It was big in the 90s. Well, 'big'. Before we had forums. You can think of it like public email. You got access through a usenet server, often provided by your ISP or University, and it had groups for more or less everything going. Servers would peer the data between them, though server admins would often have a whitelist of groups that they would replicate.
Images were transferred on it much like embedded email images now - as uuencoded text. Base64 probably came in at some point, but you get the picture. There wasn't a lot in the way of video back then, few people had the bandwidth.
Groups had etiquette but I'm not sure how/if it could be enforced. The ultimate sanction was to put someone in your ignore file, and then you wouldn't see them any more.
Old usenet was largely inhabited by tech enthusiasts, students and academics. It is the place where flame-wars and trolling originated.
Two things killed the old usenet experience.
First there was the tradition of people who didn't know the etiquette flooding in every September with the new academic year. They would learn and participate better and settle in over a short while and order would be restored. When AOL gave newsgroup access, it was referred to as the September that never ended, and marked a downturn in the quality of discussion.
Second was spammers figuring out they could just flood the place, and so the merrily did, until it was basically useless and impossible to find actual conversation.
> It was once (maybe ~15 years ago) advertised as an alternative to torrents
Yeah so in the old binaries groups you could split videos over huge numbers of individual messages, tied together with identifiers in the titles, then reconstruct them. By the mid 00s this seemed to be the main use of usenet.
A file containing all of the message ids for a particular binary was called an 'nzb' and you could use that to grab the binary if you had a newsgroup server subscription and a program like sabnzbd. By that point most ISPs didn't give access to usenet any more, so you went through a third party. You could run a sort of trawler thing on groups you liked to build nzbs yourself, which used a lot of time and data, or you could subscribe to an nzb service. These survived for a while because a) fewer people used them and b) they made the same arguments as trackers - there's no content here, it's just an index.
'scene' videos would often get to usenet first, in fact usenet was often the source of the binaries which then made their way to the torrent services AFAICT.
For the casual consumer of pirated material it was probably legally safer than torrenting as you never uploaded anything.
Yeah fair enough, they were/are the beating heart of the scene. I always assumed usenet was somehow 'closer' to the source than the public trackers, but :shrug:
even twenty years after shutdown of the one I was ... hrm ... helping with ... I am reluctant to talk so please read https://www.wired.com/2005/01/topsite/ instead
It was big in the 90s. Well, 'big'. Before we had forums. You can think of it like public email. You got access through a usenet server, often provided by your ISP or University, and it had groups for more or less everything going. Servers would peer the data between them, though server admins would often have a whitelist of groups that they would replicate.
Images were transferred on it much like embedded email images now - as uuencoded text. Base64 probably came in at some point, but you get the picture. There wasn't a lot in the way of video back then, few people had the bandwidth.
Groups had etiquette but I'm not sure how/if it could be enforced. The ultimate sanction was to put someone in your ignore file, and then you wouldn't see them any more.
Old usenet was largely inhabited by tech enthusiasts, students and academics. It is the place where flame-wars and trolling originated.
Two things killed the old usenet experience.
First there was the tradition of people who didn't know the etiquette flooding in every September with the new academic year. They would learn and participate better and settle in over a short while and order would be restored. When AOL gave newsgroup access, it was referred to as the September that never ended, and marked a downturn in the quality of discussion.
Second was spammers figuring out they could just flood the place, and so the merrily did, until it was basically useless and impossible to find actual conversation.
> It was once (maybe ~15 years ago) advertised as an alternative to torrents
Yeah so in the old binaries groups you could split videos over huge numbers of individual messages, tied together with identifiers in the titles, then reconstruct them. By the mid 00s this seemed to be the main use of usenet.
A file containing all of the message ids for a particular binary was called an 'nzb' and you could use that to grab the binary if you had a newsgroup server subscription and a program like sabnzbd. By that point most ISPs didn't give access to usenet any more, so you went through a third party. You could run a sort of trawler thing on groups you liked to build nzbs yourself, which used a lot of time and data, or you could subscribe to an nzb service. These survived for a while because a) fewer people used them and b) they made the same arguments as trackers - there's no content here, it's just an index.
'scene' videos would often get to usenet first, in fact usenet was often the source of the binaries which then made their way to the torrent services AFAICT.
For the casual consumer of pirated material it was probably legally safer than torrenting as you never uploaded anything.