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

All users should have seen this coming, for years they poured their life inside those free digital platforms, made a digital life with digital friends, and feel all cozy inside because of their digital followers.

At the time of Usenet, things where different. Those who remember brought many lessons from those times, but something to consider is that the vast majority of the user-base of nowadays' services never had to deal with a fax modem, P2P connections, and nothing out of the 'really basic'. A lot of the same people who are now calling to 'decentralize' things uses a proprietary OS on their phone that probably listen to them and they do not care about it. They do care about their life online, about the void it would left in their lives if it was all over. Those users want comfort, babysitting, somebody to take care of spam and bad people from their line of sight.

Decentralized services will not work for the masses anymore simple because they learned to be in the comfort, and they will always prefer the service who offer the most of it. I really wish to be wrong, but i do not see this being possible on such decentralized services where people have to take care of themselves and actually learn a bit to use some services.

The solution for this issue is very complex, and would require a complete reeducation of those users for a new way of interacting online, in my opinion, or else it would be for nothing. The mess has been made already, backup everything and let it die. New services should still be created, but to cater to new users and people who actually knows the importance of this move, trying to recreate what already exists is a waste of time.

1. Advertiser revenue dropped like a cliff in 2008 era. Facebook advertisements were far more valuable than AdSense whatever from your smaller forums. Today, you will never have the revenues of the 90s or 00s era, and likely never again as long as Facebook and Youtube have eaten up the bulk of advertising eyeballs and dollars.

2. Moderation back then was far harder. There was far more spam to deal with those forum-sites back then and moderators had to work harder than today. Yes, we got trolls and other such moderation issues. But 90s / 00s were just filled with penis-enlargement spam and other crap that no one wanted. If you didn't see this, it was because your moderators were excellent (and likely overworked).

For this "moderation" issue alone, I'm convinced we need shared-identity systems like Reddit or Twitter, where an admin-level ban can quickly clean up spam. We have "higher-level" moderation problems now, but at least we've evolved past the manual-labor level of spam cleanup.

> Lastly, I could get all the relevant updates from the sites I was interested in with a nice orderly rss feed customized to my liking.

3. Twitter beats RSS feeds in terms of advertising revenue. If you're aiming at an advertisement scheme, you ain't beating the "new web".

Without advertising revenue, you ain't rebuilding the 90s or 00s. And you won't get advertising revenue, because today's 2020+ era of websites are far better at drawing eyeballs than any no-name forum or phpbb instance.

Open Source projects can host a Discourse or other instance due to community donations. I'm not sure if typical groups on the internet today are large enough to self-fund (heck, even popular open source projects have issues self-funding their discussion sites or email lists).

those who do not learn from the past are doomed to repeat it

Stop using github!

I am not a crypto fanboy but I fully agree that crypto is as close a solution as we have today. Some degree of elitism is needed to keep the community safe and self-moderating. How about a crypto platform where you pay to post but also pay to subscribe? The economics of it need to be worked out but it can’t really be a one way street or only advertisers will send messages. If my post helps you then you should pay me, but if my post wants you to help me then I should pay you.