231–240 of 330 posts
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Federation makes it easier for users to join. If you don’t need that, there are plenty self-hosted alternatives. For example, HN itself.
How exactly? Ever federated project has all this faff about "which instance should I use?". How is that possibly easier .44
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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 persist…
A header communicates whether the incoming payload is compressed and the algorithm used.
Backward compatible!
Better bandwidth utilization.
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> The costs of transporting Usenet weren't zero […] How expensive was Usenet if you took out storage/bandwidth for alt.binaries.*?
Cheap. I mean, expensive by the standards of 1994, but -- inevitable comparison inbound -- a Raspberry Pi 4 has more CPU, more IOPS, more storage, and more RAM than many a 1994 small-ISP Usenet server. And modern Linux is a heck of a lot nicer to work with than any of the OS back then. A T1 is 1.5Mb/s, and if you don't take binaries, you would not quite fill that pipe back then. These days, a $10/month VPS is not mer…
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…
And there are better techniques to sustain them now, compared to back then. They don't need to be plastered with banner ads.
- Annual donations with Stripe checkout, etc
- Job boards
- If you have a product/service, host a community that caters to your general industry! For instance, if you sell film editing software, host a forum for hobbyist and professional editors, and don't make it specific to your software. You'll make conversions over time, and it's win-win for everyone. HN is essentially a form of this.
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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 was not perhaps as homogeneous as you remember?
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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!
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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
How would you forbid it?
These types of restrictions in the real world are common. We don't permit say, people to set up shop running gambling tables inside of library reading rooms.
We have restrictions all around us like this. No picnicking on freeways, or say, hookers picking up Johns next to the paintings in the city art gallery. You can't just say, wheel in dirt to city hall and start tending a garden in the council chamber.
We decided to blow away all such equivalent restrictions on the web in the early 90s, being antithetical to any conventions. Maybe continuing to adhere to that, 30 years in, is not the best idea. Obvious guardrails, equivalent to no picnicking on the freeway, can be set up.
It's time to build more of a rules based online society
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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
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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).
The only way you can stop binary usage is if you limit the demand, as if there's demand the supply will find a way.
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I am very curious but my search-fu has failed me. What was the requirement? Is there a link or jargon file or something I could read? I love this kind of stuff. Thanks!
To post to a moderated group, you would add an "Approved" header to your post before submitting. The content of the header was not important, just the presence. Equally fun, your "From" address (just another header) was also under your control. So it was fairly trivial to post articles From: anyone, Approved: yes. In this way, it was pretty similar to SMTP email in the same era. Before EHLO and reverse lookups and se…