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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?

#111

Post by mannyv »

When AOL came to the Internet it was seen as the apocalypse. But really what killed the internet is spam and scammers. They followed the public because that's where the money is.

The problem that's fundamental to the Internet is something nobody wants to say, So I will: the people suck. Not everyone deserves a voice.

The comment sections on WaPo, the NYT, and DailyKos are just as bad as the worst parts of 4chan. And nextoor/facebook? These people are whacked out.

Usenet worked because it was a sub-elite; in the golden era people in usenet were college kids, the highly educated, etc. and even with that there was more self selection, because you needed a computer and the ability to read and write text. And connect to it, which if you weren't in a university was quite difficult.

Is anyone willing to build a service that's got elitism built-in? Clubhouse sort of did. But it needs to be said: allowing anyone to post means dick picks and moderation.

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

#112

Post by throw0101b »

myself248 wrote: post #73
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.

The costs of transporting Usenet weren't zero, they were simply borne by your ISP because it was understood as a necessary part of internet access. I think that's what we're missing here. If we simply paid for this stuff as part of our regular internet bill again, we could solve a lot of the "nothing works for free" problems.

> The costs of transporting Usenet weren't zero […]

How expensive was Usenet if you took out storage/bandwidth for alt.binaries.*?

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

#113

Post by GuB-42 »

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 with small communities is that you don't necessarily have enough competent and available people to run the system reliably. Or worse, the people in charge leave, sometimes taking the servers with them, and no one else knows how to maintain it.

That's why Reddit and Discord are so successful. You can create your small community for close to zero cost and zero technical expertise, no one is going to pull the plug on the server because the one guy responsible for it didn't pay the bill, if the server in question is not an old PC in somebody's basement with no backup.

Even with good tools, building a community server still relies on an individual or a small subgroup to make an investment in money and time for the entire community, and if they stop doing so and no one wants to take over, the server is gone. On a platform like Discord, as long as there is any one person in there, it will continue running, the platform keeps the community accessible and does basic administration like spam filtering for free, even when there is no one to care, it can do that because it pays itself on user access, though premium membership and ads.

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

#114

Post by vram22 »

graypegg wrote: post #89
notpushkin wrote: post #30

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I still think you can use economics to model pretty much any human interaction. The problem is, you can't just slap a token over everything and call it a day – the incentives that drive people are way more intricate than that. On that note, I think many systems will function better without blockchain. Trust was driving the internet (and any other distributed human networks) for the long time – long before Ethereum ca…

You can also model any problem as a hydraulic circuit if you want. There are other incentives like fun, passion, and anger that will break any economic model. If HN had some internal-economy model where you were cycling around karma as if it was currency, paying upvotes into new posts to get a return back for your “early upvoting” if they do well, giving you more capital to spread to other new posters… I know exactly…

>There are other incentives like fun, passion, and anger that will break any economic model.

Yes, because those incentives can't be reduced to numbers, which is the only thing the economists, bean counters and ambulance chasers, among other professions, can even understand, let alone employ, in their models.

Reductionism at work.

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

#115

Post by 1270018080 »

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…

Here we are, all pretty happy on our anonymized and centralized HN.

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

#116

Post by kristopolous »

dn3500 wrote: post #102
e40 wrote: post #62

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Usenet started in 1980 and the first spam didn't appear until 1994.

Right when the commercialization of the internet was permitted.

The fact that we did that in the heydays of neoliberalism so we fumbled the ball into this current trainwreck will probably be part of the history in books written 200 years from now

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

#117

Post by 1270018080 »

MagicMoonlight wrote: post #92

We just need a copy of reddit but with better management. Have a barebones UI like this site so that it runs on minimal hardware and then just pay for it with donations.

Yeah, anyone suggesting decentralization or federation is completely missing the point. Kind of like when people were blindly pushing blockchain to be used in software architecture.

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

#118

Post by sneak »

hattmall wrote: post #107

Why not just independent forum sites like 1998-2008. I was a member of 10 or so very specific forums where I could get expert advice very quickly. That is in the rare event that my problem hadn't already been discussed in great detail with highly detailed walk throughs. Then each of those forums had a marketplace where you could buy pretty much anything relevant to that interest at great values with scams being prett…

Agree 100%, which is why I started one. The link is in my bio. I was inspired by someone else on HN who did the same.

Small, close-knit communities are always the way.

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

#119

Post by krapp »

_x14i wrote: post #83
qznc wrote: post #65

https://join-lemmy.org/ Lemmy is a federated Reddit clone. It already works and is available. As far as I know currently the best alternative. Please, join a smaller instance currently. The biggest ones are already overloaded.

The political views of some of the major developers (tankie, pro-china, castro-profile-picture communists) has put me off lemmy, particularly because they're (allegedly) removing anything critical of Russia/China and promoting genocide denial on their instance.

Whenever someone complains that a certain project or community harbors toxicity or right-wing views, the standard answer on HN is that should't matter, software should be judged strictly on technical merit, not politics.

So start up your own instance with blackjack and hookers if you like, federate with whomever you want.

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

#120

Post by krapp »

1270018080 wrote: post #115
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…

Here we are, all pretty happy on our anonymized and centralized HN.

With far more than 1000 users.
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