Ask HN: Is it time to resurrect a Usenet clone? • Hacker News Board

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

#161

Post by birdyrooster » Sat, Jun 10, 2023, 1:05 AM UTC

tannhaeuser wrote: post #146

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.

> spam was unheard of Eh, not exactly ;) There was (and probably still is where needed) an elaborate system of killfiles being exchanged among trusted nntp servers. Also, you might want to look up the origin of the word spam: > The first time that the word ‘spam’ was used in this sense actually arose from an innocent-enough affair. In 1993, Usenet administrator Richard Depew was responding to a discussion group, but…

your winking smiley face is condescending and annoying

edit: this psa brought to you by drinking half a beer

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

#162

Post by dylan604 » Sat, Jun 10, 2023, 1:06 AM UTC

dsr_ wrote: post #148

Hyolobrika wrote: post #131

Earlier quoted context omitted.

How would you forbid it?

You make it socially unacceptable to run a server that emits spam. You make it socially unacceptable to work for a company that emits spam. At an interview: "OK, I see you worked for an oil company, right, and then a porn company, fine -- oh, you worked for a spammer. Sorry, we're done. I don't know how this happened, I'll need to talk to HR about their filters."

socially where? where ever you set those social norms, someone will set up a server not there. like russia or any of the other internet bogeymen countries

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

#163

Post by Eisenstein » Sat, Jun 10, 2023, 1:08 AM UTC

lelanthran wrote: post #88

graypegg wrote: post #18

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Unrelated to the root post, but I’m so glad that time is over. There was a ~1year period where it was nearly impossible to have a conversation about solving something that didn’t involve someone scheming about how to reframe the problem as an economic model, and then drown out everyone with some half-baked tokenomics concept as a way to “solve it all!”. It really felt like a step backwards in critical thinking for pe…

> reframe the problem as an economic model, Every social problem can be legitimately solved by throwing more money at it[1]. That is, effectively, an economics model. Corollary: Every economic solution can be improved by removing blockchain from it :-) [1] Sometimes you have to throw the money at people who will spread your solution, sometimes you have to throw the money at media to spread the solution, sometimes you…

> Every social problem can be legitimately solved by throwing more money at it[1]

What?

That famously didn't work with covid.

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

#164

Post by dylan604 » Sat, Jun 10, 2023, 1:09 AM UTC

_x14i wrote: post #80

cmpalmer52 wrote: post #13

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The average person has no idea what 90% of the headlines on HN are even referring to, giving it a degree of self-moderation.

And the average person also doesn't know the website exists. You have a few layers of public knowledge: Twitter, Facebook, etc - everyone knows them. Reddit, Discord HN, presumably other domain-specific forums, IRC Fediverse (though less so as of late), lobste.rs, presumably many that I don't know about!

>And the average person also doesn't know the website exists.

Taking the larger number of people outside of the US that only use mobile devices and only use apps like FB, WhatsApp, or others I'm not familiar with, I'd go so far as saying that the average person doesn't know websites exist. If it's not present to them via an app, could they find an actual website (or at least would they even attempt to)?

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

#165

Post by dylan604 » Sat, Jun 10, 2023, 1:12 AM UTC

nvy wrote: post #17

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.

>traffic was an order of magnitude lighter 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…

Do the new-internet from Pied Piper. Everyone that uses the app "donates" space to the network with IPFS or something

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

#166

Post by gorjusborg » Sat, Jun 10, 2023, 1:13 AM UTC

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.

So what you're saying is that we should bring back AOL :)

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

#167

Post by dylan604 » Sat, Jun 10, 2023, 1:13 AM UTC

inferiorhuman wrote: post #67

nvy wrote: post #17

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>traffic was an order of magnitude lighter 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…

Perhaps, but HN only satiates the desire for a text-only forum for a pretty niche community. There are plenty of subreddits that don't really touch on anything tech related. Insofar as binary content goes, Supernews is still around and charges about $12/mo (they're currently running a half off promo). Sonic's ditched their NNTP servers as they move from being an ISP to a web provider, but back in the day they provide…

I've been trying to remember Supernews all day since talking about it in another thread, but too busy to stop to look it up. Honestly, I'm shocked they have remained a thing.

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

#168

Post by Eisenstein » Sat, Jun 10, 2023, 1:13 AM UTC

thelastparadise wrote: post #133

kristopolous wrote: post #116

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

> 1994 > heydays of neoliberalism please explain.

Wikipedia seems to have an adequate explanation:

Neoliberalism, also neo-liberalism,[1] is a term used to signify the late-20th century political reappearance of 19th-century ideas associated with free-market capitalism after it fell into decline following the Second World War.[2][3] A prominent factor in the rise of conservative and right-libertarian organizations, political parties, and think tanks, and predominantly advocated by them,[4][5] it is generally associated with policies of economic liberalization, including privatization, deregulation, globalization, free trade, monetarism, austerity, and reductions in government spending in order to increase the role of the private sector in the economy and society.

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

#169

Post by starkparker » Sat, Jun 10, 2023, 1:16 AM UTC

Buttons840 wrote: post #49

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…

There was an Ask HN (or similar) a while ago where someone was saying that they run a Discord server for active and committed independent game developers, and they were asking if anyone was interested in joining (I can't remember exactly). They wouldn't let just anyone in, to get in you had to schedule an interview with the moderators and show that you were a committed game developer. They were a tight community who…

> Perhaps small communities could nominate generally useful conversations and have them released as blog posts

This, maybe less formally but no less in practice, was unironically the killer social feature of Google Reader.

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

#170

Post by Aeolun » Sat, Jun 10, 2023, 1:16 AM UTC

mannyv wrote: post #111

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…

If you make it elite you’ll still have dick picks and moderation. Just less of it.

It’d be interesting to see if you could add selection criteria that both scale (automated) and are unable to be gamed (read the answers from some website).