What exactly is Usenet, how does it work, and why does one need to pay to join?
I am just curious about Usenet, and I can't find any info in plain english.
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Usenet was a system for threaded discussions that was popular before the web. It's like web-based discussion forums, but required specialized software to participate. Nowadays, most people use sites like Google Groups for the same purpose.
Usenet is still used by a VERY large number of people, more than almost any web based forum.
To quote the 'wtf' section on Panic's Unison page (http://www.panic.com/unison/#about)...
Put simply, Usenet is the Internet's oldest message board. Containing tens of thousands of groups catering to every imaginable topic, everybody sees what everybody else posts. The Usenet network is unique: when a user posts a message on a Usenet server, that message is transferred from news server to news server, all around the world, until every Usenet server (hopefully) contains a copy of that message.
Thus, every Usenet server, while being independent, is theoretically a mirror of all the others!
Originally, Usenet was the only way to group-communicate globally -- Usenet archives date back to 1981 (!). Even today, Usenet is still the place for awesome global conversation -- everything from good cheesecake recipes to politics to what's the best Mac FTP client. (Which shouldn't be much of a debate. Ahem.)
Lately, Usenet also hosts a large number of "binary groups". These groups contain files of every type -- movies, music, photos, etc. Unison will automatically piece these files together and make them easy to get!
Of course, like the Internet itself, Usenet is a vast, unmonitored wilderness -- nobody can control the content posted to the servers, so caution is advised as you navigate. But, with a little curiosity and investigation, you may find Usenet to be a surprisingly rich new Internet resource -- one that's actually been there all along!
I hope that explained it a bit better.
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I guess you could say, Usenet is like an old-fashioned Fluther...
A lot of people use Usenet or "Newsgroups" to download binary files or "warez." Often people pay for 3rd party Usenet providers because these providers provide better feeds with longer retention of posts. This is very important to those that are downloading files.
Most people have the misconception that the Web (WWW) and the Internet are one and the same, but the WWW was only invented in the early 1990s – the Internet itself dates back to the mid-1970s, and Usenet was the first large, worldwide, open forum on the Internet. The Web enabled the creation of bulletin boards, now more commonly known as forums, which are closed systems that are not connected to each other – unlike Usenet.
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