Ask HN: Is it time to resurrect a Usenet clone? • Hacker News Board

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

#51

Post by Misdicorl » Fri, Jun 09, 2023, 8:56 PM UTC

floren wrote: post #42

I've sketched a few ideas for what you'd need to make Usenet, ah, usable given modern concerns (primarily spam and spoofing). The biggest takeaway in my explorations is: you could probably never really get mass adoption of a Usenet-esque system these days. Oh well. Anyway: I'd start with the basic idea that identities matter. For any given message, you should know what user posted it and from which server. It doesn't…

Could you solve/mitigate it with curation? Let the users be anonymous or pseudo-anonymous and keep the server signing, but add another signing field called the curator.

At first blush the curation signer looks the same as the server, but I think its subtly different in a way that is maybe effective?

A) You can re-curate or multi-curate a message, but you should (probably) keep the source community constant

B) It separates moderation concerns from on-topic concerns which is a constant struggle. Easy for a server to host many different communities/topics/communication mores and import the content stream in different ways from different curators

Who does the curation? I guess its as simple as the upvote button, but perhaps you can improve that model substantially

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

#52

Post by rglullis » Fri, Jun 09, 2023, 8:58 PM UTC

It's not a technical problem. It's a social problem first and an economic problem second.

The social part: the "internet scale" and the scale of "largest group who can keep meaningful relationships" are incompatible.

The economic problem: ad-based models have misaligned incentives. People can not vote with their wallets, so every content creator, media property or social media network defaults to the lowest common denominator. And the number of people willing to pony up the cash to help things happen are simply not enough to make it sustainable.

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

#53

Post by bckr » Fri, Jun 09, 2023, 9:01 PM UTC

scrame wrote: post #12

1) usenet was a kind of opt-in syndication that ran through uucp jobs that often went through whitelists at the local level, often over low bandwidth modems. pirate and other binary channels were frequently not rebroadcast. 2) A decentralized usenet like you're describing is an email list with an archive. 3) Absolutely not. you're describing realID and Facebook. 4) Absolutely not you're describing the powermod proble…

And why don’t we just build stuff on top of email?

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

#54

Post by indus » Fri, Jun 09, 2023, 9:01 PM UTC

dheera wrote: post #37

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.

> where most of us trusted each other I think the "trust" back then was really just because only people with a certain amount of money could afford a computer and internet access. Most people on the internet at that time were middle class folk with proper day jobs, or in my case, a child of the aforementioned.

Data storage would be a big question and a design goal for something new and decentralized.

Back then it was mostly text and files were much smaller.

Now average image floating around is the size of a cheap USB stick.

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

#55

Post by knowledge-clay » Fri, Jun 09, 2023, 9:06 PM UTC

Buttons840 wrote: post #49

knowledge-clay wrote: post #31

The solution to a lot of problems is simply to not scale platforms past something like 1000 users. At that level, you can have a community that is guided by individual people and their relationships, rather than anonymized and centralized. And the infrastructure is much simpler to set up and maintain: we just need more tools tailored to being easy to set up and administer at this scale. m15o has built a ton of exampl…

There was an Ask HN (or similar) a while ago where someone was saying that they run a Discord server for active and committed independent game developers, and they were asking if anyone was interested in joining (I can't remember exactly). They wouldn't let just anyone in, to get in you had to schedule an interview with the moderators and show that you were a committed game developer. They were a tight community who…

communities can be both exclusive and publicly readable! I know many such examples

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

#56

Post by __d » Fri, Jun 09, 2023, 9:12 PM UTC

Usenet was designed with a model of sporadic connection. Every site had a copy of items in its subscribed groups, and would refresh them from its upstream servers periodically.

This is a good model if connectivity is scarce or expensive, but inefficient if it’s pervasive and cheap.

Starting to use Usenet again (since it hasn’t actually ever gone away) doesn’t really make sense. It is a product of a different set of preconditions.

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

#57

Post by tomtheelder » Fri, Jun 09, 2023, 9:14 PM UTC

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.

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

#58

Post by SpecialistK » Fri, Jun 09, 2023, 9:17 PM UTC

mlyle wrote: post #32

knowledge-clay wrote: post #31

The solution to a lot of problems is simply to not scale platforms past something like 1000 users. At that level, you can have a community that is guided by individual people and their relationships, rather than anonymized and centralized. And the infrastructure is much simpler to set up and maintain: we just need more tools tailored to being easy to set up and administer at this scale. m15o has built a ton of exampl…

The problem is that then platforms come along and vacuum everything else up. Reddit and discord sucked in and destroyed a whole lot of phpbb.

But phpbb had its own issues. Many were run by hobbyists who eventually stopped paying the bills or updating the site, and then some bot steals the data or breaks the database.

It's like cloud-hosting email: everyone wants to not host their own email server, but then you're at the mercy of the service provider. For most people its worth it... until it isn't.

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

#59

Post by ghaff » Fri, Jun 09, 2023, 9:18 PM UTC

hunter2_ wrote: post #15

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.

I think a major component of the difference between contributing then and contributing now is friction/skill/interest. Back then, you had to be specifically interested in learning how to get connected, which was a niche endeavor, while the masses were oblivious or too cool for school. Now, you can simply join almost any online community using baseline skills that an enormous fraction of Earth's population already has…

Yeah, it's not a technical thing. It's that the unwashed didn't have access/weren't even aware. Sure, you can do the same thing today given explicit gatekeeping and moderation.

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

#60

Post by awad » Fri, Jun 09, 2023, 9:19 PM UTC

rglullis wrote: post #52

It's not a technical problem. It's a social problem first and an economic problem second. The social part: the "internet scale" and the scale of "largest group who can keep meaningful relationships" are incompatible. The economic problem: ad-based models have misaligned incentives. People can not vote with their wallets, so every content creator, media property or social media network defaults to the lowest common de…

This is the core of the issue. Many would-be competitors to Facebook over the years would lean on the technology aspect as if the average person would care. There's nothing wrong with a decentralized system if you can actually make it work better than the status quo, but many individuals implementing these systems get too caught up in the tech and not enough on the distribution and user acquisition.