That was quick.
I thought it would take a few more days for the implosion to hit.

Anyway, like I said on

wankitywank, I was around when AOL hit usenet. I'd been around on usenet for a bit over six months at the time, as I recall. And, yeah, I lurked. A lot. The earliest post of mine I can find in a quick google search was dated 8/7/93-- argument on abortion (Note: I don't entirely trust the google search).

I remember the usenet culture being a lot like F_W culture, probably meaner (you don't see STFUADFM with the same regularity on F_W-- though the sentiment is definitely there). The AOL influx was huge; it didn't really matter if the majority of AOLers lurked, there were so damned many of them that even a small proportion of them posting increased volume. It wasn't helped by the fact that for the first day or so, there was a bug that made every AOLer's post duplicate four times. (I'm always bewildered that no one else mentions that.) I also had the joy of seeing the Canter and Siegel Green Card posts-- well, mostly the responses flaming the Green Card posts.

Never occurred to me at the time that these would be great historic landmarks. They were just damned irritating.

Personally, I like things more rough-and-tumble, which is why I like it over here. I liked usenet, too. I abandoned it back in '95 (last post of mine I can find is March 23, 1995), when I realized I could spend hours paging through groups, reading debates, and bitching about how stupid people were, and I would never get a damned thing done.

Not much has changed in that regard.

I've not had high hopes that people migrating over from LJ was going to go smoothly. Now, of course, it could... but it probably involves the creation of spaces that are more similar to those on LJ. I suspect we don't really want to give up our safe spaces for snark.

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puipui
2007-08-12 06:24 am UTC (link)

I thought it would take a few more days for the implosion to hit.

I was laying odds over at ashenmote's on before the end of the weekend, but I was thinking that it would probably be by the end of the day, with the way it was going over the signature thing. I had no idea that it would be more like within the hour.

Although, to be fair, it's been building up quickly since that second friending meme on FL and the resulting sudden increase in OMFG F'ING N00BS LURK MOAR >:( frustration, so it was really only a matter of time.

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	white_serpent 2007-08-12 06:43 am UTC (link)
	When I looked this morning, we were still at "irritable." Then I left the house for about eight hours. I sense a new wiki article in the "implosions" category in the near future. (Reply to this)(Parent)

	charmian 2007-08-12 09:35 am UTC (link)
	Oh yeah, I recall recently seeing besides the "JF hosts fandom wank, and therefore they are evil!" (and the next breath "LJ refuses to host our porn, they trample on Free Speech! Evil") stuff, people were saying they didn't like JF because people are "mean," probably referring to the culture of snark. (Reply to this)(Thread)

limyaael
2007-08-12 12:21 pm UTC (link)

Sarah T. (apparently) made a post that influenced several people, talking about how mean and horrible not only F_W but the JF admins are, because supposedly someone posted her personal information over here and they refused to take it down. I saw it linked on my friends-list. *goes to find*

Ah, here it is.

I actually hoped that would keep more noobs from coming over here. No such luck.

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	tehrin 2007-08-12 04:23 pm UTC (link)
	I sort of like being in a den of evil. (Reply to this)(Parent)

	tehrin 2007-08-12 03:49 pm UTC (link)
	the Canter and Siegel Green Card I don't know what that is. ducks (Reply to this)(Thread)

white_serpent
2007-08-12 07:06 pm UTC (link)

ZOMG N00B!!!

They are commonly credited for bringing us spam. They posted an advertisement for their law firm on around 3000 usenet groups. (GREEN CARD LOTTERY LAST ONE?? or something like that.) It didn't make it onto the moderated groups, obviously, but most groups were not moderated. The posts were mass-deleted not long after, but people had replied to the posts on most high volume groups.

They claimed to have received a big influx of business as a result.

It's on wikipedia and pretty easy to find on google search.

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mindset
2007-08-13 01:10 am UTC (link)

Let's see... the earliest posts I can find of mine are in December '92 to alt.fan.tolkien, rec.arts.drwho, and alt.test with a huuuuuuuuuuuge sig. Which got warlorded. *And* I quoted entire posts... yeah-huh god I was dumb. Then nothing for almost a year, then a few things to alt.fan.pratchett and rec.arts.comics.xbooks. Still with a huge sig, although I'd learned a little more netiquette. :)

And then I.. um... switched schools... and so nothing until October 94 when I came out of lurkerdom and started posting to racx (and later racmx) regularly. Pretty consistent there till another school switch in late 96, and a return in 98 with dropping attendance till about 1999-2000 when everyone I knew was on messageboards and later LJ.

I don't remember the Green Card thingy, but I do remember MAKE MONEY FAST! It's still my favorite. :)

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white_serpent
2007-08-13 02:32 am UTC (link)

Oh, God, MAKE MONEY FAST! ...And does the story about the $2.50/$250 cookie recipe still circulate? I bet it does.

You and I are the same age (my birthday is in May, BTW), so our different experiences with usenet intrigue me.

Was your .sig longer than your posts? :) I knew better than to quote long posts, and I was pretty damned lucky if I remembered to sign my posts at all. Most of my college friends were big on the evils of wasting bandwidth. They also all read the hacker groups (which one was it that was moderated, but with no moderator, so you had to hack to post?). They would have killed me if they'd seen me violating netiquette.

I used to read soc.women, soc.men, alt.feminism, soc.feminism, rec.arts.sf.written (where I killfiled any post with "Jordan" in the title until they created the subgroup), rec.music.rush (which now appears to be alt.music.rush... I always thought it should be called alt.rush-fanatic), alt.fan.pratchett, alt.fan.eddings, comp.sys.atari.st, the various UW groups, rec.humor.funny, rec.arts.sf.tv.babylon5, etc., etc. (I'd link to some of my comments, but I used my real name on usenet. God, if I'd ever had any inkling that Google would one day exist...)

When I left back in '95, I really left, though (I think I left sometime in the summer, though the last post I can find was March). I was so busy the next three years (senior year of college, then grad school) that I wouldn't have had time to keep up with my usenet groups the way I once had, anyway.

Someone at work mistakenly sent something out to a list of people on Friday (NFI why I would be on this list, honestly), and people kept replying to the list all afternoon saying they shouldn't have received the email. And, of course, they quoted the entire thread in their email. You have no idea how I cringed.

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mindset
2007-08-14 07:32 am UTC (link)

My sig was, that first time, about twice as long as my post. It had ASCII art in it too, a literal signature. ;_; And the next version of the sig about a month later just had about a dozen quotes and ASCII borders and a "sincerely". By the time I became a regular in '96, I'd gotten it down to about 5-7 lines, mostly because I held on to the borders. Now I don't use any sig at all, except for work. :)

My friends in HS were geeks, but somehow they never told be about bandwidth, I don't know why. Perhaps I was slightly oblivious to the sigmocking in our college emails, that's also possible. I was oblivious to a lot. :) But even when I did learn netiquette, I had a tendency to quote posts -- actually, one of my friends and I were legendary for the "cascades" caused by the addition of >>>'s as we replied to each other. But racmx was a very casual place most of the time, very unlike soc. or tech groups I think.

I'm not sure what that hacker group was... not alt.2600, was it?

And my real name's all over Usenet, which is kind of the reason I still use it online even though I've dropped the last name mostly. It's so damn unique it wouldn't make a difference if I had attempted to cover up circa getting an LJ...

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white_serpent
2007-08-14 03:45 pm UTC (link)

Yeah, most of the groups I posted in were not very tolerant. I mean, I actually read soc.women.

There were a whole host of hacker groups. I could go look at the FAQs and figure out which one it was. I read most of them for awhile, but would never have posted to one.

I figure if you (general and specific) want to know who I am, you already do. Anonymity on the internet is a myth. I'd just prefer that my fandom activity not pop up on a google search of my name and that people not bother me at work.

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	kadath 2007-08-13 01:12 pm UTC (link)
	God, if I'd ever had any inkling that Google would one day exist... Fortunately for me, my adolescent stupidity went away with one of AOL's periodic reorgs. I was reading usenet as a 13 year-old, but I was too scared to post, fortunately for my ego today. (Reply to this)