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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?

#221

Post by kristopolous »

Eisenstein wrote: post #168
thelastparadise wrote: post #133

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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 predominant…

Also this was during the real halcyon days of the third way and DLC right after the end of the cold war.

The libertarian fanboys on HN really don't like it because this is what they furtively shake their pom-poms for and it's clearly trending towards a socially net negative

These hands off approaches will get a thousand flowers to bloom but they'll mostly be weeds

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

#222

Post by ozr »

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.

Enable blocking users and don't surface random content. That's all you really need. Everything else is either a waste of time or infantile moralizing.

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

#223

Post by u801e »

Sunspark wrote: post #149
dragontamer wrote: post #10

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Except Reddit moderators deal with these spam issues all the time. Hacker News is run by herculean efforts by the moderation team here, and I appreciate it. I'm ignorant of what their tools are, but I don't think that scales either. Its good for our community, but Hacker News will never be Reddit or Twitter scale. Reddit's model is that moderators basically complain to the Admins that tools are insufficient, then adm…

The reason Usenet can't work today is not for the reasons you surmise. I used Usenet before the Eternal September. The reason it worked back then, is because to a certain extent, it was a relatively homogeneous group of users, meaning, people of comparable education, interests, etc. I'm not really interested in sharing a newsfeed with a kitchen cabinets spammer or a Russian troll or some MAGA trumpet endlessly gazing…

> Usenet servers act as common carriers but they are not legally common carriers (in my opinion) which means if I am right, the experiment will end as soon as someone decides to litigate against a server operator for passing on material that someone felt offended by. Not even copyright violations, just something they were offended by. For example, it is illegal to insult Ergodan (really) and while that law isn't enforceable here, it was elsewhere until recently in places like Germany which still had laws on the books saying it wasn't legal to insult foreign heads of state, etc. So it's just a big litigious mess now.

Reddit was a defendant in a lawsuit[1] of a similar vein that the USSC declined to hear.

[1] https://www.reuters.com/legal/us-supreme-court-declines-hear...

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

#224

Post by u801e »

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.

> 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.

Do you also prefer email lists over a moderated newsgroup? If so, why?

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

#225

Post by safety1st »

dylan604 wrote: post #160
kbenson wrote: post #139

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's an almost irrelevant question because as soon as most nodes would stop carrying alt.binaries, posters would no longer respect the convention that binaries should go there, because users would want the data regardless of what their provider wants. Them it's a cat and mouse game like everything else, where binaries would just be split up more and obfuscated more. When the cost of storage and compute isn't really b…

bytes limits were overcome by segmenting rar files while including CRCs to overcome incomplete rar sequences. sharing of binaries will always happen. even if it's just to include a cat image (we all know that's not all, but just sayin).

These days I think that isn't true anymore. There are a lot more ways to share files now, so if you threw up enough barriers people who want to do it would just go find another platform.

I'd be completely fine with a Usenet type of protocol that disallows file attachments altogether, adoption might not be huge, but maybe that's fine - projects like Gemini and Mastodon are valuable for me even if they're not replacing the WWW and Twitter.

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

#226

Post by u801e »

lproven wrote: post #144

USEnet is alive and well, thanks. It doesn't need resurrecting; it never died. I have a free account on Eternal September: https://www.eternal-september.org/ I use Thunderbird as my client. In T'bird >100 you get mail, including Gmail etc via oAuth, including calendar/contacts/tasks, you get News, and you get chat over Matrix. All in one app. It badly needs spam filtering for its NNTP client, but it works a treat. Ru…

> [Thunderbird] badly needs spam filtering for its NNTP client

It already has the capability to filter newsgroup posts based on header and/or message body content.

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

#227

Post by u801e »

indus wrote: post #176
lproven wrote: post #144

USEnet is alive and well, thanks. It doesn't need resurrecting; it never died. I have a free account on Eternal September: https://www.eternal-september.org/ I use Thunderbird as my client. In T'bird >100 you get mail, including Gmail etc via oAuth, including calendar/contacts/tasks, you get News, and you get chat over Matrix. All in one app. It badly needs spam filtering for its NNTP client, but it works a treat. Ru…

Thanks for NNTP mention. As an analogy a lot happened to HTTP and other protocols to increase user experience, better content deliverability, and control. Can this be done to a modern NNTP protocol?

> As an analogy a lot happened to HTTP and other protocols to increase user experience, better content deliverability, and control.

On a protocol level, do you have any examples of what you're referring to when you say "increase user experience, better content deliverability and control?" Based on what I understand of the NNTP protocol, it allows for pipe lining commands to retrieve data, allows multiple, and persistent connections, and some commands will instruct the server to send compressed responses.

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

#228

Post by u801e »

themusicgod1 wrote: post #127
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…

Stop using github!

I would really like to see collaborative software development done via a usenet newsgroup. The git send-email program could be updated to send cover letters and in line patches to a newsgroup, and people could reply to those messages and review each patch.

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

#229

Post by u801e »

BizarreByte wrote: post #183
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.

> You can still say whatever you want online. This is definitely not true anymore, but if I cite examples I will as always get flagged by people assuming I support said people/communities. The age of being able to say whatever you like online is dead when your ability to even host your own site can be removed.

> This is definitely not true anymore

If it's political, you can still post it to alt.politics on usenet and not have any issues with any central authority.

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

#230

Post by u801e »

layer8 wrote: post #74

I’d certainly like to see a return of the UX of Usenet, nothing that came after equaled its effectiveness. Unfortunately, that UX is difficult to translate to mobile devices, because it basically requires to be keyboard-driven.

> Unfortunately, that UX is difficult to translate to mobile devices, because it basically requires to be keyboard-driven.

There are GUI NNTP clients that could be adapted to work on a mobile platform. Thinking of webmail clients, you could do something very similar in terms of article selection, replying, new message, etc. The only think that would need to be accounted for is posting replies incline and with proper text wrapping.

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