131–140 of 330 posts
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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
Two years ago this is where someone would chime in with a blockchain-based solution, paying moderators with usenetcoin.
Relevant Penny Arcade, literally 22 frickin' years ago: https://www.penny-arcade.com/comic/2001/06/22/magic-its-what...
Edit: oh yeah, obviously it is. The character talking is Scott McCloud's character, and it's titled "I can't stop talking" and Scott's webcomic at the time was called "I can't stop thinking".
In fact they must be replies to these posts (comics) from June 2001 about micropayments:
https://www.scottmccloud.com/1-webcomics/icst/icst-5/icst-5....
https://www.scottmccloud.com/1-webcomics/icst/icst-6/icst-6....
Earlier quoted context omitted.
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
> heydays of neoliberalism
please explain.
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HN has a lot more powerful and strict moderation than Usenet ever had.
HN has shadowbanning, sockpuppets, etc... all the goodies that have been privately demonstrated to work, and work well; and most of those work even better when combined with a pretense of 'not having that here'
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…
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-si…
I think Freenet/Locutus contracts that work like forums on Aether (with auditable moderation and elections) would be neat.
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 genuinely think that the current inheritors of Usenet are private group chats; trust based, relatively small groups.
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?
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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.*?
When the cost of storage and compute isn't really borne by the users, content limits are just challenges to overcome.
Maybe if there was a total messages or bytes limit per user it might prevent using it for binary distribution, but those are painful for users to the degree it might kill usage enough to kill any hope of it continuing.
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.