Does anyone still use Usenet?

How do you even access a newsgroup now? I think I had access when I had AOL. That was 25 years ago.

I did in the late 1990s up until 2005 or so.

You used to could use some Google site to get to them.

You have to pay to access it now.

alt.gossip.celebrities/showbiz back on the day. LCM, the Pink Princess (RIP, QUEEN), and the burro!

Me too, r5, plus alt.movies and rec.arts.movies.current-films and rec.arts.movies.past-films.

The Pink Princess’ husband’s website is still operational.

There's a ton of ancient posts from alt.gossip.celebrities on Google Groups. The recent ones are shite of course, but you can do a search of Conversations in alt.gossip.celebrities on LCM or any of the old regulars. Here's a sample.

ASG and AGC -- alt.showbiz.gossip and alt.gossip.celebrities.

To this day, when someone dies, I think of them as "no longer shopping the Pig."

How I loved the wild-west, unmoderated Internet. It had a beautiful ass, but it couldn't live forever.

I loved Usenet! From the mid 90s - early 00's I was a regular in rec.arts.tv.soaps.misc and many others.

I still have my Christmas cards from the Pink Princess. She was one of a kind. Those were some great days with some great gossip. We'll never see that kind of wild west again.

r4 No you don't. I access newsgroups through Thunderbird via eternal september usenet server. Free, free, all free.

I've been on Usenet newsgroups since . . . hmmmm, it seems to me since the late 80s. Increasingly in the 90s, it was overrun by trolls practicing a much more aggressive trollery than do the sad pathetic wussies you see here, who just make veterans of ye olden tymes on Usenet laugh. This prompted many users to flee to moderated groups on Yahoo and Google etc. etc. That kind of trollery is now old hat, but people who left Usenet because of it pretty much never came back.

Some groups are still active--for a couple of instances: alt.usage.english and humanities.lit.authors.shakespeare.

* humanities.lit.authors.shakespeare . Don't know where that hyphenation came from.

r11 r12 OK, something's inserting the hyphen willy-nilly. Sorry.

There was a kinky group alt.bme or something like that. Body Modification Extreme. They were really into cutting off their balls and frying them up in a skillet.

Or going full-on Spock ears or splitting their tongue.

Usenet is still used heavily to distribute TV shows and films, and probably everything else digital there is. I was a paying member for years on various usenet providers to mainly download TV shows, mostly Australian reality shows like The Block or Masterchef Australia. I've also downloaded thousands of magazines and comics over the years.

I'm not a paying member anywhere currently because there's just too much to watch on the streaming services I'm subscribing to, and the magazines I like I'm buying in a physical form since it's just so much better to read them that way.

Oh, and I forgot I used to get all my audiobooks through the usenet as well. However since we have awesome audiobook services these days over here in Europe I've stopped downloading them illegally years ago. For $20 a month you get to listen to as many audiobooks as you like; it's basically Spotify for audiobooks.

BTW, content providers are fully aware of the usenet. They were sometimes very quick to force remove files from the services. That's why practically everything these days is named nonsensically and you need to be a member on some site to find the right files.

Does anyone remember the “Anal Warts Kelly” incident circa 1999-2000?

R16, No - please elaborate.

Atm I'm reading a William Gibson novel from the 90s, now retro-futuristic though it wasn't at the time, and he mentions Killfiles as a minor plot point.

That seems like a system we should implement here, to prevent the worst of the trolling. Perhaps Muriel can look into it.

R9 Me too! I loved Rec.arts.tv.soaps There was Alston atl

soc.motss

alt.showbiz.gossip where I learned which dead celebrities were sleeping in the stereo cabinet

R8 … and I think of them as being “in the stereo cabinet”.

I also refer to particularly festive gay men as being “as gay as an Ungaro spring frock”.

I think I may have put “prok chops” on a shopping list or two as well.

I loved Usenet, particular AGC/ASG, but also RAME - rec.arts.movies.erotica. It was mostly about straight porn, which was OK with me because I usually prefer straight porn anyway. The remarkable thing was that, in the midst of the inevitable dross of "she so hot" and the like, there was actual discussion of porn - what made something hot, why people liked this or that. It was often quite intelligent and articulate.

R10, Me TOO! And LCM was a gift. Always at peak entertainment. I think Judith Rogow (SIC) worked at Hustler on Wilshire. A total wealth of fun information.

I was a long-time regular on rec.arts.movies.past-films r6. We probably got into a lot of fights. Especially if you were Steve the pedo.

Usenet was wonderful, but of it would never work in our hyper-censorious society, where people are terribly worried about protecting everybody's feelings. Usenet was not a happy place for those with thin skins or stiff necks or for those who couldn't accept that freedom of expression comes with a sometimes-high price tag.

Anyway, what killed Usenet was spam, but also the heavy burden of moderating. This is the same thing that killed off the moderated forums like imdb and TWOP. It's a thankless job, and I don't blame the mods for not wanting to continue as volume became overwhelming, but goddamn it I miss both of those sites and others I can't think of at the moment that were so much fun ... and so USEFUL ... but have since bitten the dust.

Most groups weren't moderated, and that's what killed them. Moderation didn't kill them. Many people created forums to go to so they COULD moderate and get rid of the people causing problems. For instance, alt.movies.silent moved to Nitrateville the forums, because there were too many trolls on Usenet and it was no longer functional.

rec.arts.movies.past-films fractured when some troll started a thread about how no women could act and they were just in films for their boobs, and it turned out most of the men on the group agreed. We lost a lot of posters and the board never recovered. Every thread got taken over by two guys, a pedo named Steve who talked about being a libertarian because libertarians would get rid of the age of consent, and some guy who went by the name Kingo Gondo who would scream at Steve for being a pedo. It killed the forum.

In both cases, moderation would have saved those forums, but neither were moderated so there was nothing to do but leave.

I was also on aus.tv and alt.movies.kubrick. Stanley Kubrick’s daughter posted there on occasion but was abused by a teenager who hated Eyes Wide Shut.

I also posted on alt.left!

I was a regular participant on audio and soaps forums. The audio one was stupid funny, i.e., dataloungier than datalounge, but I could only take it for ten minutes at a time. There were these two characters, George Middius and Arnold Kroofeces, who would argue all day long about—oh, what was it?—some aspect of high end audio listening, I don't remember anymore. And it would turn into nothing but personal attacks and grew boring as a result.

And there was rec.arts.tv.soaps.cbs, for the fans of ATWT and GL. DonnaB (Shallotpeel?) was general majordomo-ess and Mimi Torchin defender. I wonder if she is one of DL's lesbians.

R25 I went from rampf to the Rotten Tomatoes boards (they were OBSESSED with games and Mulholland Drive) and to the erstwhile IMDb boards.

One of the craziest things I was involved with on Usenet was Dave Barry's divorce. He dumped his wife, who he had done nothing but talk glowingly about for decades, because he was banging some sports reporter at the Miami Herald. Dave's teen son would post on the alt.fan.dave-barry group under a pseudonym and spilled all sorts of tea about how scummy Dave had been. Then a crazy woman tried to get more information from the teen by trying to seduce him online, I think he was 14? Maybe younger? Absolute insanity. I have had to dodge that crazy woman on the internet on every social media platform I've gone to. She once had her daughter send me private messages on FB yelling at me for not friending her back.

Anyway I think Dave Barry had kids in his 50s with the new model upgrade wife, so he was in his 70s when they were teens, which always made me laugh.

Yes, R25, it seems that as more people discovered USENET, many of them lacked 'asbestos eyeballs' and couldn't tolerate the trolls. They always had the option to "plonk" anyone they wanted to silence -- put them in the killfile. But the world is apparently full of pearl-clutching Karens who can't stand the thought that someone is reading something they don't like. Not to mention people who simply can't stop themselves from taking the bait dangled by divisive trolls. The groups you mention could have been saved had the regulars there simply refused to engage with the troll threads, and killfiled the trolls. I was one of the regulars in a smaller newsgroup where there was a core of 15-20 people, and we froze out trolls very successfully. It's much harder to do in a bigger group, because there's always someone who'll be feeding the troll.

Yet the trolls and crazies were occasionally the most entertaining posters of all, or at least they caused some of the most entertaining threads as posters would pile on and viciously attack them and the trolls would pathetically fight back. Shit got very weird. People let their freak flag fly. I still remember one loon who would go on either AGC or ASG and post obsessively about women farting on cakes. (?) And another who literally believed that Heidi Klum was some kind of fertility goddess.

Now all we have is partisan political bickering. Even the crazies are boring on the new Internet.

R21, and I will never think of Anna Nicole Smith as anything but TWANS till the day I die.

Found Dataloinge via alt.gossip.celebritites. recall "no longer shopping the pig" and the "A List" that was created by some wonderful anal librarian.. was alt.fashion reader that was mostly skincare and makeup and drama erupted regarding different MLM products. Then the trolls and spam showed up making it unreadable. Used to access through lynx, a text only browser.

I was on it in the very early days when it was almost only college students. I remember discussions on how to make your poop different colors (including striped) and on how to pee with a hard-on. There was gay porn group where we discussed all the "stars" of the day.

I used Xnews. It still works.

R25, it's not that moderation per se killed non-alt newsgroups and forums like TWOP. It was the heavy burden of moderation for the mods as the groups became more popular with the universalization of the internet. What started as a labor of love because too time-consuming to do for free. Thus, more and more sites sold to big companies - imdb and TWOP are both examples of this. The big companies wanted only money, of course, and found that moderating forums didn't pay off. So they killed them.

I

I haven't used it in at least 15 years, OP. I'm in my mid-30s. I doubt 95% of people my age know what it is and I'm quite sure nobody younger than me knows what it is.

I was usually a lurker on the newsgroups, but occasionally posted as well. I visited rec.arts.movies.erotica and alt.gossip.celebrities on a daily basis and occasionally checked out some of the other ones.

[quote]They always had the option to "plonk" anyone they wanted to silence -- put them in the killfile.

That's not true. Killfiles weren't very accurate. For instance, I couldn't ignore the Steve guy on ramp-f that I talked about, because he only went by "Steve" and if I killfiled him, it killfiled everyone named Steve. It was very low tech and limited. I think it was the early 2000s before you could killfile by email address.

The farting on cakes guy was already on Usenet by 1992, when I first joined. He went on for years, I always wondered what happened to him.