I was researching a Black Americana antique at work, and I stumbled upon alt.flame.n* in Google Groups. I initially thought they were true supremacists but after reading their FAQ…
What’s the deal with them? Are they true supremacists, or bad parody writers? I’m leaning towards the conclusion that they’re very bad comedians, but a lot of StormFront trolls come in, post, and never catch on that they’re being mocked.
This NG is basically that by definition. If I wanted to actually troll and flame black people on Usenet, I’d seek out NGs where black people are known to post and read. What “nigger” would bother with a NG called alt.flame.niggers? Only reason I can see someone black posting there is to toss out anti-honky flames.
I’m still a little confused. I read a thread where one poster is accused of beign a troll, and a child molester, and his home address is given out, along with as ton of racist garbage. Looking over at the sponsored links, there are sites that offer diversity training, as well as a site from the putative troll/molester’s reported hometown.
Keep in mind that a lot of serious Usenetters think Google Groups is a load of dingo’s kidneys and prefer to access Usenet through a newsreader.
Among its shortcomings, the default Google Groups “Reply” button strips out all context from your post. This makes it extremely difficult to know what the hell you’re talking about, especially since Usenet isn’t like the Web in that messages arrive out of order and not everyone wants to wait for a full thread just to make sense of one post.
Speaking of threading, Google Groups breaks that as well. Google Groups threads on subjects, which are not unique, as opposed to message IDs, which are. This means that a thread in the Google Groups viewer might have completely unrelated articles going back to the 1980s simply because they all used the same subject.
The lack of a killfile and the general UI nightmare are also big issues for me, but the two things above are what everyone else mentions.
As for finding a newsreader, xnews is probably best for Windows and I like Pan for Linux. Thunderbird (the email client that got split off Mozilla) does a reasonable job here as well. If none of those appeal, the Google web search is still un-fucked-around-with.
Slowly moving back on-topic:
The alt.* Usenet heierarchy is for “Anarchists, Lunatics, and Terrorists”. This doesn’t mean that good groups don’t exist there (I love alt.fan.cecil-adams and alt.folklore.urban, myself) but it does mean that alt.flame.niggers is allowed to exist unmolested at the whim of whoever is running the various newsreaders around the world.
Usenet used to be good. Actually it’s still good in certain specialist niches.
But there’s also a whole lot of grade ‘A’ jerks (to use a polite term) there as well, indulging in pointless trolling, aimless arguments, macho-posturing and childish point scoring. All while bravely hiding behind usenet anonymity.
Oh, I know the Usenet can be good. I have subscribed to academic/technical newsgroups, many of which are still in serious use and are very good reading and quite informative, and will do so again when I get off my lazy butt and bootstrap Gentoo. I just don’t get “anything else” about Usenet, and particularly not pretending to be white supremacists, I still don’t agree that it’s illogical to create a newsgroup to really flame its intended target–by that logic, Stormfront, solely devoted to bashing Jewish people & non-whites, is also one huge hoax.
