Usenet tickling newsgroups (late 1980s- early 1990s)

[Toesheldback]

I’m not sure if this has been posted here before - apologies if it has..

Back in the day, before there was social media, many people turned to Usenet newsgroups. It was a bulletin board of text posts (only) on any and all subjects - kind of like Reddit subs are now.

Tickling was represented by the group alt.sex.fetish.tickling and later added alt.tickling.

Images were a different animal altogether. Since Usenet was a text-only environment, people posted images in text “code” called binaries. If you wanted to post an image, you’d encode it into a binary (using one of many free tools) and post it; and you’d do the same but in reverse if you wanted to decode the binary and transform it back to an image.

It sounds like a pain in the ass, and frankly it kinda was. But that was all people had till AOL came along. The main tickling one was called alt.binaries.multimedia.erotica.tickling.

An individual a few years ago wanted to resurrect all those posts, and has done a pretty phenomenal job at doing this in my opinion. You can now search either posts or groups for content at the below URL.

Here’s the URL to the Usenet archive.

https://www.usenetarchives.com/

 

[U.N.Owen]

Yup, I was there. AOL free trials were my first glimpse of an actual graphical interface.

 

[WickedTouch]

Weird coincidence–I just mentioned the old newsgroups in passing in a thread reply a few days ago. I never used it in a non-GUI environment. I had one of the graphical news readers at the time. I probably am not old enough that I should be remembering these, but I was pretty tech savvy and kink aware at an embarrassingly early age lol. I'll have to comb through those old posts at some point. One thing I remember, but only through the lens of my younger self, is that due to richer media being so difficult to share widely, stories seemed so much more plentiful and more often of higher quality. Perhaps that's a memory distorted by time, or just that it appeared that way because they were all more concentrated in a few digital spaces as opposed to scattered across the web. Either way, despite it being complicated in some ways, it was generally a simpler time that I have fond memories of.

Thanks for sharing! 🙂