[HN Gopher] Ask HN: Could Usenet get revived, to replace the soo...
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Ask HN: Could Usenet get revived, to replace the soon to be
unusable Reddit?
I recall the comp., sci., and soc.culture., from just before AOL
opened the flood gates (access), and even soon thereafter, as they
used to be so fun...
Author : netfortius
Score : 107 points
Date : 2023-06-01 16:31 UTC (6 hours ago)
| tgv wrote:
| Usenet won't be as effective, since it lacks "karma." People love
| up and down voting, and usenet simply does not provide that.
|
| That, and the the whole question of who's going to pay for a
| large amount of usenet traffic. Think of all those images
| traveling uuencoded and being stored at every hub...
| notacoward wrote:
| > Think of all those images traveling uuencoded and being
| stored at every hub.
|
| Yes, the text-only bias of Usenet (really NNTP) is a bit of a
| problem, but otherwise it's a pretty good starting point.
| Better IMO than ActivityPub, which is insane wrt consistency -
| e.g. everyone viewing a post from different servers is likely
| to see a different set of responses - and is actively cache-
| hostile. Fix the text bias, or add a side protocol for images
| like IRC did, and it would be pretty close to what you'd want
| for a decentralized Reddit (or HN) replacement.
| EGreg wrote:
| At Qbix.com we will be launching something soon to compete with
| Twitter and Reddit.
|
| It is described at https://rational.app
| jrflowers wrote:
| What _is_ this? This page is a lot of words about the media and
| negativity and debate with very little information about...
| whatever this is (or will be?)
| EGreg wrote:
| I guess it has had the intended effect :-)
| andyjohnson0 wrote:
| Tangential, but what happened to the various usenet archives that
| google obtained and mashed into google groups? Do they exist
| anywhere else in a more reliable [1] home?
|
| Edit: To clarify, I'm wondering how extensive the non-google
| archives are.
|
| [1] As in not google
| UberFly wrote:
| There are archives out there, such as
| https://www.usenetarchives.com
| andyjohnson0 wrote:
| Yeah, but its hard to get a feel for how comprehenive they
| are or how far back in time they extend. I seem to remember
| that the archive that google bought from dejanews goes back
| to the mid/early eighties - much earlier than the IA's
| archive.
| wccrawford wrote:
| I don't see anyone talk about search discoverability. Many, many
| people add "site:reddit.com" when searching for product reviews
| and other information to weed out the garbage, and so far as I
| know, it currently isn't possible to search usenet with Google,
| Bing, etc.
|
| I think it'd basically mean there was an easy way to access
| usenet text groups via the browser, and thus also an easy way for
| the average Joe to access usenet.
|
| Some have already mentioned spam and moderation, and I think this
| will be a huge factor. Without the ability to moderate, bad
| actors quickly ruin any potentially-popular social media outlet.
| Most comments are happy about the lack of moderation so far, but
| that's actually a problem IMO.
| adamzochowski wrote:
| Unfortunately you can't do site:old.reddit.com , It is a
| tragedy as old version loads more comments and has better UI.
| ipaddr wrote:
| Why can't you?
| tylerag wrote:
| It just isn't indexed nearly as well.
| opportune wrote:
| When I first read this comment, my initial thought was that it
| would be neat if there were a forum-provider that made it easy
| for nontechnical users to create and run forums on their
| platform. That way if you wanted to do a site:forumprovider.com
| search you'd search across all forum instances. Then I realized
| that's exactly how Reddit was originally designed and used!
|
| Anyway, the forums of the aughts were discoverable through
| search and anecdotally used to be more highly ranked in search
| queries until they mysteriously started getting derailed by
| Google I think around 2016 or so. They solve the moderation and
| spam problem by have forum moderators just like Reddit - unlike
| Reddit these were usually real people from the forum + owners,
| and not powermods. Power mods I think do all kinds of shady
| stuff to monetize their control, with forums that's less
| necessary as you can just put up banner ads, sponsored content,
| etc without running afoul to Reddit policies. And unlike with
| Reddit, there is no huge incumbency/landgrab advantage from
| controlling a common term like "politics" because you're not
| running on a single site. I was surprised not to see it
| mentioned more here or on the current top Reddit post also
| discussing this, I guess most Reddit users are too young to
| have had exposure to them, but besides Digg it's actually what
| Reddit replaced as it grew in the early 2010s.
| evgen wrote:
| Betteridge's law of headlines strikes again.
|
| Easier to build something new than to tack on more cruft to the
| broken usenet model. At this point usenet has little remaining
| use other than being a low-profile warez distribution channel. It
| was great in the late 80s and early 90s but does not scale well
| as a communications medium and we already know better ways to
| manage the distributed data sharing layer.
| brodouevencode wrote:
| > broken usenet model
|
| That's a bold assessment.
|
| It was slowly abandoned because it lacked fun graphics and
| emojis and all the other frilly parts that casual users love,
| but I wouldn't call it a broken model. It had (and has) a
| place.
| MisterBastahrd wrote:
| It was quickly abandoned because the signal to noise ratio
| went from 1:1.5 to 1:5000 overnight. Nobody gave two craps
| about emojis (which did largely not exist at the time) or
| graphics.
| jcranmer wrote:
| > It was slowly abandoned because it lacked fun graphics and
| emojis and all the other frilly parts that casual users love,
| but I wouldn't call it a broken model. It had (and has) a
| place.
|
| Usenet had graphics and emojis. What it didn't have was the
| ability for a nascent community to easily set up their own
| server or newsgroups, not in the same way a nontechnical
| person could easily get webhosting for their forums. And
| moderation of Usenet was possible, though again a higher
| barrier than competing services. What killed off Usenet was
| the general shift of the Internet towards technologies that
| can be easily accessed over HTTP, with the primary HTTP
| access to Usenet (Google Groups) being a barely usable piece
| of shit.
| jandrese wrote:
| Also, the Usenet model was that your ISP ran a server that
| pulled from the global feed. But most ISPs shut down their
| servers in the early 2000s and forced people to look
| elsewhere. Sure they could have gone to a public server,
| but the person would have to find that before they found
| other options and most did not. They ended up on Myspace,
| Slashdot, Digg, 4chan, etc...
| brodouevencode wrote:
| That was more of what I meant - pubs weren't shiny
| enough.
| CodeWriter23 wrote:
| Nobody wanted to pay for bandwidth used by the gigabyte in an
| unlimited fashion by thankless anonymous folks back around
| 20+ years ago. I'm pretty sure nobody wants to pay for it to
| be similarly used by the terabyte today.
| JohnFen wrote:
| That's not my memory. My memory is that Google basically
| bought it (by buying Deja News) and turned it into Google
| Groups, removing most of what made it great. That was when
| people really left in droves.
|
| But that was a long time ago. I could be misremembering.
| jghn wrote:
| Google bought an archive & a mechanism to post/read. It's
| not possible to buy usenet, by nature it's a distributed
| platform.
| JohnFen wrote:
| Right, that's why I said "essentially". My memory is
| hazy, of course, but I remember that a whole lot of
| people stopped using usenet after that purchase. Some
| because they felt sold out to Google, and some because
| they saw it as a sign that Usenet was going to get
| absorbed into the borg. A system being decentralized does
| not make it immune from being that sort of thing. Look at
| what gmail did to email.
|
| Whether or not that was most people, I don't know. But it
| was more than a few.
| jghn wrote:
| I mean, it was all around the same time. But I would
| argue it was a correlative effect, not causative. People
| were already moving on to web based message boards, more
| and more people were viewing Usenet as a place for warez
| & not discussion boards, etc. I'm sure there were people
| for whom that was the final straw, but I can't imagine
| that being the true nail in the coffin.
|
| Personally I stuck with Usenet until the early 2010's.
| But it was so low signal that in retrospect I'm not sure
| why I bothered.
| JohnFen wrote:
| Yeah, that sounds about right. Thanks!
| jrochkind1 wrote:
| Google bought the Usenet _archive_ from Deja News.
|
| Usenet was/is decentralized. Yes, some things that are
| technically decentralized still end up centralized. But
| that's not what was going on or why Google bought Deja
| News, I don't think. They, at that time, ostensibly, wanted
| the historical usenet _archive_ , and to make it
| searchable. Most people using usenet at the time didn't
| actually have access to a complete archive, just however
| much their usenet provider had chosen to keep on-hand from
| whenever that provider started distributing usenet.
|
| I don't think the majority of usenet users were using it
| via Deja News provider. They could all keep accessing it
| however they were used to, Google's acquisition didn't
| change that, Gogle had no way to "remove what made usenet
| great" (i'm not sure what you are thinking of here being
| removed) -- if people switched from usenet to google groups
| (and I'm sure some did), it was because google groups had
| something they wanted that usenet didn't, google had
| absolutely no way to force anyone to do that, usenet kept
| existing the same as it ever did -- on a long-term trend of
| increasing irrelevancy.
| more_corn wrote:
| Just do what slack did with irc. "Reinvent" it with a modern
| interface and some fixes. The mercurial masses will flock to the
| hot new platform, VC will shower you with adoration and cash,
| we'll tell stories about how you don't eat breakfast and only
| ever wear one sock. Everyone will emulate you and then you can
| come back around as a wealthy guru investor.
|
| Duh. Have you learned nothing of the tech cycle?
| contingencies wrote:
| Fear not. Your wisdom is preserved at
| https://github.com/globalcitizen/taoup
| brudgers wrote:
| Spam killed Usenet so probably not.
|
| Unless someone moderates.
|
| Then you have Reddit, ie the need to fund moderation.
|
| Or a corner case where there are volunteers.
|
| And besides users will want tags and private messages and the
| ability to follow personalities and avatars and such.
|
| None of which addresses zero latency for the first child porn.
| Remember how common it was for ISP's to block everything starting
| with "alt" ?
|
| Yes it was fun while it lasted but it wasn't AOL that killed it.
| It was ubiquitous bandwidth improvements worldwide.
| JohnFen wrote:
| That would be incredible. The passing of Usenet was a huge loss
| to the internet, and nothing has come even close to being able to
| replace it.
| leshokunin wrote:
| What exactly do you think the Venn diagram of: users who are
| annoyed with the API change + users who are willing to put up
| with Usenet?
|
| Look at migrations to Mastodon and Matrix. It's still niche. It's
| great for that niche, but it's not something the average user
| will understand.
|
| Users care about UX, quality of life. This argument isn't
| grounded in that.
| TheIronMark wrote:
| The pricing model is hot garbage, but _most_ Reddit users will
| continue to use it (myself included). That said, I 'd be happy to
| move to an alternative, even usenet. Reddit has so much weird
| baggage associated with it (powermods, admin shenanigans, a
| surprisingly high number of racists/sexists) that I'd love to
| find a place for more nuanced and interesting discussions.
| mnky9800n wrote:
| why do you use reddit? I'm not being argumentative, I'm just
| wondering.
|
| I stopped because I found that looking at reddit would
| negatively alter my perceptions of reality. Hacker news doesn't
| seem to do that. I also found that conversations on reddit were
| not very engaging but rather formulaic. It wasn't about having
| a discussion, just towing a party line (whatever the party for
| the particular subreddit might be).
| themadturk wrote:
| I use it because domain-specific subreddits are usually gems
| of advice and discussion. r/ObsidianMD, r/YNAB, etc. are
| often as useful, of not moreso, than product forums. Also,
| there are many subreddits that are simply fun...
| r/BitchImATrain, for instance, or even the great, highly
| moderated r/AskHistorians. The bigger, more general
| subreddits may be burning trash heaps, but there's good stuff
| if you dig.
| kagevf wrote:
| > I'd love to find a place for more nuanced and interesting
| discussions.
|
| ... what about here?
| BudaDude wrote:
| Hacker News is great for Tech news. But it's not so great at
| niche hobbies like reddit is.
| kagevf wrote:
| That's true ... tech and tech "adjacent" or other serious
| topics like history and some politics, but you wouldn't
| come here to talk about your favorite TV / streaming show
| ...
| commandlinefan wrote:
| > I'd be happy to move to an alternative, even usenet
|
| Well, reddit is free (for the individual user) - Usenet is not.
| ISP's don't even offer news accounts any more and even when
| they did, they were so useless you had to pay for an NNTP
| account anyway.
| cykros wrote:
| Eternal-September.org has free text based Usenet. No
| binaries, but works just fine, and has for years.
| Gordonjcp wrote:
| How exactly is reddit going to be "unusable"? I mean, apart from
| the general low quality of posts in a lot of subs?
| jandrese wrote:
| The official clients suck, but that's not currently a problem
| because there are quality third party clients you can use
| instead. But this change is going to shut down the third party
| clients.
|
| If they also stop offering old.reddit.com I'm convinced the
| place will be a ghost town like Tumblr in a matter of weeks.
| Ekaros wrote:
| The new Web experience is horrid. Intentionally bad it looks.
| Maybe it works if you just read the posts and maybe few
| comments, but trying to go any deeper in conversations is just
| not possible.
| kalupa wrote:
| I think this is out of the complaints about API access costs
| and those using third-party clients will "just stop using
| reddit" which I'm not sure is actually going to happen as
| broadly as folks may believe
| JohnFen wrote:
| But it might.
|
| I have a bias here, though... I got fed up with Reddit and
| quit it entirely a couple of years ago, so I can easily see
| why others would bail on it without a great deal of prodding.
| Gordonjcp wrote:
| I suspect it'll be like a lot of things, where everyone says
| they're ditching it, and they are not ditching it.
|
| I don't really understand why people use an "app" anyway,
| when browsers exist.
| vdqtp3 wrote:
| > I don't really understand why people use an "app" anyway,
| when browsers exist.
|
| Reddit from a mobile browser is one of the most unfriendly
| sites I've ever found.
| hxugufjfjf wrote:
| It also consistently insists, breaks functionality and
| nags you to try and get you to use the app instead of the
| browser. Its barely useable from a mobile browser.
| BitwiseFool wrote:
| I refuse to download the app out of principle. I just
| manually go into the URL bar and add "old." to get the
| classic experience.
| tyfon wrote:
| They can steal a lot more data from you using the app,
| that's why they insist on you installing it.
|
| I avoid native mobile apps for anything but the most
| essential for this reason. If it wasn't for the cars and
| public transportation I'd be using a feature phone by
| now.
| Veen wrote:
| Because Reddit's web experience is shit. The apps exist to
| make using Reddit bearable.
| mcbutterbunz wrote:
| Im not going to stop using reddit, but I'll use it a lot
| less. I primarily consume it on my phone using Apollo when Im
| relaxing. I would likely only use it on my desktop and that
| would become infrequent at best.
|
| A part of me almost wants the API changes to happen. It would
| free up more of my time in the evening and provide a little
| bit of schadenfreude. But honestly, I should just uninstall
| the app anyways.
| mr_tristan wrote:
| In particular, third party apps like Apollo are popular for
| moderators because the default tools from Reddit are just hard
| to use, especially on mobile. Thus, I think the big impact to
| reddit's model is to actually drive off a lot of moderators.
|
| i.e., I've seen a lot of comments like this that makes me think
| this is going to be a real problem:
| https://www.reddit.com/r/apolloapp/comments/13ws4w3/comment/...
|
| Personally, this is what bothers me the most; subreddits that
| are strictly moderated are usually useful, and ones that aren't
| are just not worth regular time.
|
| This is also why I'm not really sure about usenet or any other
| replacement, because moderation is still the hard problem to
| get right.
| Loquebantur wrote:
| > (...), because moderation is still the hard problem to get
| right.
|
| Why not try AI?
| mr_tristan wrote:
| While I do think AI _could_ greatly help moderation,
| someone has to implement it, to be responsible for trust
| issues. And, right now, I 'm not sure Reddit will be that
| someone.
|
| And it's even more unclear is who would do that more
| generically where it could be used on a platform like
| usenet
| edgyquant wrote:
| Every community has tons of people that would take up the
| moderation mantle
| tomjen3 wrote:
| The best sub reddits are heavily modded, but Usenets support for
| moderation is very small, which means it will only be great if
| you can preselect by limiting who gets access to the groups.
| Ekaros wrote:
| It doesn't combat spam very well. So I doubt it will come back at
| least in substantial way. Other thing is that you would need some
| agreed standard to make it "rich" as in user experience.
| agiacalone wrote:
| Killfiles are the generally accepted way of combating spam on
| Usenet. With only a few lines, I see very little of it even on
| the wider Usenet groups.
|
| Generally blocking public services (like Google Groups) is
| enough to block 90%+ spam
| jandrese wrote:
| I feel like it's easy to avoid spam on Usenet at the moment
| because few spammers give a crap about Usenet. If it became
| popular again this would change, just like the first time it
| became popular.
|
| That said, one of the things I really liked about Usenet is
| that the client was entirely in your hands. Some of the
| Usenet readers were incredibly sophisticated and no internet
| forum software has ever come close to offering an equivalent
| level of utility. I would jump on a "Usenet, but with
| moderation/spam control baked in" in a heartbeat. In fact
| this is pretty much what Reddit is, which makes me sad that
| they're trying so hard to Digg it.
| Ekaros wrote:
| I wonder how truly effective those would be if the spammers
| really started to combat and circumvent them actively.
|
| And blocking public servers would kill the network effects.
| Thus keeping it only to small communities.
| agiacalone wrote:
| It just means that services that allow bad actors get
| blocked. Like Google Groups.
|
| I have and enjoy using "public" Usenet servers like
| eternal-september and SDF which disallow spam and hold
| users accountable for their actions.
| VikingCoder wrote:
| I want something new.
|
| I want a client that looks basically how reddit looks today. An
| aggregator.
|
| And maybe that aggregator has a back-end that runs on a VM
| somewhere that I control, or I can pay someone to run an
| aggregator for me, or whatever.
|
| But I want each subreddit to be federated. Run on its own server,
| with its own moderators.
|
| I want to be able to make as many Reddit accounts as I want to
| (dozens, maybe not hundreds), and pick which ones I use on which
| subreddits. Some decentralized authorization / authentication
| scheme? Or maybe some centralized server? Or using OAuth or
| something? I don't really care.
|
| I want to SUBSCRIBE to a list of Admins. If an Admin shadowbans a
| user, I don't see their posts. I find this incredibly useful.
| Other people will disagree with me about which users, which
| actions, should result in shadowbanning.
|
| I think that about wraps it up. What am I missing?
| dark-star wrote:
| What will happen to Reddit to make it unusable? I feel a bit out
| of the loop here...
| afavour wrote:
| Third party clients are going to be cut off. IMO the case is
| overblown: Reddit has their own mobile apps which are... fine.
| Definitely not amazing but they serve the uses of the vast
| majority of Reddit users.
|
| The idea that a serious number of users would rather move to
| Usenet than use Reddit's official offerings feels like very
| optimistic thinking to me.
| hammyhavoc wrote:
| There's _probably_ an overlap between people who use third-
| party clients and those who fondly remember Usenet or still
| use it.
| aaronax wrote:
| Pricing out of third party clients via API fees > only official
| website and clients are available > they get worse with
| monetization attempts > smart people who don't want to put up
| with less-useful UIs leave > site becomes devoid of "good"
| content.
| Diederich wrote:
| I exclusively use old.reddit.com and it seems pretty good.
| breakingcups wrote:
| How long you think until they dare take that away too? For
| all intents and purposes, old.reddit.com is just like any
| third-party client. Vastly preferred by its users, harder
| to monetize or exert control over.
| Diederich wrote:
| I'm somewhat anxious about old.reddit.com going away, no
| doubt.
|
| > harder to monetize
|
| Honest question: how is old.reddit.com harder to monetize
| than 'new.reddit.com'? I've been seeing ads creep in over
| the past couple of years I think. (Not that I necessarily
| have any beef about that..)
| gremlinsinc wrote:
| I exclusively use relay for reddit, if they take that away,
| I'll probably stop using reddit. Their mobile app is shit.
| I only use reddit on mobile.
| procflora wrote:
| More context on that monetization bit is that they're
| apparently planning an IPO later this year.
|
| https://www.reuters.com/technology/reddit-aims-ipo-second-
| ha...
| rcarmo wrote:
| I remember alt.religion.emacs - quite vividly, in fact.
|
| NNTP was a massive quasi-distributed forum (I wasn't the
| newsmaster at the ISPs I worked at, but frequently dealt with the
| servers and setups) and a pretty big overhead resource and
| management-wise, but pretty interesting to deal with until it was
| overwhelmed by binaries groups and all sorts of weirdness.
|
| I do miss the quirky sense of humor and the community - somewhat
| like Mastodon, for those who are leaving Twitter - but I don't
| miss the drama, the flooding and the flame wars.
| sigstoat wrote:
| somebody was asking in a thread the other day about some open
| protocol for forums/subreddits/whatever that different people
| could host, that could be fronted by independent clients.
|
| well, there you go, NNTP still exists.
|
| write some ios/android NNTP clients that can handle multiple
| servers w/credentials, and run some NNTP servers. no need to
| distribute the posts to other servers.
| chongli wrote:
| How do you deal with spam and moderation? What about the
| sidebar and pinned posts? Upvoting/downvoting? There's a lot of
| quality-of-life features in modern forums like Reddit and HN
| that you don't have with these old technologies.
| sigstoat wrote:
| "extensions to the protocol" do you need the whole thing
| designed in a comment?
|
| the original context was to decompose subreddits into their
| own decentralized and separately hosted things. so:
|
| dump spam into some hidden pseudo-group that only mods can
| see. let them post replies to the posts which are interpreted
| by the server to release/delete the spam
|
| add additional headers on posts to mark that they're pinned
| or sidebarred. clients will have to know how to interpret
| that, but you'll remain backwards compatible with everything
| that already exists
|
| again if you really want upvoting/downvoting, have specially
| formatted reply posts which the server uses to
| increment/decrement the vote counter, which is presented as a
| special header on the posts. special clients can display it
| like reddit, and even old clients can probably make use of it
| for filtering purposes.
|
| now, i did the design work, so you go implement it.
| chongli wrote:
| I don't see the advantage of doing this vs. doing a new
| federated protocol from scratch, with all of the modern
| features built-in, and accessible from a web browser rather
| than a separate news reader.
| AdamH12113 wrote:
| > How do you deal with spam and moderation?
|
| Moderated newsgroups existed (and presumably still do). I was
| never a moderator myself, but to my understanding they use an
| SMTP-based system. I'm sure that could be improved.
|
| > What about the sidebar and pinned posts?
|
| The equivalent of pinned posts would be a FAQ. Links to the
| FAQ (or the FAQ itself) were posted at regular intervals to
| newsgroups.
|
| > Upvoting/downvoting?
|
| The biggest difference between web-based discussion boards
| and Usenet is that in Usenet almost everything is done on the
| client side. Threading, searching, filtering, subscribing,
| blocking of users and threads, and other such administrative
| tasks were all done on your computer by software that you
| chose.
|
| Filtering in particular could be much _more_ advanced than
| what we have today. Newsreaders had "killfiles"[1] which
| could have regex-based matching and scoring. This would allow
| you to have filters like "ignore posts where person X uses
| the words Y and Z".
|
| The downside of all this was that it was entirely local,
| individual, and ephemeral. Usenet is a _distribution_
| protocol, not a _storage_ or _display_ protocol. News servers
| typically didn 't keep old posts for more than a few months.
| If you wanted to save a post you either archived it yourself
| (possibly in your newsreader) or posted it to the web
| somewhere. Responses to posts provided context by quoting the
| post inline. Another downside is that Usenet is text-only --
| you could embed binaries (and there were whole groups
| dedicated to that), but it wasn't normally done in discussion
| groups. If you needed images, you made ASCII art. :-)
|
| Some of the downsides can be mitigated -- shared blocklists,
| for instance, already exist and are used by ad blockers and
| (IIRC) Twitter clients. But part of the charm of Usenet is
| that it's _not_ a modern web forum with eternal storage and
| constant redesigns and monetization attempts and Official
| Policies from Corporate Management. It 's just a place where
| you can talk about things. It doesn't really scale to having
| three million people on the same forum, but not every forum
| needs or wants three million participants. (And back in the
| day there weren't three million people _on_ Usenet in the
| first place.)
| rcarmo wrote:
| Binaries groups devolved into UUEncode spam at the gigabyte
| level, and private servers sprang up to provide access to
| curated piracy, so there's that as well.
| chongli wrote:
| _Links to the FAQ (or the FAQ itself) were posted at
| regular intervals to newsgroups._
|
| Not a fan of having lots of repeat posts like that! They're
| yet another form of noise to deal with, along with spam.
|
| _Newsreaders had "killfiles"[1] which could have regex-
| based matching and scoring. This would allow you to have
| filters like "ignore posts where person X uses the words Y
| and Z"._
|
| Local scoring/filtering seems like a non-starter to me. The
| advantage (and disadvantage) of up/down-voting is that it
| harnesses the "wisdom of the crowds". This can be pretty
| awful in very large forums such as the most popular
| subreddits, but can be pretty great in smaller communities
| (such as small subreddits) or those with strongly-defined
| community norms such as HN.
|
| With an entirely local system you're going to end up
| creating a very elaborate bespoke protocol to manage and
| distribute this information or you're going to force
| individual users to handle everything themselves (with no
| wisdom of the crowds). Either way is less than ideal and
| seems to lose much of the advantage of NNTP: simplicity.
| Might as well go all the way and create an entirely new,
| federated protocol with support for moderation and
| up/downvoting and sidebars/pinned posts as well.
| AdamH12113 wrote:
| > Not a fan of having lots of repeat posts like that!
|
| IIRC it was typically once a month. If you were going to
| post in a new group it was customary to read the FAQ
| and/or lurk for a while.
|
| > The advantage (and disadvantage) of up/down-voting is
| that it harnesses the "wisdom of the crowds".
|
| If you want a forum built around a collaborative effort
| to decide which posts are "good" and which aren't, then
| that is indeed very different from a newsgroup, where the
| front-line method of filtering is "skim new threads and
| posts and ignore what you're not interested in". I think
| this is mostly a matter of personal preference, although
| I will say that skimming was _much_ faster and easier
| with a newsreader than a typical web forum UI. Here are a
| couple examples[1][2] of Forte Agent, for instance.
| (Sorry about the low resolution in the first one.) Keep
| in mind that the posts have already been downloaded, so
| navigation via keyboard shortcuts is instantaneous.
|
| But it's also true that Usenet worked best with A) a
| lower volume of posts, and B) posters who put effort into
| proper threading and quoting.
|
| > Might as well go all the way and create an entirely
| new, federated protocol with support for moderation and
| up/downvoting and sidebars/pinned posts as well.
|
| That seems to be the holy grail these days. Not sure if
| anyone can actually pull it off, but I look forward to
| seeing what happens.
|
| [1] https://courses.cs.vt.edu/~cs1204/usenet/images/agent
| _8.gif
|
| [2]
| https://images.betanews.com/screenshots/1012115881-1.gif
| chongli wrote:
| _If you were going to post in a new group it was
| customary to read the FAQ and /or lurk for a while._
|
| _But it 's also true that Usenet worked best with A) a
| lower volume of posts, and B) posters who put effort into
| proper threading and quoting._
|
| In an ideal world, every new poster would read the FAQ
| and lurk for a while, then make their best effort to fit
| into community norms when they start posting. Usenet was
| born in that idealized "first age" of the internet. But
| now we are in the Eternal September age (and the age of
| highly automated spam). We really need highly
| sophisticated tools of moderation and norm enforcement.
|
| We also need it to be as easy as possible for new,
| unsophisticated users to get up to speed so they can
| start contributing. Installing an app from one of the
| official app stores is just about the most you can ask of
| new users before you risk bouncing them out the door.
| News readers (and potentially other tools for managing
| killfiles, distributed moderation, etc.) are a very big
| ask. You'd essentially be restricting the community to
| hard core, tech-savvy folks. And that's a real shame,
| because some of my favourite subreddits are for non-tech
| hobbies, where I'd find it unusual for users to have a
| lot of tech knowledge.
| LinuxBender wrote:
| _Could Usenet get "revived", to replace the soon to be unusable
| Reddit?_
|
| Technically yes. Become widely adopted, _maybe if..._
|
| There are free Usenet providers for the text groups. People would
| have to agree on methods to ignore the spam bots, maybe a signed
| message header/footer that a UI recognizes. There are forums and
| chat systems that already leverage Usenet as the
| transport/storage but they all need some tender loving care.
|
| In my opinion for that to be widely adopted people would need a
| low friction way to access Usenet and it would need to provide
| them a UI/UX they are familiar with. Perhaps Usenet would be
| entirely transparent to them. Perhaps it would be a simple nginx
| web front-end so that anyone could run a node and it would use
| Usenet on the backend for storage and transport, ideally the
| sites that implemented NNTPS (TLS). Just nginx+python, or
| nginx+golang or an nginx module and super-lightweight with secure
| safe defaults. There would need to be a group set up where all
| the front-end nodes ingest group keys, identities, etc... and
| maybe a git repo that bootstraps all of this.
|
| Traditional methods like using a Usenet reader such as
| Thunderbird? Probably not. Probably very small technical circles.
| I think this would be akin to convincing people to switch from
| Discord back to IRCD or using Mumble/Murmur for voice.
| Gualdrapo wrote:
| I feel like the HN hivemind likes to bash Reddit for some reason,
| but for me it has not been that bad. I've got small work gigs on
| there, discovered places where I've got to learn about stuff that
| I like, being updated about what's going on in the FOSS world,
| discover new music, etcetera.
|
| Yes, some people in there would like to drag you into absurd and
| nonsensical arguments, but even in here where I do not
| participate that much have fell into that situation. I went into
| Reddit after 6 years of using Facebook which was much, much
| worse. Reddit made me ditch Facebook once and for all.
|
| Not that I agree even in the slightiest about the changes they
| are about to make, but I'm yet to find an alternative where I
| could find all of the aforementioned but with a more sane
| support. I don't see how usenet can bring all of that all of a
| sudden, nor see myself using something like Mastodon and become a
| social media addict.
| ThrowawayTestr wrote:
| This is about alternative front ends becoming untenable. Have
| you used the new interface?
| stronglikedan wrote:
| I use reddit almost daily for niche subjects, and I only use it
| in the browser. Granted, I use old.reddit, but still, I have no
| idea what people are on about when they say they need a 3rd
| party solution to use it. It's practically zero effort. To me,
| it takes more time to complain about it than to actually use
| it.
| skyyler wrote:
| They're not complaining about old.reddit, that's for sure.
|
| The mobile site pushes you to use their official app, which
| is horrible in quality compared to the many third party apps.
|
| I'd stop using reddit entirely before I switched to their
| official app or new site design.
| opportune wrote:
| Some problems with Reddit (like it having a lowest-common-
| denominator general user base due to its size) are avoidable by
| going on smaller subreddits.
|
| The real problem with Reddit is that even small subreddits tend
| towards beginner or introductory content because that reflects
| the level of understanding of most users.
|
| Having separable, more focused forums can allow for discussions
| at a much higher level of knowledge and expertise than Reddit.
| You can see plenty of examples of this today with HN having
| better content and discussion in its niche than anywhere on
| Reddit, and plenty of complicated high-skill-ceiling discussion
| topics like vehicle maintenance or travel hacks still being
| discussed at high quality on oldschool forums.
|
| I don't see a benefit for Usenet because it wasn't obsoleted by
| Reddit, it was made obsolete by forums. Honestly I just wish
| those would make a resurgence. They allow for so much more
| customization than Reddit, Usenet, or Facebook and don't have
| centralized policies constantly messing with them. And I really
| don't think there is a need for a one-stop-shop site or tech
| stack for focused discussion. Reddit and FB may have replaced
| forums in most cases for most people from 2010 to now, but as
| they've become more commercialized with more rules, maybe we
| can switch back
| yunohn wrote:
| > reflects the level of understanding of most users
|
| It's also this elitist mindset that makes HN boring often.
| opportune wrote:
| I'm not trying to be elitist, there's certainly a need and
| place for content aimed towards beginners or people very
| casually engaging in a topic, and when I've been getting
| into a topic I've found Reddit quite valuable. It's just
| that after a few years as you get more into the topic you
| start wanting a different kind of content and discussion,
| and don't want to keep reading the same rehashed advice or
| beginner-oriented content any more. So there has to be (or
| should be) a place for content aimed at more experienced
| people.
| Freedom2 wrote:
| > don't want to keep reading the same rehashed advice
|
| Rehashed, sometimes outdated, advice is what you'll often
| find here, though.
| Bukhmanizer wrote:
| I find it slightly annoying how Reddit gets always singled out
| as being "better than other social media" when it's often more
| toxic and addictive.
|
| Most of my FB feed is photos of my friends/ life updates. Most
| of my Instagram feed is dogs. You can curate almost any social
| media into what you want, Reddit isn't extraordinary in that
| respect.
|
| But there's a smugness to a lot of redditors I really despise
| that I think the voting system rewards. As if having the
| _statistically most broadly agreeable opinions_ makes one
| superior. Even in small to medium sized communities.
| [deleted]
| ChrisArchitect wrote:
| Ask HN:
| Moto7451 wrote:
| For some needed context, Reddit clients will be charged for API
| access.
|
| https://www.reddit.com/r/apolloapp/comments/13ws4w3/had_a_ca...
| agiacalone wrote:
| Small newsgroup services that use NNTP, like Usenet, still exist
| as well--not to mention the "big" services.
|
| Tilde operates one, as does SDF, the two *nix communities that I
| belong to.
|
| https://tilde.wiki/wiki/NNTP
|
| (SDF is member only access)
| cameronfraser wrote:
| I don't think most reddit users care about reddit politics so no
| notacoward wrote:
| Seems more likely that "the fediverse" will take up the slack.
| Perhaps not Mastodon (the best known implementation) which is
| more of a Twitter alternative, but Lemmy seems to fit this niche
| pretty well. OTOH, a revival/update of Usenet would not be
| unwelcome either. NNTP > ActivityPub, after all.
| paulpauper wrote:
| How about Reddit minus the overzealous censorship by admins and
| sub moderators. I think this is easier than recreating facebook
| or youtube. Reddit can be fixed by changing how mods are
| appointed. The major problem with Reddit is that there is no way
| to remove bad or corrupt mods. This has been a major problem with
| popular subs.
| commandlinefan wrote:
| > I think this is easier
|
| Yeah, a lot of people (voat, ruqqus, parler) have thought the
| same, and found otherwise...
| pwg wrote:
| USENET still exists, and some groups are still active, just not
| at their peak from yesteryear -- so why not go join and see if
| anything is happening in your old haunts.
|
| Free access to text only groups: http://www.eternal-
| september.org/
|
| Pick a newsreader:
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Usenet_newsreaders and go
| take a look.
| kkfx wrote:
| I'm ready. I'm here. But I've essentially abandoned usenet just
| because most groups I was in are now dead or spammed... So...
| Well... Not much faith in mass of people...
| uhtred wrote:
| Why would you want Usenet to be like reddit? Reddit is awful.
|
| 99% of posts are a desperate grab for attention. Every comment is
| one of:
|
| - a smug, know it all response by someone who thinks they are an
| expert in some field rather than a loser who spends their day on
| reddit
|
| - an attempt to be witty
|
| - some reddit saying that gets repeated over and over ("man got
| that dawg in him" and so on)
| EGreg wrote:
| It is also a bunch of teenagers just saying one liners
| jandrese wrote:
| And this differs from Usenet how?
|
| I guess you can argue that the Karma system is
| counterproductive and leads to Karma farming, even though Karma
| is explicitly worthless. But I think attention seeking is going
| to happen no matter what the platform is.
| slothtrop wrote:
| This was part of the forum and usenet experience long before
| reddit.
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