I had a post almost finished, but I lost it so I’ll have to redo it. A lot of the major ISPs have dropped Usenet support. I haven’t used newsgroups in years, but I have heard that spammers increasingly took them over in this decade anyway. Has anything taken its place, which is as useful as it was?
Usenet had thousands of photos available on any given week, all categorized and easy to find and keep track of. There was everything: pornography, simple nude pictures of any sort of woman, fetish materials, or just pictures of women on the beach or something. There are plenty of photos out there on the Web, but you have to search and find them on a million different websites. There are web forums, but joining each one is a tedious process compared to the effort of one click or keystroke to subscribe to a newsgroup. It all takes a lot more time.
When I was using newsgroups, there were some video clips but it was mostly photos. I don’t know if it was ever good for high-quality video. There are some websites these days that have many free video clips all centralized and searchable, but I don’t think that exists for photos.
I wonder if torrents are the new thing. To use a torrent, as I understand it I have to be involved in the distribution of the material instead of just viewing it. I’m paranoid about that, because I’m not really interested in having to distribute pornography. There could be material which is copyrighted, or if a person ran across illegal material they would already be helping to distribute it before they realized it, if I understand correctly.
Are today’s teenagers growing up without the wonders that I did?
There’s nothing different really. Back in the day Usenet was the avenue for user created content. Websites were administered and somewhat static, or at least had limited access for content creation. Nowadays with just about every website incorporating user generated content of some kind, there’s little need for Usenet. People can just upload and share their stuff to one of thousands of websites that trade in user generated content.
You’re aware of Google Images? Just turn off the filter and any topic you search for should pop up a few images, which will usually be on a page of similar images.
Yahoo groups has pretty much taken over this duty. You can find a group for pretty much any proclivity with members posting relevant pictures daily. That said, usenet still exists, it’s just that the naughty picture groups don’t generally show up for free on the web - you’ll have to use your email providers’ server info.