Ten Things Writers Learned from Usenet

From: https://web.archive.org/web/20120605235808/http://elizabethbaxter.blogspot.com:80/2012/05/guest-post-jason-christie-on-lessons-of.html / 

MONDAY, 28 MAY 2012

A long, long time ago, before most of you people had computers, writers ruled the Internet. There was FTP, email and Usenet. Okay, there was Archie and Gopher and stuff, telnet, too. But mostly just FTP, email, and Usenet.

Usenet was for readers and writers. Before there was a web (really, there was such a time), everyone who was anyone was a member of Usenet's 30,000 or so discussion groups.  Imagine a message board where you could cross-post to other message boards. Yes, it was as chaotic as it sounds. The golden age of trolling.

But also a great time and place for writers. Oh, and we used to kick it with Stephen King, Peter Straub, Terry Pratchett, Rebecca Ore and others. Did you know, for instance, that Maryanne Keyhoe has a head shaped like an olive loaf? Or that Constantine Tobio does a pretty great Barney impression? That was Trashcan Man. He started a flame war between rec.pets.cats and alt.tasteless that actually got a mention in Wired, at one time...

The Internet was almost composed almost entirely of words, and writers ruled. That's where I learned to write, and so did many others. I suspect we all took away some of the same lessons from the blast-furnace atmosphere of Usenet, and were made better writers for it.

 1. Typo-pouncing, grammar nazi, context-placing flamers will hand you your ass every time. And none of your fancy spellcheckers for us, generally speaking. Everything you wrote had to be more or less perfect.

 2. A thick skin in response to criticism. No matter how cool and well-liked you were, someone was always ready to take you down a notch. No holds barred, either. This wasn't family-friendly Facebook. Things got very ugly on a regular basis. Man up.

 3. If you weren't funny, you almost weren't worth reading. Humor matters. You can also get your point across much more effectively with humor than, say, logic...

4. Just about everyone had a clique of friends, they helped out in rough patches. Social networking began on Usenet. It's more or less dead, but a lot of my friends persist to this day. Even enemies on Usenet are friends compared to the rest of the world, for many of us.

5. You also had to know your audience, whether you were trying to troll or just write entertaining posts. 30,000 discussion groups meant you had a target audience out there waiting for you, if you could just figure out what it was. If you had no real target demographic, you could always write for the surrealists of alt.alien.vampire.flonk.flonk.flonk or alt.fan.karl-malden.nose. But even that was a genre and a market.

6. You're only as good as the last thing you wrote. You might have been funny last month, bucko, but your posts this month are unfunny and uninteresting. Therefore you are unfunny and uninteresting. Next...

7. The internet has a long memory. You couldn't get away with any real bullshit on Usenet, because those posts are archived forever, and no one will let you forget what you said in the summer of 1997. Watch your tongue.

8. Write every day. This was all casual fun to us, back then, but posting once a week or a few times a month made you a hanger-on. Some of us gave the appearance of being on there 24 hours a day.

9. Put some thought behind it. Funny or not, stupid people were ridiculed terribly on Usenet. But there weren't a lot of stupid people, because, unlike the web, you actually had to know a little bit about computers to get on there, generally speaking. AOL disaster aside...

10. Memes. Yeah, most of the stuff you people think is cute is fifteen year old Usenet material. 'Teh'? that was us? Cheezburger talk? Also us. Horribly offensive images? Also us. Meow...

I could go on, but I'm only preaching to the choir. Read more about Usenet here: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Usenet