Community reach

[calcmandan]

Of course not. Twitter is just a giant, flat, global flame war. The difference is that Usenet has flame wars that have been going on for 30 years. And I'm sure there is still good discussion, but the fact is that it's closed off to most ISP customers now and most of the people paying for it are feeding their SickBeard. Usenet has always been a breeding ground for piracy ever since UUEncode was invented, and ISPs didn't want the liability of keeping it open once the vast majority of discussion moved to web forums and chat groups.

isps had no liability after the mid-90s. 30yo flame war, come on man.

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[TomXP411]

22 hours ago, calcmandan said:

And this isnt why most isps dropped nntp support. It was due to the cost of server maintenance and bandwidth vs a dwindling number of subscribers utilizing the service. Some people pay a third party for access, but many people use google groups.

Yup. I remember when my ISP canceled their news servers. According to them, nobody was actually posting to newsgroups... almost all of their use was people downloading pron or pirated material. 

While NNTP isn't totally dead a a medium today, I didn't see any real benefit over a forum like this... so I haven't even had a newsgroup reader installed since maybe 2005 or so. 

Quote

isps had no liability after the mid-90s.

Section 230 and the DMCA both still require ISPs to remove infringing material that they know about. So there is still some legal exposure.  I don't want to talk about my experience on a public forum, however. ?

 

[Sean]

2 hours ago, calcmandan said:

isps had no liability after the mid-90s. 30yo flame war, come on man.

 

There were vi vs. emacs and Enterprise-D vs. Imperial Star Destroyer threads that were at least a decade old when I saw them 20 years ago.

[calcmandan]

3 hours ago, TomXP411 said:

Yup. I remember when my ISP canceled their news servers. According to them, nobody was actually posting to newsgroups... almost all of their use was people downloading pron or pirated material. 



While NNTP isn't totally dead a a medium today, I didn't see any real benefit over a forum like this... so I haven't even had a newsgroup reader installed since maybe 2005 or so. 



Section 230 and the DMCA both still require ISPs to remove infringing material that they know about. So there is still some legal exposure. I can talk about some of my experiences, but I don't want to do so on a public forum.



 

It would be easy enough to access them free. For instance, many BBS's operating today have NNTP relays configured. There's google groups. I'm sure others exist that I'm not aware of.

Regarding liability, the media companies would've sued ISP's and newsgroup providers to oblivion long ago. They were hungry for blood, and there's no way a gaping hole in their liability umbrella went unnoticed.

When my ISP dropped NNTP, my godson was managing the support division so I asked him for insight. I stated the reason above. They cut the service in 2016 and I was forced to find a replacement. I didn't want to use google groups so I got a discount off my monthly internet service, which I still enjoy today.

I suggested a newsgroup for this community as a way to increase outreach, not to replace the forum. We do have an irc channel and one could make the same arguments you did to oppose it. The only real opposition involves media pirates (alt.binaries.*) and flame wars (alt.discuss.startrek). These issues wouldn't effect our community. We could create a NG in comp.hardware.* or comp.sys.*.

David even posted in numerous threads in comp.sys.cbm.

 

[BruceMcF]

It seems likely the only additional exposure would come from posting on topic content to legacy groups ... when a C64 program is ported or a CX16 program ported to the C64, in comp.sys.cbm, or if a CP/M z80 card is developed, in comp.os.cpm, and even such long established groups only generate a small amount of discussion nowadays. A new Usenet newsgroup is not likely to offer enough additional reach to be worth the trouble.

There's nothing particularly WRONG with doing it, it's just not likely to be a very compelling environment for discussion.

[calcmandan]

This organization offers free usenet access to text only newsgroups. No binary support, which isn't the aim anyway. I found this after a bit of research.

http://www.open-news-network.org

 

 

[SlithyMatt]

I don't think anyone was in opposition to it. I was just answering Kelli's initial question about whether anyone uses it. It's great that a small number of people are carrying on the original purpose of Usenet. But to pretend that it's not 99.99% piracy and "Rule 34" is to deny reality.

[calcmandan]

3 minutes ago, BruceMcF said:

It seems likely the only additional exposure would come from posting on topic content to legacy groups ... when a C64 program is ported or a CX16 program ported to the C64, in comp.sys.cbm, or if a CP/M z80 card is developed, in comp.os.cpm, and even such long established groups only generate a small amount of discussion nowadays. A new Usenet newsgroup is not likely to offer enough additional reach to be worth the trouble.

Sure, or crossposting to the legacy NG's could work too.

[calcmandan]

On 2/6/2021 at 10:50 PM, kelli217 said:

Sine the alt.* hierarchy is a bit of a free-for-all, you could just create alt.comp.sys.cx16. ?

I'll bounce it off David and see how he feels about it. I wouldn't mind relaying it with my future BBS's message echoes.