<story><title>Why did Usenet fail?</title><url>https://shkspr.mobi/blog/2023/06/why-did-usenet-fail/</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>redprince</author><text>I&amp;#x27;ve used Usenet quite extensively in its heyday. At one point I even ran a Usenet site with dozens of peers and thousands of users. All on a very beefy (for its time) Sun E450.&lt;p&gt;In my opinion Usenets greatest strength was also its downfall. It is a distributed system without central authority over who could connect to the network or firm control over groups and their contents. To connect to it as a peer, you just had to find at least one Usenet site willing to exchange messages (peer) with you. Usually that wasn&amp;#x27;t a problem. ISPs, universities, organizations of all kinds were running their own servers, offering Usenet client access to their customers and members for no additional charge.&lt;p&gt;In a distributed system without central authority, innovation is exceedingly hard though. The protocols and features were basically set in stone. Taking the concept of offering discussions among users to a centralized or closed system made it possible to innovate very fast and offer superior features to the users.&lt;p&gt;As the article pointed out, that wasn&amp;#x27;t the only protocol which got picked up that way and innovated upon until it displaced its origins.&lt;p&gt;Since Usenet is still frozen feature wise were it was 30 or more years ago, I don&amp;#x27;t see a revival coming anytime soon.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>martinald</author><text>This is the key problem with decentralised systems. They simply can&amp;#x27;t innovate as quickly as centralised systems.&lt;p&gt;We saw this with usenet and we also saw it with IRC. IRC really is what slack was, 30years ahead of it. However, IRC has so many essential missing features it never caught on - push notifications, saving your state when offline, admin controls, etc. I know some of these were solved with extensions and workarounds (having a shell connect to irc an then you connect to the shell for persistence for example) but it&amp;#x27;s a huge hack. This compares to Slack or Teams where they can push a back and front end update to millions&amp;#x2F;billions(?) of users in a very short space of time to add additional functionality.&lt;p&gt;This is another reason why all the decentralised &amp;#x27;blockchain&amp;#x27; things would have struggled (on top of many others).</text></comment>
<story><title>Why did Usenet fail?</title><url>https://shkspr.mobi/blog/2023/06/why-did-usenet-fail/</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>redprince</author><text>I&amp;#x27;ve used Usenet quite extensively in its heyday. At one point I even ran a Usenet site with dozens of peers and thousands of users. All on a very beefy (for its time) Sun E450.&lt;p&gt;In my opinion Usenets greatest strength was also its downfall. It is a distributed system without central authority over who could connect to the network or firm control over groups and their contents. To connect to it as a peer, you just had to find at least one Usenet site willing to exchange messages (peer) with you. Usually that wasn&amp;#x27;t a problem. ISPs, universities, organizations of all kinds were running their own servers, offering Usenet client access to their customers and members for no additional charge.&lt;p&gt;In a distributed system without central authority, innovation is exceedingly hard though. The protocols and features were basically set in stone. Taking the concept of offering discussions among users to a centralized or closed system made it possible to innovate very fast and offer superior features to the users.&lt;p&gt;As the article pointed out, that wasn&amp;#x27;t the only protocol which got picked up that way and innovated upon until it displaced its origins.&lt;p&gt;Since Usenet is still frozen feature wise were it was 30 or more years ago, I don&amp;#x27;t see a revival coming anytime soon.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>liotier</author><text>&amp;gt; without central authority over who could connect to the network or firm control over groups and their contents&lt;p&gt;Moderation. In public forums, everything else is trivial and moderation is the invisible stinking hairy elephant in the room. To the question &amp;quot;why isn&amp;#x27;t there a decentralized open protocol free software X&amp;quot; the answer is moderation. Think or it as the discreet but efficient bouncers without which a sufficiently popular public place cannot maintain a welcoming atmosphere. Newsgroups became sufficiently popular, death by inadequate moderation ensued.</text></comment>