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Anybody remember Usenet?
(kbin.social)
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this post was submitted on 19 Jul 2023
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Usenet arose during a time when the people using computers actually understood how they worked and how to use them. Asking someone to download and install a Usenet client then set it up to connect to a server of their choice and then subscribing to newsgroups is way above and beyond what most people are willing to do in 2023, sadly.
If it's not on a touchscreen, and not able to be done with 2 or 3 taps, then it ain't happening.
Expanding on this, I'm worried a technological education gap is forming among the youth. Old people didnt grow up with computers, they have an excuse. Middle aged people had to deal with the computers of the 80s and 90s, and because of that, understand computing pretty well. Young people were born into a world of instant gratification and super simplified touchscreen GUI interfaces, and from talking with them, it's clear most of them know how to get on the internet and do their thing on social media, but most of them have no clue how the nuts and bolts of it all work.
This is not true at all. People download phone clients all the time. And there were also Usenet web clients. Subscribing to newsgroups is exactly the same as subscribing to subreddets or kbin magazines. And you have to pick a server for Fedverse also, but the the Usenet server doesn't matter at all like a Fedverse server does.
The only reason people don't use Usenet is because the free servers disappeared and ISPs no longer provided it with your internet service.
this is totally not the case. your usenet server mattered a lot and some people would even pay to subscribe to servers in addition to what was provided by their ISP to access all the content they were interested in.
usenet was a federated forum where messages were exchanged between servers with relationships with each other. Sometimes there would be no server connection between you and another user. So you would see replies directed at a person but you would never see their posts directly. The situation could be mutual, or not. Some servers would send messages to anyone who asked but only pick up from their chosen sources. IME the more physically remote someone was, the more likely there would be hiccups in communication.
also servers would pick and choose what groups they would even pick up. it was a whole thing.
On usenet there was no one central "truth" or baseline. Everyone was always working with pieces.
Well. Usenet arose during a time when computers were only available to people who were all or most of the following: wealthy, white, formally educated at the post secondary level, professionally employed, affiliated with a western university, fluent in English, male, associated with the "defense" industry. Presumably most people who were on Usenet in 1980 had a good understanding of the technology.
But you sound as though you are being nostalgic for this extremely exclusionary time in computing. Having been in rooms as described above, it is not as interesting as you'd think. Homogeneous. Rigid. Boooring.
Why would anyone do that in 2023 when usenet is full of spam. It would only be an academic exercise unless you are looking to download pirated content. In which case usenet is quite a popular choice. Usenet's traffic has increased steadily year over year as it has transitioned into a media sharing platform. But you mean the forum side of things. Probably because you yourself have "sadly" not done any of the things you are crying about other people not doing you are not even sure what is going on.
It's off topic but on this you are correct from what I understand. I can't find in my bookmarks right now but I recall having read some research about how younger people (b >~2000) lack understandings of things like file systems and other computer basics. In their experience these things have always been very obscured. So they are very good at the things they have experience with, but actual understanding of "computers" is minimal.
Yes. plenty of articles coming out about how many in gen z are technology illiterate. I am started to see it at my workplace since we hire a lot of fresh college grads. getting more support calls for completely inane stuff that shows the person has zero basic technological knowledge, like the type of stuff that my you see from boomers. and often it's the issue is simple the user doing things wrong and refusing to understand or learn to do them correctly, like a boomer.
it's wild to think a 22yo is incompetent at basic computer skills, but like you said, all they do is social media crap on their phones. they have no idea how to actually work with PC/Mac applications, let alone solve basic problems or change settings.
This is why I try to involve my 5 year old god daughter in whatever tech project I'm working on whenever she's over. I also have a bunch of edutainment games running on my Windows 98 PC that she plays. She knows how to use a keyboard and mouse, which puts her well ahead of her peers from what I understand.
I've only exposed my 4 year-old to Minecraft and Kerbal Space Project so far for reasons (now he understands "minecraft" to be an adjective meaning "that pixellated 90s video game retro aesthetic", it's adorable), but I taught in a preschool some years ago where I showed the kids Treasure Mountain and Midnight Rescue (some lucky kid might also have gotten Outnumbered but I was teaching preschool/elementary-school English, not elementary-school arithmetic). Huge hits.
Maybe it's time to get my own kid on SST[Edit - Treasure Mountain. That might have been too obscure] come to think of it, he is of age