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

This is a great refresher on how the usenet forums were organized including the top 8 groups, and then winnowing down to specific ones.

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

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 fear you might be right. But somehow, HN is a counter-example?

I rarely even see a bad joke, because we’re a self-selected sample of people who care about the edges of professional computing.

So I say, why not?

I sure hope that more and more areas on the greater web keep getting decentralized/federated...because all this centralization is for the birds! Over the years, any content that i have posted on such centralized platforms, i consider ephemeral...and if its lost, either i already have my own copy, or i don't care (it would be content that i care less about, etc.). Of course i say that, but really it would be others that might suffer from, say, some essential answer that i provided like on stackoverflow, and then when that answer is gone, i will be ok, but others will suffer. I'm by no means a fountain of answers, i'm just proposing an example scenario. To tangent a bit, this is why the intent of projects like SOLID [0] sounded so good to me: everyone has their own somewhat copy of interactions with each other, ensuring tha at least to some degree there is preservation of valuable content among members of a community.

[0] = https://solidproject.org/

Except Reddit moderators deal with these spam issues all the time.

Hacker News is run by herculean efforts by the moderation team here, and I appreciate it. I'm ignorant of what their tools are, but I don't think that scales either. Its good for our community, but Hacker News will never be Reddit or Twitter scale.

Reddit's model is that moderators basically complain to the Admins that tools are insufficient, then admins mostly ignore those complaints. Moderators write bots that automatically surf traffic and try to automate... then the Admins come back and increase the price of API-access by 1000%, and then change the API and overall become hostile to this behavior. This cannot work either.

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At least in Usenet days, we could run our own programs in an open source model for these moderation issues.

I don't think Usenet would work. We need a way to rewind time (Usenet: once you post or once something passes moderation, it is forever more sent to everyone else's inbox). USENET was POP model, to put into email terms... while Reddit is IMAP/JMAP model, where the true state of the information is centralized to the server.

So yes, I agree with you that USENET will fail today. But the nuances of why it will fail are important to understand.

In particular: Reddit was never very good about these moderation issues. But with enough work and grit, the community came together anyway. That's good enough. I expect that USENET's moderation model is sufficient, albeit decades old. Its all the other USENET crap that won't work today (being a "POP"-like message distribution platform without any "takebacks", so no editing posts, no deleting porn that got past the spam filter, etc. etc.)

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Or maybe... USENET works with regards to API access. The *ARCHIVE* (ie: Google Groups, or Deja News if you're old enough to remember that) is where takebacks / edits can live instead.

So maybe Usenet can work, but with changes to our workflow to be more akin to 2023-level of features. By separating concerns over USENET (ie: how messages are distributed among a decentralized list of servers), and "The Archive" (which needs to be run by a trusted set of administrators), and a system where moderators will have access to "The Archive" for their own moderation purposes, we can rebuild Reddit through USENET??

Hmmm... it could work. Though I'm curious if it has much benefits over Mastodon or other solutions available today.