I WAS THERE: alt.music.alternative

Oh where to begin.

I was wondering whatever happened to Persi

God, I might have done, I can't remember.

I did see it, yes.

Whatever happened to alt groups? Did it all end in a flurry of spam and porn distrib?

i had access to usenet in 1992 through a shortlived job at a hospital and probably posted about My Dad Is Dead or Tsunami or something. think i spent most of the time lolling at alt.flame though.

Whatever happened to alt groups? Did it all end in a flurry of spam and porn distrib?

Most of them got spammed into oblivion, then Google snapped up the archives; I think you can still post to them if you really, REALLY want to.

love that ppl get offended when you imply that this is an "indie" or "alternative" board because

I read it a bit in my last year at uni in 1997. I didn't really understand how to post to it, I was pretty new to The Internet at the time - only got an email account in late 1996 because I was doing an exchange term in Dublin and wanted to be able to keep in touch with friends.

Got to campus in Sept '94, right when alt.tv.mst3k and rec.arts.tv.mst3k were going strong. My first introduction to tape-trading, too.

Two years later, switched to alt.punk and that was that.

I read it occasionally, but never posted. I was too busy with the alt.binaries music groups

love that ppl get offended when you imply that this is an "indie" or "alternative" board because

I love that too, tbh!

love that ppl get offended when you imply that this is an "indie" or "alternative" board because

What does indie/alternative mean in this context?

Because I don't think it's true that the board is centered around the discussion of indie/alternative music.

It means that we are all being distributed by Pete Waterman.

Lurked for about a year circa 1998. Read uk.music.alternative for longer and posted to ukma once or twice, but never posted on ama.

Whatever happened to alt groups? Did it all end in a flurry of spam and porn distrib?

They're still there! But yeah, more or less.

Newsgroups got really horribly full of spam towards the end of the 90s until most of the real posters left, and then the spam decreased a little because there's no point spamming a medium nobody reads, but looking at a music-related newsgroup these days will probably get you a handful of posts a week, half out-and-out off-topic casino/porn/whatever spam and the rest semi-topical automated crap ("here is the playlist to my latest radio show", "check out my eBay CD auctions for this week", etc), and no real posts.

The, uhh, less legal end of alt.binaries.* was still thriving until fairly recently, but even those now seem either dead or just full of the same bit of malware posted 3000 times a day under the name of every hot new app someone might search for. Of course I only ever visited these for research purposes, officer.

Newsgroups got really horribly full of spam towards the end of the 90s until most of the real posters left

This was why most of us on a.m.a. decamped to private email lists for a while until Tom kicked ILX into gear.

And thus we were born!

Yay!

rec.arts.books, man.

rec.* was the civilized border town to alt.*'s wild frontier

alt.punk

I read alt.music.sonic-youth for a while when I started university. I was also briefly addicted to alt.games.final-fantasy for some reason, despite not having any great interest in the games; I think it was the shock of my first exposure to meme culture.

I hung out on the alt. cure group and lurked a bit on a.m.a I think

I met Mr Veg on alt.music.pearljam in 1994 :D

can't believe there's never been a thread about alt.suicide.holiday

used to post to alt.guitar.tab, too. still have big manila folder of dot-matrix printouts from that great newsgroup.

the NG thread over on ILM got me digging in the groups archive, and yes i did post on alt.music.alternative back in 95.

.. and the associated channel on IRC of course.

Remember alt.pave-the-earth and alt.chrome-the-moon (iirc)?

I was so there btw.

hey i just checked and yep, i posted there once in 1993

I don't think I ever posted. Maybe once or twice. Read it a few times.

i was more of a alt.food.waffle-house guy

I think that's the only place my name shows up in a search of the alt. directories.

!!

i just found a post of mine bigging up BMX Bandits

and railing against Oasis

I can only find 3 posts I made, all in 1995 on AMA. Ned responded to one of them, lolz.

I found 2 posts, one on alt.music.nirvana, and one on alt.music.pearljam ...profile says I had a total of 8 posts, across 8 boards, lol. My lurking ways were in full effect

155 posts in the archive. I still have it in my newsreader.

Oh man, alt.guitar.tab. I had a dot-matrix printer until 97-98 or so, and had stacks of tab, still connected by their perforated edges.

I had never heard of a.m.a or Usenet when I found ILX, so no.

Question: What was it about that particular group that spawned so many future ILX scribes? Did Tom post a message on there during its dying days like "Hey all, stop dealing with all these useless spam messages and come join this new message board I just started called 'I Love Music'"?

Don't know if I was ever on ama but I was on alt.4ad a bit. My big usenet hangouts were aus.culture.gothic and alt.tech-support.recovery with small stints on aus.tv (horrible right wing bogans) and alt.simpsons

Huh alt.music.4ad that should be. And was it alt.simpsons or alt.tv.simpsons ?

I was mostly on rec.music.hip-hop.

alt.rock-n-roll.metal.death , where as a matter of course every single message was crossposted to rec.music.christian

Oh that's brilliant, ha:)

Question: What was it about that particular group that spawned so many future ILX scribes? Did Tom post a message on there during its dying days like "Hey all, stop dealing with all these useless spam messages and come join this new message board I just started called 'I Love Music'"?

This is answered upthread, but basically a lot of a.m.a people kept in touch and everyone knew about Freaky Trigger, with a lot of us contributing to it in some form or another; when Tom started "I Love Music", people basically stopped posting on mailing lists and migrated to the board.

i posted on a few alt.music boards in the late '90s/early '00s, but only band-specific boards (mainly alt.music.sonicyouth, which ian on here remembers me from), don't think i saw the point in being on a big genre-wide board like that.

Really, the metal groups were worth it for the daily Spinoza Ray Prozak show alone.

I feel like Tom started doing the "name that song" game from freaky trigger and posting about it on a.m.a.? that is my possibly wrong vague recollection. I was busy angsting out over on alt.music.nin and rec.music.industrial, not sure how I got to ama, I suspect it's when I got burnt out playing 3 hours of mediocre ebm tracks on my show. then I found the older industrial records type records but a lot of the "scene" kind of dead-ended there. Think a.m.a.ers had similar touchstones but had found new things to move onto. /navel-gazing

who I remember there: ned, dan/dex, tom, persi, ml compton, geir, gondola bob (lol), fred s.
obviously other ilxors were there, just can't recall seeing their posts. I only read at the tail end of its existence.

Mostly the same places I'm at (mostly lurking now) currently--alt.sex.stories.d and *.moderated, rec.*.int-fiction, rec.games.computer.ultima.dragons, rec.games.roguelike.* and the local groups for my Usenet server, eternal-september.com. I had to stop reading rec.arts.sf.written because it gets 300+ messages a day (Google Groups says it's currently the highest volume group in existence) and I got overwhelmed.

I did read ama in the day and sort of remember that jyot1 m1ishra (sp) used to post there?

I am trawling thru the googlegroups archivces of my time on usenet in 99-2001 and jesus I was a different online person back then. I was brasher, ruder and a hell of a lot more open about inane emmbarrasments. I guess back then none of us thought of it all as that "public"?

Or it just may have been that you were younger then.

would have looked at a.m.a occasionally, followed a couple of a.m.*band groups, but found rec.arts and rec.music hierarchies waaaay less a) spammy and b) cunt-filled

don't remember recognising anyone from there when I started here, though a bunch of ILC types were on rac*

Oh god, yes, I posted. Man oh man. I actually admitted I liked an Ocean Colour Scene rec. hahahaha

posted & read to rec.arts.sf.written and alt.music.sonic-youth and i think that was it.

alt.punk and alt.music.ska (to my eternal shame)
also rec.games.mecha (Battletech!)

Started lurking from some time in 1994 to when the core FT crew left. Posted once, but even in those days I was Tha Threadkilla.

I may have read a.m.a a bit, but I think the only ones I ever posted to were alt.music.pulp and rec.music.beatles.

Before the Web attained critical mass (around 1994), Usenet was the internet for me. I didn't post much to alt.music.alternative (since by 1995, since by that point loads of major-label million-selling bands were being hawked as "alternative" by both fans and the radio stations that played them to boost their hipster cred. But I posted to many other alt.music and rec.music threads. Really, I miss Usenet.

Ugh, don't miss it at all. Dude, internet radio, mailing lists.

Like I said upthread, I still read and post to Usenet. There are still interesting and active groups there, none of which are about music unfortunately.

Usenet's just a big porn trade nowdays, as it flies under the radar (its why most ISPs stopped bothering with a newsfeed server - the binary group data was killing)

No, but I've heard of it, you are so old, lol.

Usenet's just a big porn trade nowdays

so this is why Christine posts there!

Yeah, I tried to post some of the pictures of you I stole off of your camera (and you must tell me sometime how you did that thing with the blonde, the redhead, and the lizard in the middle of traffic without getting arrested or run over), but it was flagged as child pornography and I now have to do a year's worth of my sysadmin's laundry or he'll turn me in. :-)

xp There are still text groups that get more than 100 messages a day and quite a few thriving communities still left.

Like I said upthread, I still read and post to Usenet. There are still interesting and active groups there, none of which are about music unfortunately.

What Christine said. Still read and post (just not to music groups)

Automatic thread bump. This poll is closing tomorrow.

I did post there, but I might miss alt.music.spice-girls more.

Automatic thread bump. This poll's results are now in.

About what I would figure.