Monday, December 3, 2012

Why USENET Hierarchies Are Still Useful


USENET hierarchies may be old, but their brilliance is still apparent. They make USENET one of the most well organized systems online.

The USENET system is one of the oldest forms of communication over computer networks. The system actually predates the Internet as most people understand it. There are quite a few things about USENET that people generally do not understand. One, the system is actually still thriving. Two, the way the system is organized is actually far superior to the types of organizational schemes you will generally see around the rest of the Internet.

The Scheme

On the USENET system, groups are organized into hierarchies. They have very descriptive top-level hierarchies: such as sci for science and comp for computer-related topics. One of the real advantages of this hierarchy system is that the conversations within them tend to be much more on-topic than they are on regular Internet forums. In fact, the best USENET newsgroups are moderated, so anybody who is consistently adding off-topic material will simply have their articles deleted.

In the USENET system, there are eight very large hierarchies that have the collective name of the Big 8. They include comp, news, sci, rec, soc, talk, alt and misc. these hierarchies allow USENET users to divide the subjects of their newsgroups into logical divisions, making it easier for everybody to use the system.

Speed

The reason the hierarchies in the USENET system are so effective is precisely the same as the reason that a good card catalog in a library is very effective. Imagine walking into a huge library and having no way to know what any book was about or where it was located. The hierarchy system in USENET provide you with a very quick way of going through the various groups on the system and determining which ones you would be interested in. For example, you would start out with the top level and then work your way down until you found precisely the newsgroup you are interested in. If you're interested in computer gaming, and you are on the PlayStation 3, you might go to comp.games.ps3. The way the hierarchy system works allows users to narrow down exactly what they want from the huge number of groups available.

Enduring Appeal

Another important feature of the USENET hierarchy is that it allows users to avoid newsgroups in which they would have no interest or which they would find objectionable. The descriptions of the newsgroups are very specific, so you generally do know what you are going to be getting when you subscribe to any given newsgroup.

Internet forums may be more familiar to quite a few modern users of the Internet, but USENET newsgroups have been shown to have a great deal of staying power. They retain their appeal, particularly to individuals who enjoy substantive conversations online and who to like to make certain that the system they use allows them to navigate to exactly what they want without having to deal with all the distractions along the way. Decades since it was first invented USENET remains relevant in terms of both content and how that content is organized.

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