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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?

#251

Post by lelanthran »

Eisenstein wrote: post #163
lelanthran wrote: post #88

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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.

> What?

> That famously didn't work with covid.

I was being haha-serious, not completely serious.

The response to "we threw money at $FOO and it didn't work" is "You didn't throw enough money at $FOO".

[PS. which country threw money at the COVID problem and had worse or the same results?]

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

#252

Post by fwungy »

wombat-man wrote: post #248
fwungy wrote: post #244

What about a crypto token based use net where every message would cost a small token fee that would be credited to the node operator? This would give an incentive to run a node and would serve as a hurdle to the unwashed masses.

I don't see why this needs to involve crypto

The messages would be on a block chain. The crypto would fund the node provider.

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

#253

Post by SllX »

u801e wrote: post #220
SllX wrote: post #95

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

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

Strictly speaking that’s not entirely true.

1. They could choose which newsgroups to provide access to as part of their USENET access service.

2. USENET or a modern-day like-service as a separate billable item would not necessarily be subject to the same common carrier provisions that broadband service providers were subject to when they were regulated under Title II of the 1934 Communications Act.

3. This rule was also repealed under the Trump administration and broadband service providers are once again regulated under Title I, which is to say they are not classified as common carriers. Even if it hadn’t been or if they were to be reclassified under Title II, see point 2. I did try to see if this did change under the Biden administration but I have not heard of such a change nor could I find one.

4. ISPs previously did not have the same incentive structure, and were dealing with a different market and legal environment prior to 2002. The truth is, USENET at the scale of Reddit could not exist without good moderation. It would be untenable for all the reasons unmoderated forums are untenable, and also too unappealing to develop a Reddit-sized mass. The mods, for all the issues with Reddit’s mod community, are what make Reddit possible to continue to exist. You would need similar for any Internet social forum of a similar size, scope and user base and if that’s not the goal, plenty of niche forums already exist that you don’t need to get through your ISP.

> 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.

Perhaps you misunderstood me. I don’t have an issue with the billing arrangements I have with my ISP. I have an issue with the idea of getting billed for non-internet access services (read: content) through my ISP as a means of paying for them. In an age of pervasive payment tech like Apple Pay, I want a direct billing relationship with my service providers, not a stack of line items on my internet bill. Put another way, I’m saying it is simply an unappealing arrangement when there are superior alternatives.

I do still have the ISP-provided email address though, completely unused for the last 15 years and if they ever billed me separately for it, it would be terminated instantly.

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

#254

Post by notbeuller »

This comes up time to time, See discussion of Robin Sloan’s “Spring ‘83: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32233412>

And “Fraidycat”: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22545878>

I do think there’s a maximum size of any online community beyond which it loses its value.

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

#255

Post by forgetfreeman »

rainonmoon wrote: post #213
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

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.

Let slide my ass, they were intentionally yanked off the table by monied interests. I distinctly remember my reaction the first time I encountered an actual honest-to-fuck ad campaign in an online space. Shock, followed my a grudging smirk at the novelty of it, followed by months of concerned chatter among the "netizens" I interacted with about what it would mean for the web if advertising or any other form of money scheme were permitted online, followed by dire (and entirely prescient) predictions of what the internet might devolve into if the floodgates were opened to the idle masses through mass commodification of connectivity coupled with a flood of bullshit zero quality content laid as bait.

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

#256

Post by quesera »

hunter2_ wrote: post #240
quesera wrote: post #175

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

Interesting that the content off the Approved header didn't matter. I'm only familiar with Mailman's use of same, where the content has to be the moderator's password: incorrect is equivalent to not providing the header, and correct bypasses the moderation queue. Either way, it gets scrubbed immediately, for secrecy. Essentially, it's just to let listserv moderators send to a list without having to spend time using t…

Ah, I'd forgotten about the similarity to Mailman's moderation. Right, that works because there's a centralized approval gateway (the mailman code on the mail server) which can also strip out the secret before distributing the message to the list members.

Since NetNews had no central authority, every news server had to judge the validity of posts for themselves. And obviously they couldn't all know the moderator secret without it leaking immediately. Nowadays we'd have a moderator cryptographically sign the message contents. Actually this should have been possible back then too (RSA in 1977 plus a public key published in the newsgroup definition which already held the moderator email address?), but it was not used.

Newsreaders did not show the Approved header. People often stuck fun or funny stuff in there, like easter eggs for those who knew to look.

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

#258

Post by seanhunter »

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.

This. I loved usenet, but when the spam started, that was the harbinger of doom. Maintaining communities costs time and effort as well as servers and bandwidth. Given the thankless task of fighting the onslaught of spam, trolls, raids, organized information ops etc it's not viable as a volunteer exercise in general. It can be done by mutual cooperation and self-policing on a small scale in isolated groups of like-minded folks but en mass the incentive to ruin the commons for everyone else will always be too strong for some folks.

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

#259

Post by mildred593 »

The issue with moderation is that not everyone agrees. Moderation should be plug-in and multilayer. Everyone should be able to choose which moderation they trust or distrust.

Full p2p is technically complicated and does not work well for small devices not always connected, we should keep servers to host the discussions.

The servers should be able to subscribe to a moderation. You don't want to host a discussion illegal in your country gor example. Users should also be able to move servers painlessly. If the users trust their servers with their identity, it does not need to use crypto for user identity. On your profile page on a server you can link other servers identity and that's enough and simpler.

If a discussion group is private, it should only be hosted in servers of their members and not elsewhere.

I started working on such a system https://github.com/mildred/disputatio.nim but beyond the technical stuff I have no idea how this could gain adoption.

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