the ones I have as the sheer volume, which would be dialed up considerably by 1994, would have made that impractical without paring down the ever growing number of newsgroups.

Anyway, if you are curious, here is how you can access Usenet newgroups.

First, you need a service provider who is still hosting Usenet.  There are a few out there and most of them charge for the access.  But there are a couple of free paths as well.

In my own experiment with current Usenet I went with a site called Eternal September, named after one of the critical inflection points of Usenet, the rush of commercial users into the newsgroups and the end of the quiet and cliquish early era.  You can set up an account there for free.

Then you need a Usenet newsgroup reader.  For this I went with Thunderbird, the one time Mozilla developed email client that was also an off-shoot of the open source version of Eudora, which also shared the name with a notorious fortified wine made by Ernest & Julio Gallo Winery.  My grandparents had a vineyard into the 70s out by E&J and sold their output to them, so there is a family connection.

The setup is pretty simple.  Here is my configuration.  You have to hit the Alt key to get the menu options to appear, then you go to Tools and choose Account Settings, then create a new account as follows.

Thunderbird Settings

The critical bit is that last checkbox, Always request authentication.  That prompts you to login with your Eternal September credentials, which in turn opens up the whole hierarchy of news groups to you…. and there are a lot of newsgroups.  Thousands.

Many of them are dead.

The group rec.games.roguelike.rogue has 7 messages in it, the earliest dating back to 2014.

Some are active.

The group rec.games.roguelike.nethack, just next door to the above, had 8,562 messages in it going back to 2007, and many of the recent ones are on topic discussions of NetHack, as opposed to being mostly spam.  (I used to follow that group back in the 90s and like to tinker with the source code to make my own changes to it.)

Other groups… have a lot of messages.

Maybe I won’t download all of those…

That group does have some on topic discussion, but is popular enough to have attracted more than a little spam.  Actually, a lot of spam… but people have been trying to persist through it.

And other groups are completely overrun by spam and abandoned to their fate.  The ALT hierarchies seem especially prone to that.  Here is alt.games.everquest as an example.

Not at all about EverQuest

In parallel, rec.games.computer.everquest has been similarly overrun, though with different spam.  So there is variety I suppose.

This is why the world moved on.

So it goes.  Usenet newsgroup went through many of the various problems we face today with what we now brand as social media.  Usenet, by its nature, did not have the means to deal with them..

And with that rambling mess, I will move on from Usenet.  Next time, back to business and telephony.

The series so far:

• Hanging on the Telephone
• Calling the Mall
• Finding Friends with the Popcorn Lady
• Jenny and the FCC
• What Your Area Code Used to Say About Your Location
• I Get a Modem then Start a BBS
• Tech Support at the Village
• Dominating the PowerBook Modem Market
• The Death of eWorld
• The Great Dial Tone Drought of 96
• When the Modem Business Ran Out at the Village
• The Village Attempts to Move Beyond Modems
• Anecdotes from the Village
• Usenet Newsgroups Part I – I find some Usenet Archives on CD-ROM
• Usenet Newsgroups Part II – What is on that CD and Why Your Hard Drive isn’t a Database