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Comment by TactiFail | Hacker News Reader

I always feel like I missed out on a pretty exciting era whenever I read about Usenet. I envy those who have strong memories around comp.* and wish that I could have been a part of it.

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Take reddit and remove all the karma whoring, and you have the Usenet. I think reddit is essentially Usenet 2.0 for all intents and purposes. You get all of the good and bad associated with Usenet, but in a much more easily accessible format.

Reddit is a much worse form of Usenet.

You're limited to the reddit clients; you're limited to what admins allow; and you're limited to what mods allow.

I disagree. I think reddit is much, much more accessible, and because of that, some of the communities on reddit are thriving in a way that was never possible with the Usenet.

Reading this, I could not help but feel an incredible longing for a proper threaded UseNet client, a good UseNet subscription that contained most of the important channels, refraining from top-posting, using fixed-width fonts, and in general, spending a good part of my time as a youth learning one too many things and interacting with fascinating people. For someone who was (and still is) quite pedantic about word-wrapping and fonts and proper indentation levels while quoting, Google Groups never came close.

You could download a news reader (I liked slrn; other people like tin or trn or pan; but there's a bunch of others) and find a free text server.

Or you could download INN and set up your own local group for you and your friends.

http://www.eyrie.org/~eagle/software/inn//

(Perhaps INN isn't the best server to start with! Maybe Diablo is better.)

http://www.openusenet.org/

It baffles me why this got downvoted.

You didn't.

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