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

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

#271

Post by crabbone » Sat, Jun 10, 2023, 9:25 AM UTC

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.

> for free

Wasn't that sort of included in your Internet subscription?

Even if not, why not use the same model as Internet subscription, where the payment comes from the fee you pay to your ISP? This would also make it easy for governments / donors to sponsor participation in such groups as they wouldn't have to hunt down individuals to provide them with a tiny amount of money, rather they could compensate ISPs directly.

A lot of ISPs are trying to make some extra $ by selling all sorts of junk, like anti-virus or w/e. Sure they wouldn't be opposed to sell an extra service, should it become popular enough.

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

#272

Post by rainonmoon » Sat, Jun 10, 2023, 9:46 AM UTC

mcluck wrote: post #266

rainonmoon wrote: post #261

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Registering for a website is not something most people find so mystifying. Short of being willfully obtuse, I would imagine most people who express discontent with online communities could exert the most cursory of efforts to understand how to do it. Typically it involves visiting a URL and then typing in an email address and a password. Please pass this on if you come across anyone struggling to comprehend it.

Getting into a federated space brings a lot of questions for normal people. Why this instance? Why not this instance? Can I only join one? What if my friends join a different one? This one only has 100 people, is it weird if I join? This one has 1,000,000 million, isn't that basically Reddit/Twitter/whatever? These are the sorts of questions that come to mind for normal people. By the time they've asked this pile of…

As people positioned to understand this stuff, we have a duty to explain it to people if we believe it will have a positive impact on society. I'm not oblivious to the fact that lots of people have lots of questions about decentralised social media, I'm saying the answers can be very simple. That should be enough to realise that the fatalism some people seem to experience in the face of this new technology only exposes their own intellectual laziness -- not the confusion of "normal people" and not the insurmountable complexity of that technology.

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

#273

Post by throwawaaarrgh » Sat, Jun 10, 2023, 9:47 AM UTC

No, because you could just run Usenet and nobody wants to.

What's always been hilarious about the controversial nature of giant social media companies is nobody has ever been forced to use one. It's not like the monopoly of telephones or roads or municipal water or anything else you have no choice in and still need to live. Social media is 100% optional and there is always another way to do what you need without them. The fact that they exist is merely humans not being able to control their urge to simultaneously be entertained and socialize. You might as well complain about TV.

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

#274

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

Anonymity and trustworthiness are actually different concerns that only appear to be in opposition. For example, if someone you trust asks to bring a friend to your party and doesn’t mention their name, it’s probably okay, right?

For this kind of situation, a network of some kind like a bulletin board, you have someone you only know via that board but you’ve known them for years and never known them to play up, and they ask to let someone join and will vouch for them, is that a problem?

This is the kind of problem Keybase was trying to solve, and they were right, social proof is more important than unmasking anonymity.

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

#275

Post by im3w1l » Sat, Jun 10, 2023, 10:13 AM UTC

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

If the internet didn't permit commercial use, then it would lose another inter-network that did. People want to do buy things online and people want to sell things online and someone would step up to fill that need.

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

#276

Post by torgian » Sat, Jun 10, 2023, 10:21 AM UTC

Shit I would be on that in a heartbeat. But it can’t be free in todays world. Pay to play, so to speak, and I would happily pay a hundred a year to do so

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

#277

Post by threeseed » Sat, Jun 10, 2023, 10:34 AM UTC

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

Back then yes. Today ISPs and Telcos are the literal definition of the word insidious.

So many examples of them selling user data to third parties without true consent.

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

#278

Post by pera » Sat, Jun 10, 2023, 10:40 AM UTC

WallyFunk wrote: post #16

Usenet was kind of sketchy though (and still is). If you browsed long enough you started discovering very niche and outright illegal shit on your travels. Then you had Usenet proxy services who censored that stuff, and for the better. I don't want to access sketchy shit accidentally or have it anywhere near my hard-drive.

The same is true in the world wide web and social networks.

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

#279

Post by flir » Sat, Jun 10, 2023, 11:00 AM UTC

hunter2_ wrote: post #15

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.

I think a major component of the difference between contributing then and contributing now is friction/skill/interest. Back then, you had to be specifically interested in learning how to get connected, which was a niche endeavor, while the masses were oblivious or too cool for school. Now, you can simply join almost any online community using baseline skills that an enormous fraction of Earth's population already has…

You can always throw a shiny web interface on top of your usenet clone. If it reached critical mass, I'm sure someone would.

SMTP : Gmail :: NNTP : ???

Personally I think the (necessary) lack of binaries is why it would never grow beyond its niche.

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

#280

Post by denton-scratch » Sat, Jun 10, 2023, 11:01 AM UTC

gregw2 wrote: post #235

Sunspark wrote: post #149

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

Re: homogenous user base and MAGA trumpets... in 1998 or so, when I did an informal analysis of USENET centralized moderation vs Slashdot distributed moderation and number-of-posts/day counts across both platforms, alt.fan.rush-limbaugh was one of the highest trafficked USENET groups. The proto-MAGA crowd was there. USENET was not perhaps as homogeneous as you remember?

> USENET was not perhaps as homogeneous as you remember?

My Usenet was fairly homogenous, because I only subscribed to a handful of groups. You simply couldn't read the traffic on 100,000 groups! But the full list of groups was extremely diverse.

The list of groups also depended on which server you were using as your feed. Many servers carried groups dealing with some product the operator sold; those groups weren't always relayed by other servers. In fact I guess that's still the case.