11–20 of 330 posts
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.
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 problem that ruins all of these larger forums.
and since you seem a little unfamiliar with it's history, you should look up ARMM
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?
Earlier quoted context omitted.
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?
HN has a lot more powerful and strict moderation than Usenet ever had.
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.
Artificially constructing a similar level of friction/gatekeeping would have major downsides that might not be worth it, but it could theoretically achieve a community that behaves as that past one did, if that's the goal. Sort of a CAPTCHA to prove you're not just a human, but a leet one. As others have said, HN achieves this in a way. Perhaps non-tech communities can do a similar thing. But educational materials to slowly penetrate the barrier must exist.
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 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 Tildes already serve this niche. So any proposal for USENET 2.0 must provide a treatment of the bandwidth/data retention issue.
Two years ago this is where someone would chime in with a blockchain-based solution, paying moderators with usenetcoin.
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…