Usenet personality

Nothing has changed since Jerry Pournelle wrote 40 years ago when discussing online forums:

>I noticed something: most of the irritation came from a handful of people, sometimes only one or two. If I could only ignore them, the computer conferences were still valuable. Alas, it's not always easy to do.

This is what killed Usenet,[1] which 40 years ago offered much of the virtues of Reddit in decentralized form. The network's design has several flaws, most importantly no way for any central authority to completely delete posts (admins in moderated groups can only approve posts), since back in the late 1970s Usenet's designers expected that everyone with the werewithal to participate online would meet a minimum standard of behavior. Usenet has always had a spam problem, but as usage of the network declined as the rest of the Internet grew, spam's relative proportion of the overall traffic grew.

That said, there are server- and client-side anti-spam tools of varying effectiveness. A related but bigger problem for Usenet is people with actual mental illness (kstrauser mentioned one); think "50 year olds with undiagnosed autism". Usenet is such a niche network nowadays that there has to be meaningful motivation to participate, and if the motivation is not a sincere interest in the subject it's, in my experience, going to be people with very troubled personal lives which their online behavior reflects. Again, as overall traffic declined, their relative contribution and visibility grew. This, not spam, is what has mostly killed Usenet.

[1] I am talking about traditional non-binary Usenet here

I can't stop laughing at the first entry and this simple joke:

> he gained international notoriety for his claims that [...] mass and time are equivalent. (With regard to the second claim, it was suggested on the "sci.astro.amateur" newsgroup that his demise be observed with a gram of silence.)

Is that guy in comp.theory still saying he's solved the halting problem and been suppressed by big computer science for 25 years?

> skiing enthusiast banned by court order in 1999 from posting on the Usenet discussion group "rec.skiing.alpine", after engaging in a flame war with other online posters. The heated exchanges lasted for months, eventually escalating into death threats, until a police detective from Seattle posted a request for all involved to calm down. All involved did except Abraham...

I'm sorry, this was probably annoying to all involved, but also so hilarious. Not least of which picturing a detective, who joined the force thinking he was going to solve murders and maybe even get a lead on D.B. Cooper sighing as he posted on a message board.

Happy to see Erik Naggum on this list - its the one I really remember the posts, mostly in a very "particular style" which was very entertaining to me (reading it a few years later).

I kinda miss that style of poster and understand it cannot come back. But if the world is big and diverse then I prefer that that kind of people can exist.

Ah, The Usenet Oracle. I fondly remember late night drunken college Usenet Oracle sessions back in the early 90s, competing to see who could make it to the Best Of digests. It often ended up with us realizing eventually that nobody else was emailing the Oracle, so we were just getting each others questions.

I'm going to disagree with the summary of Serdar Argic. My belief is that the Turkish government financed a grad student at University of Minnesota, Ahmet Cosar, to do the spamming. It is as well known that Uunet, and early ISP, had a "pink contract" with Cosar that allowed him to spam. Cosar lost his student visa, had to return to Turkey.

Globally 0.29% of people suffer from schizophrenia (lifetime risk of 1%) so it shouldn't have been surprising Usenet (or, really, any forum system without moderation or some similar kind of control) would experience their presence.

Why wasn't Henry Spencer listed as a Usenet personality (the good kind)?

Wow, what a nostalgia trip. We had our fair share in the comp.sys.amiga.* groups.

I feel bad about one in particular. Don't get me wrong: he was incredibly annoying and liked to jump into nearly every single thread and turn it into some persecution complex thing. I was unkind to him, as were many others.

Looking back, it seems obvious to me that he had some mental issues and was battling demons the rest of us didn't see. I wish younger me had the wisdom to just killfile him and pretend he didn't exist. Whatever his problems, I'm sure I didn't make the world any nicer by yelling at him.

Sorry, man. I'd have handled that differently now.

Most of these are negative in some way, except for the "Other personalities" section.

There's a lesson here somewhere.

I'm starting to think Archimedes Plutonium was wrong about his Plutonium Atom Totality conjecture.

I have the dubious distinction of being in the Net.Legends.FAQ. I'm glad I didn't rise to the level of ending up in this Wikipedia article.

I am very convinced that a number of early X-Files plots (or sub-plots) were inspired by threads on Usenet.

B1FF sounds like he would have been right at home on weird Twitter

Didn't John Titor also post his warnings on Usenet?

I doubt it is a thing anymore, but if you were in a NOC and said, "...there is no cabal." you could expect at least some portion of the people present to turn around and hail, "Long Live The Cabal!" It was a usenet admin shibboleth that I still laugh at every time I hear it.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/There_Is_No_Cabal

No mention of Scott Nudds?

Scott Nudds was a guy who trolled comp.lang.c and a few other programming newsgroups. He was noted for his phrases "Unix and C are dying, this is a good thing." and "C pushers will do anything to defend their sick religion. I, on the other hand, prefer honesty." For a while, the usual reference to "making demons fly out of your nose" (a humorously valid potential response by the compiler when it encounters undefined behavior) was often replaced with "making Scott Nudds fly out of your nose".

Wherever you are now, Scott Nudds, you are remembered. A hero and vanguard to the Rust Evangelism Strike Force—because C really is dying now, and that's probably a good thing.

SsZERO is another, whom I've mentioned before, but his appeal was more limited:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42218587

The list lacks Derek Smart, so it's not a real list.

I mean, there are certainly similarly odd and known HN personalities. They are different though, they have adapted to survive active moderation.