Do you remember USENET?
 

That was the "Mother" of all online forums today!
A lot of useful discussion and information but also a lot of spam on un-moderated groups.
What do you think?

Before my time

:D

I download tv shows and movies from usenet everyday. Kind of like torrents.

But I don't use it to talk or have discussions anymore. Not for a very very long time.

I have fond memories of having a great many discussions back when computer BBS systems were big. I would participate in discussions in BBS message forums that were "echoed" across the country. Message were transferred by BBS systems by calling other BBS systems over the phone line by modem. System to system. It would take a few days for messages to reach other systems across the country or world. Then the wait for any replies.

I was an avid user of Usenet, but in my opinion, Facebook was the nail in it's coffin. It's been dead for many years. Most internet users today wouldn't even know how to use it.

Really? Best Usenet providers of 2023. Not exactly cheap....

Yes. Used it a lot back in the day. Dial up, download new post of the feeds I was subscribed to, hang up, do my thing with them, dial up, send post, hang up. Rinse and repeat daily.

I bought my first concert tickets from someone on usenet back in 1996.

I still use it today to download things. It's still very much useful but not for what it was in the 90s.

I don't think it was Facebook in general. Most of USENET was either binary or specialized text groups. The text groups lost out to similarly specialized mailing lists and web forums. That was well underway when Facebook started and process has been a steady one. A lot of the groups I used to read are still being posted to, or petered-out fairly recently.

I do still pay for a monthly account, but only because easynews sells USENET+vpn for little more than either individually. Otherwise I'd get a block account where you pay for GBs that never expire. It's still useful for binaries that are hard to find elsewhere.

I used it back when I was a regular on this forum (nearly 20 years ago now. Wow...) and when I was a Fastmail fan, and constantly debating whether to use Outlook Express or Netscape. I miss those days.

First discovered USENET as an undergrad in 1983. Back in the 80s it was really The Thing. My university didn't have "real" Internet then, but even if we had, there wasn't any content on it... all it offered beyond what we had with dialup connections was FTP and telnet - boring :D

I suppose I continued reading USENET into the 90s... don't have a clear memory of when I stopped, but I have had no desire to get back into it since then.