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.

 

[ForestGhost]

This is great, thank you for sharing. I've been wondering if there were still some way to access ASH because Google's archive of it (if that's the right word) was blocked for being unmoderated. Usenet was long before my time but I've been curious for a while about how ASH compared to SS.

 

[BradGuy123]

Oh wow. I used Usenet back in the day. I haven't thought of it in years. Thanks for this blast from the past.

 

[cme-dme]

Update: So remember how Thunderbird asked me if I wanted to download a huge amount of messages? Well, I downloaded them all. It's taking up about 385 MB of space :p Now I have message history that goes all the way back to 2003. I don't really know why it doesn't go back further. The newsgroup was clearly much more active in 2003 with many posts daily although I know that this period was sorta the beginning of the end for a.s.h.

I tried searching for the phrase "CTB" and it crashed Thunderbird lol :p It's so weird seeing posts from AOL email addresses. But anyways, some more posts that I personally find interesting.

Spoiler: More posts

Something I wanted to know was how often the phrase "CTB" was used and sure enough there were plenty of results in my search. One of the oldest results was a nice poem :)



How many vampires are on SaSu?

This has been fun to look through :) There are a lot of serious posts but I prefer to highlight silly posts just out of respect for the users even if the posts are over a decade old.

 

[CapitánBeto]

Very interesting piece of history, thanks for sharing.
It certainly predates me by a decade, but still.

I hope it is archived somehow, up to the very first thread.
If it is decentralized, as you said, I guess it's up to one of the servers keeping the entire history.

There are probably more efficient ways of downloading and browsing all that data than Thunderbird.
Anyway, if anybody is interested in trying to get to the very beginning of alt.suicide.holiday, I'll gladly help.
Sounds like a fun endeavor.

 

[cme-dme]

Very interesting piece of history, thanks for sharing.
It certainly predates me by a decade, but still.

I hope it is archived somehow, up to the very first thread.
If it is decentralized, as you said, I guess it's up to one of the servers keeping the entire history.

There are probably more efficient ways of downloading and browsing all that data than Thunderbird.
Anyway, if anybody is interested in trying to get to the very beginning of alt.suicide.holiday, I'll gladly help.
Sounds like a fun endeavor.

Well there's Usenet Archives but I have no clue how complete that collection is. The infrastructure behind Usenet is quite complex so I don't really understand how that equates to me not being able to download any posts past ~2003. Probably has something to do with my provider (Eweka)View attachment 1768870519057.png src

 

[CapitánBeto]

Well there's Usenet Archives but I have no clue how complete that collection is. The infrastructure behind Usenet is quite complex so I don't really understand how that equates to me not being able to download any posts past ~2003. Probably has something to do with my provider (Eweka)View attachment 192779 src

Well, I didn't even know the thing existed, so...
I'd have to research the inner workings of it.

If it is decentralized, I wondered if there's a single source of truth (such as in blockchain, etc.).
Maybe there isn't and then the beginning of a.s.h would be unclear.

 

[Spider Lilies]

genuine discussion happens even today.

Wow this is fascinating to me. Even the archive that someone made of the main points of ASH only goes back to 1993. I assumed based on the created archive that ASH itself wasn't active at all anymore with posts. Im not surprised some people still find it on usenet to check out, but people still talking? Absolutely. Thanks for the bit of a dive!

 

[Shadows From Hell]

ASH used to be my hangout until I found SaSu not long after it was created. ASH started going downhill and I eventually started looking for a different site, which led me here.

ASH is where I met a female who wanted to do some hiking before we decided on a spot to ctb, only she kept putting it off, and then abandoning me at a hotel(that she paid for), and went to NYC to ctb with someone else.