The more snark I hear about Usenet, the happier I be to have missed it, but..

Post #396,565 by Ashton 11/23/14 8:16:55 PM Reply	The more snark I hear about Usenet, the happier I be to have missed it, but.. did I miss something more than say, witnessing the roots of non-netiquette? in those dial-up daze.. I mean.. maybe something liff-changing also happened there and I just iggerant on one more topic.
Post #396,566 by Andrew Grygus 11/24/14 12:19:48 AM Reply	Yes! You missed the foundation of internet culture! You missed where Flame Wars were born - where anonymity established the right to be as much of a total asshole as the universe could tolerate - or even more! I was there - if you were not, that's your loss, not mine. Unfortunately, it just isn't the same now - the old masters have all retired.
Post #396,570 by pwhysall 11/24/14 2:34:27 AM Reply	It's just a delivery mechanism for stolen content nowadays /snark
Post #396,571 by drook 11/24/14 2:53:57 AM Reply	Yes, the GIFT http://www.penny-arcade.com/comic/2004/03/19 -- Drew
Post #396,572 by Ashton 11/24/14 3:50:06 AM Reply	Ah.. have missed something like a dose of the clap. ('I can live with that shame.')
Post #396,600 by CRConrad 11/25/14 7:32:48 AM Reply	Sure, the birth of non-netiquette... But also the birth of netiquette itself. So, yes, I'd say you definitely did miss out on something. -- Christian R. Conrad Same old username (as above), but now on iki.fi (Yeah, yeah, it redirects to the same old GMail... But just in case I ever want to change.)
Post #396,601 by Another Scott 11/25/14 7:53:08 AM Reply	I enjoyed it a great deal. There wasn't the pressure to be tied to the screen in real-time. You could use your favorite "news reader" and download messages when you liked, reply to them at your leisure, then upload your replies. In the '90s, I often pictured it as college or graduate students all over the world sitting around late at night in a computer lab, competing with each other to be the most clever, cogent, etc. Sometimes it degenerated, but it didn't have to. You could talk with real experts if you wanted. It was male dominated, that's true, and that could be a problem... You could have long discussions with people on a topic that went on for months, or it could branch off in all kinds of ways simultaneously. You could read FAQs and learn from the best arguments that had been hashed out in the past. talk.origins alt.atheism comp.os.os2.advocacy was a great time sink and could be lots of fun. Occasionally one could learn some stuff, also too. ;-) As always, there were stupid places, too. alt.flame.* It was a different beast than Twitter, Facebook, blogs, etc., but the seeds of them were planted back then. HTH. Cheers, Scott.
Post #396,604 by Ashton 11/25/14 3:31:39 PM Reply	Thanks; best summary. Indeed I did miss out. but early-on, had not the equipment to play, though in hindsight, that's no real excuse. Clearly too, as you ably focus: the mental time-share fallacy had not erupted; Things Take Time grooks had been born, there was time to reflect, edit, really: to become edjumacated at your-own-rate. Seeds of FB et al? I guess so, but now Everything is Slick, demographically algorithmed-unto-Death and Big-$$ is the only actual common denominator for the whole fucking egregore an occult concept representing a "thoughtform" or "collective group mind", an autonomous psychic entity made up of, and influencing, the thoughts of a group of people. The symbiotic relationship between an egregore and its group has been compared to the more recent, non-occult concepts of the corporation (as a legal entity) and the meme. (Love the 'occult' slot:) an oft denigrating quip for summarily-dismissing disciplines by which it may be discerned how psychological habits Rule-over all that intellectual rationalization: that which forms the bases of most 'Laws' and of all propaganda, so effective in our fledgling conceited-while-ignorant species. Gurdjieff, Ouspensky used that word a lot, in illustrating many abstruse relationships as account for our sleep-walking through a pedestrian liff, most of us.. [+] Now that obscure word has made it into Wikipedia! ... progress? Yeah, Progress.. that Sweet and undefinable ... like the pineapple concept: also pretty well eviscerated by the incomparable Piet Hein of Denmark: RIP, fair debunker of bloviators every-when.
Post #397,084 by jake123 12/13/14 11:05:05 AM Reply	You were on c.o.o.a? What was your handle? I was in there all the time.
Post #397,085 by Another Scott 12/13/14 11:18:06 AM Reply	It was my name. I had to mostly give it up after some guy at Microsoft sending me an e-mail with an implicit threat about not liking where I was posting from... :-/ The troll threads with Dave Tholen were fun at times. ;-) Cheers, Scott.
Post #397,088 by jake123 12/13/14 12:55:30 PM Reply	Oh my god, Tholen Yeah, epicness abounded. I miss usenet; I still think it would be a great collaboration tool for the enterprise.
Post #397,096 by Another Scott 12/13/14 4:04:29 PM Reply	I miss it as well. Maybe AI will get good enough soon enough that we can get the benefits of Usenet without the spam and trolling without the necessity of human moderators. Web based discussion is so brain-dead and aggravating compared to Usenet. You end up with something locked down like WordPress (Nope, you can't say anything related to gambling or boner pills; nope you can't edit your comments after 5 minutes; nope the discussion thread won't last more than a couple of hours; no pictures; nope, nope, nope...) or Disqus (which has its own issues). Threading? Are you kidding? If the bloghost doesn't like threading, you're stuck. And if you don't want to be chained to real-time discussion all the time, you're not wanted. Progress!!1 :-/ We're slowly rolling out an organization-wide web-based collaboration and discussion site at work. It works pretty well - the little I've played with it, but even things like allowing HTML in posts is the subject of long discussion, and then there's the issue of which editor to permit/support... Welcome to the 1990s. ;-) Cheers, Scott.

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