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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?

#211

Post by beej71 »

jandrese wrote: post #69
bityard wrote: post #47

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> USENET had many excellent corners as well as places where you could witness or, if desired, participate in, full-on fecal matter throwing contests. Not sure why people think it was some idyllic environment different from anything seen today. I was fairly late to the game, but by the time I was on usenet, it was _mostly_ full of spam and flamewars, with only a few "moderated" groups being of value. (And even those t…

The eternal September is living proof that no discussion system can scale without robust moderation. Usenet worked when it was a handful of academics, students, and professionals. Once the average Joe got access it went downhill in a hurry, especially on the groups that had the broadest appeal. rec.music was hopeless, but rec.music.classical.guitar would probably be pretty good. Even Reddit shows this, with the defau…

The only people who would be willing to sign everything and build a web of trust would be a handful of academics, students, and professionals. I wonder if that could act as a gateway.

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

#212

Post by Groxx »

phire wrote: post #206
gregw134 wrote: post #7

Two years ago this is where someone would chime in with a blockchain-based solution, paying moderators with usenetcoin.

There is circularity in that Proof-of-work was originally proposed as a solution to bulk email spam. Didn't work as a solution for that either.

It wasn't really adopted by any major hosts or sending applications, tbh I'd say it's still entirely untested as spam prevention.

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

#213

Post by rainonmoon »

kristopolous wrote: post #116
dn3500 wrote: post #102

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

It's part of the history books now. Ben Tarnoff's Internet for the People is a bracing but very accessible history of this and the potential futures we let slide off the table. Highly recommended reading.

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

#214

Post by rainonmoon »

meltedcapacitor wrote: post #85
indus wrote: post #54

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Data storage would be a big question and a design goal for something new and decentralized. Back then it was mostly text and files were much smaller. Now average image floating around is the size of a cheap USB stick.

A "usenet 2.0" that only does (short) text and links/embeddings for media (to youtube etc) would already be a very useful thing, notwithstanding the risk of take-down of controversial media (freeloading on Big Tech infra for the 99.9% that isn't).

Is this not just the existing decentralised social networks etc?

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

#215

Post by hombre_fatal »

SoftTalker wrote: post #205
hombre_fatal wrote: post #157

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Since independent forums never went anywhere, you have to ask yourself why Reddit still "won". In other words, if indie forums are so compelling, why didn't they prevent the success of Reddit? Single sign on across a bunch of forums was always a holy grail. Users don't want to register for 10 forums either. I remember EZBoard (a free forum host in the early 2000s) had an EZBoard Gold membership where you paid monthly…

No I much prefer email groups to online forums or Reddit. Easy to register, just send a subscribe message. Trolls can be ignored or banned by the list administrators. I am subscribed to several specific interest email lists. The information I get there is typically much better than what I find online.

That's fine. As long as you understand why other people might not find email lists to be the peak user experience.

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

#216

Post by rainonmoon »

st00 wrote: post #185
tomtheelder wrote: post #57

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You can still say whatever you want online. You just can't guarantee an audience, but that was _never_ the case.

I can't tell whether you're joking, wilfully misinterpreting the GP, or something else. The past few years have highlighted some of the suboptimal machinations of our society, like collusion between government and media to silence domain experts who don't agree with a dominant political narrative[1]. The ethos of the internet is that it's a place where you can say whatever you want--the corollary is that I should be…

> The ethos of the internet is that it's a place where you can say whatever you want

According to whom? There are plenty of ways that has never been the case. In historical terms, its precedent was in enabling covert comms across large distances. In cultural terms, arguably its ethos is to facilitate the operation of the economy. In technical terms, its ethos is the segmentation and transmission of data. Insofar as you can even reasonably ascribe an "ethos" to machinery, in what avenue do you see this ethos of extreme freedom of speech? Because it sounds like you're saying a promise was broken that was never made.

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

#218

Post by syntheweave »

notpushkin wrote: post #30
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…

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…

There's a kind of musical chairs or hot potato game being played with online trust. Nobody wants to pay to post; nobody wants to pay for moderation; nobody wants to moderate uncompensated for a long period; and nobody wants to stay somewhere that's unmoderated(even if the moderation is a bare minimum no-spambots rule.)

The reason why the internet was functioning on trust was because it had economic arrangements powering it in a more invisible sense: the market demand was for more access to content, not higher quality of content. But we're really facing down the final conclusion of that with AI-generated spam. It can be encoded as hours of 8k video with the photorealistic likenesses of multiple celebrities, your spouse, parents and children all speaking to you: it will still be spam. Either the content has some kind of market price or carrying cost on it or we are willing to be elaborately lied to forever.

This isn't even a new issue to economics - the transition from free to regulated markets tends to be precipitated on the demand side by a desire for quality(safe food, air, water etc.) even if the regulation itself is ineffectual.

Blockchains are expensive in terms of data quantity, but they do get at certain parts of the issue; someone who elects to post content through one is signalling way above the noise floor, and it's only biased in that it self-selects to people who own some of that token(which does not necessarily lead to a one-to-rule-them-all billionaire's dystopia - precisely the opposite, it's relatively easy in a technical sense to spin up a small and short-lived chain and hand out some free tokens if you only need a little bit of security for a limited period of time, but that's not a framing we've normalized).

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

#219

Post by u801e »

SoftTalker wrote: post #203
JohnFen wrote: post #98

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> they were simply borne by your ISP Well, not necessarily your ISP. I've never had an ISP that supplied Usenet feeds. But yes, the cost was borne by somebody that wasn't you. (Probably -- if you didn't have access to someone else's Usenet feeds, there were services that would provide one to you for a fee.)

ISPs in the 1990s often provided Usenet newsgroups. I had EarthLink dialup and had Usenet groups

They did up till around 2010 IIRC. The smaller ISPs had their own feeds, but eventually outsourced them. I remember the Path header containing the server name of the ISPs own NNTP server, but later it changed to supernews.

ISPs also provided email accounts and I believe some provided a server directory for you to host your own website.

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

#220

Post by u801e »

SllX wrote: post #95
myself248 wrote: post #73

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Then we would be subject to the moderation policy’s of our ISPs. No thanks. It is way easier for me to create and delete an account at any number of websites than it is for me to change ISPs; and I don’t need any bill on my internet bill when I can just Apple Pay for whatever.

> Then we would be subject to the moderation policy’s of our ISPs.

ISPs are a common carrier and never really moderated the content of newsgroups on usenet.

> I don’t need any bill on my internet bill

I'm billed monthly for internet access and have had this arrangement with multiple companies over the last 30 years. That bill used to include a ISP email account and usenet access. Now it doesn't.

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