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Ask HN: Is it time to resurrect a Usenet clone?

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Re: Ask HN: Is it time to resurrect a Usenet clone?

#181

Post by mgerdts »

tannhaeuser wrote: post #146
joezydeco wrote: post #4

Usenet thrived in a time where most of us trusted each other, traffic was an order of magnitude lighter, trolls were few, spam was unheard of, and moderation - if any - was cheap and painless. I honestly believe those times are past us. And I say that as someone that loved Usenet back in the day. What you're asking for, for free , isn't possible.

> spam was unheard of Eh, not exactly ;) There was (and probably still is where needed) an elaborate system of killfiles being exchanged among trusted nntp servers. Also, you might want to look up the origin of the word spam: > The first time that the word ‘spam’ was used in this sense actually arose from an innocent-enough affair. In 1993, Usenet administrator Richard Depew was responding to a discussion group, but…

Before 1994 usenet had trolls but what we recognize as spam today was all but unheard of.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_email_spam

In my .edu world the most annoying part of email was “chain mail” in which each recipient was threatened with bad luck or similar if they didn’t forward it on to three others. Email loops caused by .forward files were fun too.

Re: Ask HN: Is it time to resurrect a Usenet clone?

#182

Post by nvy »

dylan604 wrote: post #165
nvy wrote: post #17

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>traffic was an order of magnitude lighter I think this is the elephant in the room that most "resurrect usenet" proposals ignore. Usenet hosting has coalesced around huge providers because the volume of binaries traffic presents a significant challenge, namely that you need beefy, expensive server infra to manage the traffic and retention. The "next big thing" after Reddit won't be a plain text-only service. HN and…

Do the new-internet from Pied Piper. Everyone that uses the app "donates" space to the network with IPFS or something

What's my incentive to host someone's 5TB of pirated Community episodes?

Re: Ask HN: Is it time to resurrect a Usenet clone?

#183

Post by BizarreByte »

tomtheelder wrote: post #57
jsz0 wrote: post #25

We desperately need something like this to happen before it's too late. We are dangerously close to a total corporate stranglehold on digital free speech. The current generation of kids coming to age are growing up in a world where they don't even know a time when you could say whatever the hell you wanted to online. If we don't save digital free speech now it's gonna be lost forever.

You can still say whatever you want online. You just can't guarantee an audience, but that was _never_ the case.

> You can still say whatever you want online.

This is definitely not true anymore, but if I cite examples I will as always get flagged by people assuming I support said people/communities.

The age of being able to say whatever you like online is dead when your ability to even host your own site can be removed.

Re: Ask HN: Is it time to resurrect a Usenet clone?

#184

Post by dylan604 »

nvy wrote: post #182
dylan604 wrote: post #165

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Do the new-internet from Pied Piper. Everyone that uses the app "donates" space to the network with IPFS or something

What's my incentive to host someone's 5TB of pirated Community episodes?

Because you have 5TB of every episode of the simpsons on the same network. don't act like you don't

Re: Ask HN: Is it time to resurrect a Usenet clone?

#185

Post by st00 »

tomtheelder wrote: post #57
jsz0 wrote: post #25

We desperately need something like this to happen before it's too late. We are dangerously close to a total corporate stranglehold on digital free speech. The current generation of kids coming to age are growing up in a world where they don't even know a time when you could say whatever the hell you wanted to online. If we don't save digital free speech now it's gonna be lost forever.

You can still say whatever you want online. You just can't guarantee an audience, but that was _never_ the case.

I can't tell whether you're joking, wilfully misinterpreting the GP, or something else.

The past few years have highlighted some of the suboptimal machinations of our society, like collusion between government and media to silence domain experts who don't agree with a dominant political narrative[1].

The ethos of the internet is that it's a place where you can say whatever you want--the corollary is that I should be able to read whatever I want if it's being said. The relationship between me and people speaking is being manipulated, so, in that sense the ethos of free speech and the internet is broken.

The conclusion is that, no, in fact, you can't say whatever you want online. Saying that you can't guarantee an audience (without more context) makes your statement seem pejorative, as though the speaker feels entitled to an audience. The GP alludes to the free exchange of ideas, which your statement seems to ignore.

1: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Twitter_Files

Re: Ask HN: Is it time to resurrect a Usenet clone?

#186

Post by vhodges »

zilti wrote: post #91
ChuckMcM wrote: post #79

Yes. But you have to do it in the way that Usenet was built and you may not like that. I was intelca!cem on Usenet. Modem charges (phone calls) weren't free outside the local calling zone, and places like Berkeley (ucbvax) were often "hubs" that could use university resources to move data over longer distances. Every node had all the data, so system administrators had to come up with schemes for what to delete and wh…

So basically you want the clients to store their data themselves? I actually thought about such a thing as well, but that would have severe performance implications, or require a DHT-like storage where stuff gets chopped up and replicated on a bunch of other clients, meaning those other clients would not only have to offer extra storage, but also experience a lot of bandwidth usage.

as I understand it, this is what nostr does. The relays are pretty dumb and make no promises on long term storage (I imagine it would be a few weeks-months).

Re: Ask HN: Is it time to resurrect a Usenet clone?

#187

Post by throwaway81523 »

Also don't forget what happened to Usenet. At first it wasn't archived anywhere (disk space was expensive then). That was ok, people treated Usenet discussions as ephemeral and said things expecting them to not be dug up later. Then a nonprofit called Deja News started archiving them, causing some limited consternation, but it was a useful resource and offered an opt out to people who didn't want their stuff saved, so fine. People came to rely on Deja News, and... Google acquired it, and it became part of Google Groups, which got worse and worse to the point of now being useless and irrelevant.

Usenet is not completely dead, but it's a shadow of what it once was. Certainly revivals should keep the strong and weak spots of the past in mind.

Re: Ask HN: Is it time to resurrect a Usenet clone?

#188

Post by kazinator »

e40 wrote: post #62
joezydeco wrote: post #4

Usenet thrived in a time where most of us trusted each other, traffic was an order of magnitude lighter, trolls were few, spam was unheard of, and moderation - if any - was cheap and painless. I honestly believe those times are past us. And I say that as someone that loved Usenet back in the day. What you're asking for, for free , isn't possible.

There was spam, for sure. There were also "kill files" for readers, which were immensely helpful in removing trolls from your stream. And there were some epic trolls, back in the day. Xah Lee comes to mind. He actually has an interesting website ( http://xahlee.info/ ), which I found recently when searching for a solution to an elisp problem. Yes, he was a troll on comp.lang.lisp.

Xah Lee falls into the "kook" rather than "troll" category. He was (is?) interested and engaged in the topics. I don't have the impression that he aimed to disrupt, or yank people's chains.

Re: Ask HN: Is it time to resurrect a Usenet clone?

#190

Post by [deleted] »

throwaway81523 wrote: post #187

Also don't forget what happened to Usenet. At first it wasn't archived anywhere (disk space was expensive then). That was ok, people treated Usenet discussions as ephemeral and said things expecting them to not be dug up later. Then a nonprofit called Deja News started archiving them, causing some limited consternation, but it was a useful resource and offered an opt out to people who didn't want their stuff saved, s…

[deleted]
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