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It is a silly place

I decided to see if USENET was still there. It is. Kind of.

The text groups were felled by the very thing that made them most attractive: posts and users are never deleted. Thirty, forty years later, they’re vast empty wastelands where spambots chatter to each other about buying Ambien. It’s almost eerie.

It’s not dead, though. The binary groups are a hot business. In fact, you pay a monthly fee to a usenet service provider to access those.

Binary groups were for trading data, so I reckon that’s where people go to pirate and download illegal stuff. I guess. There has to be some reason people will pay for access rather than use torrents for free, but I decided not to find out. How many lists do I want to be on, really?

I wonder if the few moderated groups are still functional. Will dig some more.

No idea who poor Fred Hall is.

June 17, 2020 — 8:09 pm
Comments: 12