A Beginner's Guide to the Internet/INTERNET.ISO/text/usenet/info/whatis-2

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From [e-mail] Thu Jan 19 14:37:39 EST 1995
Article: 1678 of news.announce.newusers
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Date: Thu, 12 Jan 1995 09:01:44 GMT
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From: [e-mail] (Edward Vielmetti)
Subject: What is Usenet?  A second opinion.
Newsgroups: news.announce.newusers,news.admin.misc,news.answers
Followup-To: news.newusers.questions
Reply-To: [e-mail] (Edward Vielmetti)
Approved: [e-mail] (Mark Moraes)
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Xref: darwin.sura.net news.announce.newusers:1678 news.admin.misc:28286 news.answers:36590

Original-author: [e-mail] (Edward Vielmetti)
Original-date: 26 Dec 1991
Archive-name: usenet/what-is/part2
Last-change: 26 Oct 1994 by [e-mail] (Mark Moraes)
Changes-posted-to: news.misc,news.admin.misc,news.answers

The periodically posted "What is Usenet?" posting goes:
>
>Archive-name: what-is-usenet/part1
>Original-from: [e-mail] (Chip Salzenberg)
>
>The first thing to understand about Usenet is that it is widely
>misunderstood.  Every day on Usenet, the "blind men and the elephant"
>phenomenon is evident, in spades.  In my opinion, more flame wars
>arise because of a lack of understanding of the nature of Usenet than
>from any other source.  And consider that such flame wars arise, of
>necessity, among people who are on Usenet.  Imagine, then, how poorly
>understood Usenet must be by those outside!

Imagine, indeed, how poorly understood Usenet must be by those who
have the determined will to explain what it is by what it is not?
    "Usenet is not a bicycle.  Usenet is not a fish."

Any posting like this that doesn't get revised every few months quickly
becomes a quaint historical document, which at best yields a
prescriptivist grammar for how the net "should be" and at worst tries
to shape how the Usenet "really is".

The first thing to understand about Usenet is that it is big.  Really big.
Netnews (and netnews-like things) have percolated into many more places
than are even known about by people who track such things.  There is no
grand unified list of everything that's out there, no way to know beforehand
who is going to read what you post, and no history books to guide you that
would let you know even a small piece of any of the in jokes that pop
up in most newsgroups.  Distrust any grand sweeping statements about
"Usenet", because you can always find a counterexample.  (Distrust this
message, too :-).

>Any essay on the nature of Usenet cannot ignore the erroneous
>impressions held by many Usenet users.  Therefore, this article will
>treat falsehoods first.  Keep reading for truth.  (Beauty, alas, is
>not relevant to Usenet.)

Any essay on the nature of Usenet that doesn't change every so often
to reflect its ever changing nature is erroneous.  Usenet is not a
matter of "truth", "beauty", "falsehood", "right", or "wrong", except
insofar as it is a conduit for people to talk about these and many
other things.

>WHAT USENET IS NOT
>------------------

> 1. Usenet is not an organization.

Usenet is organized.  There are a number of people who contribute
to its continued organization -- people who post lists of things,
people who collect "frequently asked questions" postings, people
who give out or sell newsfeeds, people who keep archives of groups,
people who put those archives into web servers, people who turn
those archives into printed books, talk shows, and game shows.
This organization is accompanied by a certain amount of disorganization
-- news software that doesn't always work just right, discussions
that wander from place to place, parts of the net that resist easy
classification.  Order and disorder are part of the same whole.

In the short run, the person or group who runs the system that you read
news from and the sites which that system exchanges news with control
who gets a feed, which articles are propogated to what places and how
quickly, and who can post articles.  In the long run, there are a number
of alternatives for Usenet access, including companies which can sell you
feeds for a fee, and user groups which provide feeds for their members;
while you are on your own right now as you type this in, over the long
haul there are many choices you have on how to deal with the net.

> 2. Usenet is not a democracy.

Usenet has some very "democratic" sorts of traditions.  Traffic is
ultimately generated by readers, and people who read news ultimately
control what will and will not be discussed on the net.  While the
details of any individual person's news reading system may limit or
constrain what is easy or convenient for them to do right now, in the
long haul the decisions on what is or is not happening rests with the
people.

On the other hand, there have been (and always will be) people who
have been on the net longer than you or I have been, and who have a
strong sense of tradition and the way things are normally done.  There
are certain things which are simply "not done".  Any sort of decision
that involves counting the number of people yes or no on a particular
vote has to cope with the entrenched interests who aren't about to
change their habits, their posting software, or the formatting of
their headers just to satisfy a new idea.

> 3. Usenet is not fair.

Usenet is fair, cocktail party, town meeting, notes of a secret cabal,
chatter in the hallway at a conference, friday night fish fry,
post-coital gossip, conversations overhead on an airplane, and a bunch
of other things.

> 4. Usenet is not a right.

Usenet is a right, a left, a jab, and a sharp uppercut to the jaw.
The postman hits!  You have new mail.

> 5. Usenet is not a public utility.

Usenet is carried in large part over circuits provided by public
utilities, including the public switched phone network and lines
leased from public carriers.  In some countries the national
networking authority has some amount of monopoly power over the
provision of these services, and thus the flow of information is
controlled in some manner by the whims and desires (and pricing
structure) of the public utility.

Most Usenet sites are operated by organizations which are not public
utilities, not in the ordinary sense.  You rarely get your newsfeed
>from  National Telecom, it's more likely to be National U. or Private
Networking Inc.

> 6. Usenet is not an academic network.

Usenet is a network with many parts to it.  Some parts are academic,
some parts aren't.  Usenet is clearly not a commercial network like
Sprintnet or Tymnet, and it's not an academic network like BITNET.
But parts of BITNET are parts of Usenet, though some of the traffic on
Usenet violates the BITNET acceptable use guidelines, even though the
people who are actually on BITNET sites reading these groups don't
necessarily mind that they are violating the guidelines.

Whew.  Usenet is a lot of networks, and none of them.  You name
another network, and it's not Usenet.

> 7. Usenet is not an advertising medium.

A man walks into a crowded theater and shouts, "ANYBODY WANT TO BUY A
CAR?"  The crowd stands up and shouts back, "WRONG THEATER!"

Ever since the first dinette set for sale in New Jersey was advertised
around the world, people have been using Usenet for personal and for
corporate gain.  If you're careful about it and don't make people mad,
Usenet can be an effective means of letting the world know about
things which you find valuable.  But take care...

- Marketing hype will be flamed immediately.  If you need to post a
  press release, edit it first.
- Speak nice of your competitors.  If your product is better than
  theirs, don't say theirs is "brain damaged", "broken", or "worthless".
  After all someone else might have the same opinion of your product.
- Dance around the issue.  Post relevant information (like price, availability
  and features) but make sure you don't send everything out.  If someone
  wants the hard sell let them request it from you by e-mail.
- Don't be an idiot.  If you sell toasters for a living, don't spout off
  in net.breadcrumbs about an international conspiracy to poison pigeons
  orchestrated by the secret Usenet Cabal; toaster-buyers will get word
  of your reputation for idiocy and avoid your toasters even if they are
  the best in the market.
- Disclaimers are worthless.  If you post from foobar.com, and put a note
  on the bottom "not the opinions of foobar inc.,", you may satisfy the
  lawyers but your corporate reputation still will be affected.  To maintain
  a separate net.identity, post from a different site.

> 8. Usenet is not the Internet.

It would be very difficult to sustain the level of traffic that's
flowing on Usenet today if it weren't for people sending news feeds
over dedicated circuits with TCP/IP on the Internet.  That's not
to say that if a sudden disease wiped out all RS/6000s and Cisco
routers that form the NSFnet backbone, CIX hub, and MAE East
interconnect, that some people wouldn't be inconvenienced or cut
off from the net entirely.  (Based on the reliability of the MAE
East, perhaps the "sudden disease" has already hit?)

There's a certain symbiosis between netnews and Internet connections;
the cost of maintaining a full newsfeed with NNTP is so much less
than doing the same thing with dialup UUCP that sites which depend
enough on the information flowing through news are some of the most
eager to get on the Internet.

The Usenet is not the Internet.  Certain governments have laws which
prevent other countries from getting onto the Internet, but that
doesn't stop netnews from flowing in and out.  Chances are pretty good
that a site which has a Usenet feed you can send mail to from the
Internet, but even that's not guaranteed in some odd cases (news feeds
sent on CD-ROM, for instance).

> 9. Usenet is not a UUCP network.

UUCP carried the first netnews traffic, and a considerable number
of sites get their newsfeed using UUCP.  But it's also fed using
NNTP, mag tapes, CD-ROMs, and printed out on paper to be tacked up
on bulletin boards and pasted on refrigerators.

>10. Usenet is not a United States network.

A 1991 analysis of the top 1000 Usenet sites showed about 58% US
sites, 15% unknown, 8% Germany, 6% Canada, 2-3% each the UK, Japan,
and Australia, and the rest mostly scattered around Europe.  Things
have no doubt changed since then, but I don't have that data close
at hand.

The state of California is the center of the net, with about 14% of
the mapped top sites there.  The Washington, DC area is also the center
of the net, with several large providers headquartered there.  You
can read netnews on all seven continents, including Antarctica.

If you're looking for a somewhat less US-centered view of the world,
try reading regional newsgroups from various different states or
groups from various far-away places (which depending on where you are
at could be Japanese, German, Canadian, or Australian).  There are a
lot of people out there who are different from you.

>11. Usenet is not a UNIX network.

Well...ok, if you don't have a UNIX machine, you can read news.  In
fact, there are substantial sets of newsgroups (bit.*) which are
transported and gatewayed primarily through IBM VM systems, and a set
of newsgroups (vmsnet.*) which has major traffic through DEC VMS
systems.  Reasonable news relay software runs on Macs (uAccess), Amiga
(a C news port), MS-DOS (Waffle), and no doubt quite a few more.  I'm
was typing on a DOS machine when I first wrote this sentence, and it's
been edited on Macs and X terminals since then.

There is a certain culture about the net that has grown up on Unix
machines, which occasionally runs into fierce clashes with the
culture that has grown up on IBM machines (LISTSERV), Commodore
64's (B1FF 1S A K00L D00D), MS-DOS Fidonet systems, commercial chat
systems (America Online), and "family oriented" systems (Prodigy).
If you are not running on a Unix machine or if you don't have one
handy there are things about the net which are going to be puzzling
or maddening, much as if you are reading a BITNET list and you
don't have a CMS system handy.

>12. Usenet is not an ASCII network.

There are reasonably standard ways to type Japanese, Russian, Swedish,
Finnish, Icelandic, and Vietnamese that use the ASCII character set to
encode your national character set.  The fundamental assumption of
most netnews software is that you're dealing with something that looks
a lot like US ASCII, but if you're willing to work within those bounds
and be clever it's quite possible to use ASCII to discuss things in
any language.

>13. Usenet is not software.

Usenet software has gotten much better over time to cope with the ever
increasing aggregate flow of netnews and (in some cases) the extreme
volume that newsgroups generate.  If you were reading news now with
the same news software that was running 10 years ago, you'd never be
able to keep up.  Your system would choke and die and spend all of its
time either processing incoming news or expiring old news.  Without
software and constant improvements to same, Usenet would not be here.

There is no "standard" Usenet software, but there are standards for
what Usenet articles look like, and what sites are expected to do with
them.  It's possible to write a fairly simple minded news system
directly from the standards documents and be reasonably sure that it
will work with other systems, though thorough testing is necessary if
it's going to be used in the real world.  You should not assume that
all systems have been tested before they have been deployed.

>WHAT USENET IS
>--------------

Usenet is in part about people.  There are people who are "on the
net", who read rec.humor.funny every so often, who know the same jokes
you do, who tell you stories about funny or stupid things they've
seen.  Usenet is the set of people who know what Usenet is.

Usenet is a bunch of bits, lots of bits, millions of bits each day
full of nonsense, argument, reasonable technical discussion, scholarly
analysis, and naughty pictures.

Usenet (or netnews) is about newsgroups (or groups).  Not bboards,
not LISTSERV, not areas, not conferences, not mailing lists, they're
groups.  If someone calls them something else they're not looking
at things from a Usenet perspective.  That's not to say that they're
"incorrect" -- who is to say what is the right way of viewing the
world? -- just that it's not the Net Way.  In particular, if they
read Usenet news all mixed in with their important every day mail
(like reminders of who to go to lunch with Thursday) they're not
seeing netnews the way most people see netnews.  Some newsgroups
are also (or "really") Fidonet echoes (alt.bbs.allsysop), BITNET
LISTSERV groups (bit.listserv.pacs-l), or even both at once!
(misc.handicap).  So be prepared for some violent culture clashes
if someone refers to you favorite net.hangout as a "board".

Newsgroups have names.  These names are both very arbitrary and very
meaningful.  People will fight for months or years about what to name
a newsgroup.  If a newsgroup doesn't have a name (even a dumb one like
misc.misc) it's not a newsgroup.  In particular newsgroup names have
dots in them, and people abbreviate them by taking the first letters
of the names (so alt.folklore.urban is afu, and soc.culture.china is
scc).

>DIVERSITY
>---------

There is nothing vague about Usenet.  (Vague, vague, it's filling up
millions of dollars worth of disk drives and you want to call it
vague?  Sheesh!)  It may be hard to pin down what is and isn't part of
Usenet at the fringes, but netnews has tended to grow amoeba-like to
encompass more or less anything in its path, so you can be pretty sure
that if it isn't Usenet now it will be once it's been in contact with
Usenet for long enough.

There are a lot of systems that are part of Usenet.  Chances are that
you don't have any clue where all your articles will end up going or
what news reading software will be used to look at them.  Any message
of any appreciable size or with any substantial personal opinion in it
is probably in violation of some network use policy or local ordinance
in some state or municipality.

>CONTROL
>-------

Some people are control freaks.  They want to present their opinion of
how things are, who runs what, what is OK and not OK to do, which
things are "good" and which are "bad".  You will run across them every
so often.  They serve a useful purpose; there's a lot of chaos
inherent in a largely self-governing system, and people with a strong
sense of purpose and order can make things a lot easier.  Just don't
believe everything they say.  In particular, don't believe them when
they say "don't believe everything they say", because if they post the
same answers month after month some other people are bound to believe
them.

If you run a news system you can be a petty tyrant.  You can decide
what groups to carry, who to kick off your system, how to expire old
news so that you keep 60 days worth of misc.petunias but expire
rec.pets.fish almost immediately.  In the long run you will probably
be happiest if you make these decisions relatively even-handedly since
that's the posture least likely to get people to notice that you
actually do have control.

Your right to exercise control over netnews usually ends at your
neighbor's spool directory.  Pleading, cajoling, appealing to good
nature, or paying your news feed will generally yield a better
response than flames on the net.


>PERIODIC POSTINGS
>-----------------

One of the ways to exert control over the workings of the net is to
take the time to put together a relatively accurate set of answers to
some frequently asked questions and post it every month.  If you do
this right, the article will be stored for months on sites around the
world, and you'll be able to tell people "idiot, don't ask this
question until you've read the FAQ, especially answer #42".

The periodic postings include several lists of newsgroups, along with
comments as to what the contents of the groups are supposed to be.
Anyone who has the time and energy can put together a list like this,
and if they post it for several months running they will get some
measure of net.recognition for themselves as being the "official"
keeper of the "official" list.  But don't delude yourself into
thinking that anything on the net is official in any real way; the
lists serve to perpetuate common myths about who's talking about what
where, but that's no guarantee that things will actually work out that
way.


>PROPAGATION
>-----------
In the old days, when it cost real money to make long distance
phone calls to send netnews around the world, some people were
able to get their management to look the other way when they
racked up multi-thousand dollar phone bills.  These people were
called the "backbone cabal", and they had a disproportionate
influence on news traffic because, after all, they were managing
to get someone else to pay for it.

Nowadays, communications costs are (for many sites) buried in with
a general "internet service".  If you want to have a disproportionate
influence on news traffic, you need to be able to beg, borrow, buy or
steal access to great big disk drives (so that you can keep a full
feed) and lots of memory (so that you can feed a lot of sites at once).

There is a vigorous, competetive cash market for news feeds; you
can get a newsfeed from a local provider via modem or via Internet
in all 50 states of the USA, more than 50 countries, and via
satellite in most of North America.  The notion that any one system
is a "pre-eminent site" is outdated; communications costs have
gotten low enough, and traffic high enough, that if any one node
were to get wiped out completely it would still be possible for
everyone to be back on the net within weeks.

>NEWSGROUP CREATION
>------------------
You're better off starting up a mailing list.

If you *must* start a newsgroup, you're best off starting a mailing
list anyway - even an informal one - to plan the newsgroup.  Get
a half dozen people to all agree on the basic goals, topics of
conversation, etc.  Figure that you have about two months to agree
that there's something worth talking about, get a hundred other people
to see your way, and run the vote.

There are time-honored rituals for newsgroup creation, designed
mostly to minimize the amount of work that news administrators
(the people who have managed to corral a bunch of disk space to
store news) have to do; in particular, this involves minimizing
the number of mail messages they have to read every day.  The
process involves handing off responsibility to a group of people
well-steeped in ritual (the Usenet Volunteer Votetakers) who can
run through the process for you.

>THE CAMEL'S NOSE?
>-----------------
I'm not sure what camels have to do with anything.  The only real
camel that has anything to do with Usenet is Larry Wall and Randal
Schwartz's "Programming perl", aka the "Camel Book", published by
O'Reilley.  Larry wrote "rn", one of the second generation of news
readers that let you ignore some news that you didn't want to read.
The process of getting rid of unread news got to be a complex enough
decision process that he wrote a programming language (perl) to help
him write a newsreader to replace "rn".

He never finished the new newsreader, though that's not at all
surprising.  "perl" is a pretty useful language, though.  If you
can understand "perl" you'll have a much greater appreciation for
the ability of news admins to get rid of things they don't want to
see.

There are easily $12M worth of computers that I can point to that
are responsible for the transportation of netnews around the world,
plus another $12M per year in communications bills spent to keep
news flowing.  Much has been made of the risk that miscreants will
do something horrendous that will mean The Death Of The Net As We
Know It.  It seems unlikely, however, that this collective enterprise
will be endangered by any one user's actions, no matter how bold
they might be about trying to propogate their message against the
collective will of the rest of the net trying to keep them in check.

>IF YOU ARE UNHAPPY...
>---------------------
If you are unhappy, what are you doing reading netnews?  Take a
break.  Stretch.  Walk outside in the sunshine or the snow.  Relax
your brain, watch some TV for a while, listen to the radio.  If
you need to communicate with someone else, give them a phone call,
or see them in person.

It's good to not spend too much time all in the same place with
a fixed focus - rest your eyes everyone once in a while by
looking around at something else.

Don't worry about missing anything, it'll all get re-posted
if it's any good.

>WORDS TO LIVE BY #1:
>--------------------
  Hours can slip by, people can come and go, and you'll be locked
  in Cyberspace.  Remember to do your work!
                                     -- Brendan Kehoe

>WORDS TO LIVE BY #2:
>--------------------
  Part of the apprenticeship for a network guru was knowing enough
  other people and attending enough conferences to find out where
  things were hidden.  This worked just fine when the Internet was
  a small network.
                                     -- Ed Krol

>WORDS TO LIVE BY #3:
>--------------------
  The second newsreader philosophy believes that you want to read
  only 10 percent of the articles in any given group....  This
  philosophy is far more realistic.
                       -- Adam Engst