Exploring alt.suicide.holiday (a.s.h)

[cme-dme]

For those who don't know, alt.suicide.holiday which I am going to call a.s.h from here on is a Usenet newsgroup. Originally created to discuss the correlation between suicide and the holiday season, a.s.h overtime changed into possibly the first pro-life space on the Internet and is a predecessor to what forums such as this one would become.

"Okay. But, what is Usenet?" - Usenet is a distributed discussion system first created in 1980. It's similar in many ways to how a traditional forum works today and actually predates the creation of the World Wide Web. Usenet is a distributed network of servers that store and forward messages to each other meaning there is no central authority in control of Usenet. The decentralized nature of Usenet means that it is still usable to this very day even 46 years later and we can still visit a.s.h!

a.s.h is one of many of what you call "newsgroups" which can most easily be compared to a subforum or subreddit. Many other newsgroups exist such as comp.programming for programming or comp.os.linux for Linux. a.s.h is an unmoderated newsgroup meaning there are no moderators so it's a wild west type of situation. Anyone can post anything and there is nothing anyone can do about it.

I can't find an exact date that a.s.h was created but the oldest post I can find was created April 12th, 1990 titled "damn tree rats!" which describes a truly foolproof suicide method. That is, of course, covering yourself in peanut oil and getting eaten alive by squirrels! But anyways, I'm gonna log in and see what it's like to use a.s.h today!

First I needed a Usenet provider. I used a paid provider but free providers like Eternal September exist. Next I needed a Usenet newsreader. Back in the day using Usenet looked something like this:

But luckily nowadays you can just use Mozilla Thunderbird which I already use for Email. I enter my Usenet credentials and add the alt.suicide.holiday newsgroup and am met with a prompt to download an extremely large amount of messages.

I just set it to download 1000 for now. 1000 seems like plenty though because scrolling all the way to the bottom of the list shows I downloaded the last decade worth of messages. a.s.h had most of it's activity in the late 90's to early 00's so it makes sense. According to Wikipedia the place died out because of trolls and spam which I can certainly believe.

Spoiler: Posts

I was expecting mostly trolls and spam and while yes, there are those things, I was surprised to see how much genuine discussion happens even today. It's not very active, sure but still there was genuine posts and support going on.

Due to the sensitive nature of many posts I'm gonna be careful with the posts I present but I'll highlight a couple more here.
Found a mildly amusing post that mentions this forum

I guess due to the (relatively speaking) challenges that come with accessing Usenet at all that is kind of a filter to keep kids out now that I think about it. But still, kinda funny to complain about such a thing in an unmoderated newsgroup.

No comment on this one.

Anyways I left out the trolling and spam. One particular individual I saw I think has been spamming and trolling this newsgroup longer than I have been alive. What a strange individual they are. I can see why this place died out and it was for more reasons than just Usenet as a whole losing popularity to this hip new thing called The Web that everyone was moving to at the time. Still, it's an interesting digital artifact and for that I respect it. If it didn't exist well, we wouldn't be using the phrase "CTB"...and that's probably it.

 

[Unsure and Useless]

I guess due to the (relatively speaking) challenges that come with accessing Usenet at all that is kind of a filter to keep kids out now that I think about it. But still, kinda funny to complain about such a thing in an unmoderated newsgroup.

Hypothetically speaking, the only thing keeping that place (relatively) untouched is that the youth don't know of its existence. All we need is a YouTuber who can access that place before it starts receiving more activity (and, by extension, more kids)

 

[Praestat_Mori]

Thanks for sharing this piece of history!

 

[cme-dme]

Hypothetically speaking, the only thing keeping that place (relatively) untouched is that the youth don't know of its existence. All we need is a YouTuber who can access that place before it starts receiving more activity (and, by extension, more kids)

I think the fact that its decentralized, having to pick a usenet provider, and not having a single fancy app or Web UI you can use it from is enough to keep your average digitally illiterate netizen away :p

 

[Lemonite]

Yeah, i have read about this usenet, it cam to my knowledge when i researched Sasu

 

[deny_conformity]

A blast from the past, I remember A.S.H during the late 90s and early 00s. It had some useful information hidden amongst the spam and trolling. I think the only thing stopping kids these days from accessing it is the relative difficulty of using Usenet.

SaSu is a lot more user friendly and by extension "kid friendly". It also feels like more of a community in a way that A.S.H never did.