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Trying to find some life on the Usenet (2020)

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Re: Trying to find some life on the Usenet (2020)

#31

Post by glimshe »

First the BBSs, then Usenet...

I think that one good thing from these services was the relatively high barrier of entry. Today, online services are all about low friction signup, which makes a lot of sense in the highly competitive Internet of 2023. But when computers were somewhat niche and you really had to figure out how to get things working, users were a lot more committed and thus the quality of discussions was a lot higher.

Interestingly, Hacker News has a fairly low barrier of entry and high quality discussions. Maybe because it's kind of ugly and scares away the average user expecting animated prompts and fancy style sheets.

Speaking of BBSs, there is nothing today that quite captures the full value proposition of BSSs. Back in the day, you could sign up to one of them and meet a lot of locals due to the high long distance phone bills. I made a lot of "real world" friends, even a girlfriend or two, back in the BBS days.

Re: Trying to find some life on the Usenet (2020)

#32

Post by axus »

chongli wrote: post #30
sigg3 wrote: post #12

Earlier quoted context omitted.

In my unqualified opinion the usability of e.g. phpBB forums (discussing through the browser) was much better than calling up a local BBS on telnet. Multilevel prompt menus in telnet can be quite maze-like. Web crawlers indexed online forums too, so you could find the content right away through the same search engine instead of having to search the BBS discussions for hours or post a request on the local BBS and wait…

It feels silly to say this since it sounds like you’ve been using Usenet since the dawn of time, but you can get GUI-based news readers that fetch articles from your Usenet over the internet, no dialing up or using Telnet required. Properly configured, these news readers feel just like email clients, with threading and signatures and all that. Yes, the configuration part is some work but you only have to do it once a…

I think they were talking about BBS interface vs. forums, and you're talking about Usenet (the actual topic of the article).

Re: Trying to find some life on the Usenet (2020)

#33

Post by cmplxconjugate »

glimshe wrote: post #31

First the BBSs, then Usenet... I think that one good thing from these services was the relatively high barrier of entry. Today, online services are all about low friction signup, which makes a lot of sense in the highly competitive Internet of 2023. But when computers were somewhat niche and you really had to figure out how to get things working, users were a lot more committed and thus the quality of discussions was…

I wouldn’t really say the visual aspect of HN really puts people off. I would argue that it’s more a function of discussion topics being more niche and technical.

Ultimately the worst situation is when replies can consist of only a “joke” or meme (worst of all… a gif). Discussion is destroyed and instead replaced with a delta function; a single impulse response. “Click and move on”.

Re: Trying to find some life on the Usenet (2020)

#34

Post by gorbachev »

dredmorbius wrote: post #4
hsjqllzlfkf wrote: post #2

This isn't trolling, genuine question from someone who joined the internet after Usenet was already gone: I keep seeing people wanting to build distributed this and distributed that. According to Wikipedia, usenet was already distributed. Why did it die? Edit: follow-up question, what about freenet? Are they the same thing? Are they different, compatible, implementations of the same protocol? Are they incompatible bu…

1. It got spammed to death. 2. It lost control over its culture, and that culture was crucial to its functioning. 3. It was too problematic for ISPs (or others) to provide ready access to it: spam, harassment, child pornography, and copyright violations all posed massive concerns. 4. There was no viable business model for providing the service. https://web.archive.org/web/20230603024330/https://old.reddi... > (I'm au…

There was more to it.

1. The clients were kind of a pain for anyone but comp.sci nerds

2. It was butt ugly. Web forums killed it, because you could make them pretty

3. Not only spam, but the troll bots just destroyed everything. I can't remember why exactly this started happening, but there were a dedicated pool of assholes spamming Usenet groups they didn't like with garbage or vile crap posing as regular contributors of the groups. When you searched for posts by someone, the first 100 pages were from these troll bots

Re: Trying to find some life on the Usenet (2020)

#35

Post by glimshe »

cmplxconjugate wrote: post #33
glimshe wrote: post #31

First the BBSs, then Usenet... I think that one good thing from these services was the relatively high barrier of entry. Today, online services are all about low friction signup, which makes a lot of sense in the highly competitive Internet of 2023. But when computers were somewhat niche and you really had to figure out how to get things working, users were a lot more committed and thus the quality of discussions was…

I wouldn’t really say the visual aspect of HN really puts people off. I would argue that it’s more a function of discussion topics being more niche and technical. Ultimately the worst situation is when replies can consist of only a “joke” or meme (worst of all… a gif). Discussion is destroyed and instead replaced with a delta function; a single impulse response. “Click and move on”.

GIFs require too much work, nowadays you only get a reaction - if you are lucky!

Usenet was also niche and technical in the beginning, but that changed over time. Maybe the answer is multifaceted; Hacker News is a bit ugly, has a large percentage of technical users, strong moderation and lack of "low effort" features such as inline images, GIF libraries, reactions etc.

Re: Trying to find some life on the Usenet (2020)

#36

Post by bawolff »

hsjqllzlfkf wrote: post #2

This isn't trolling, genuine question from someone who joined the internet after Usenet was already gone: I keep seeing people wanting to build distributed this and distributed that. According to Wikipedia, usenet was already distributed. Why did it die? Edit: follow-up question, what about freenet? Are they the same thing? Are they different, compatible, implementations of the same protocol? Are they incompatible bu…

> I keep seeing people wanting to build distributed this and distributed that. According to Wikipedia, usenet was already distributed. Why did it die?

People like distributed things ideologically but practically speaking they have a ton of drawbacks. It failed because it was outcompeted by centralized solutions that could leverage their centralized power to make a better product (e.g. handle spam among other things). The decentralized aspect also means incentives can become misaligned where people who are paying for it aren't really benefiting or controlling it (i imaging alt.bibaries was not cheap to syndicate)

> follow-up question, what about freenet? Are they the same thing?

No, and generally pretty unrelated.

Re: Trying to find some life on the Usenet (2020)

#37

Post by bawolff »

gorbachev wrote: post #34
dredmorbius wrote: post #4

Earlier quoted context omitted.

1. It got spammed to death. 2. It lost control over its culture, and that culture was crucial to its functioning. 3. It was too problematic for ISPs (or others) to provide ready access to it: spam, harassment, child pornography, and copyright violations all posed massive concerns. 4. There was no viable business model for providing the service. https://web.archive.org/web/20230603024330/https://old.reddi... > (I'm au…

There was more to it. 1. The clients were kind of a pain for anyone but comp.sci nerds 2. It was butt ugly. Web forums killed it, because you could make them pretty 3. Not only spam, but the troll bots just destroyed everything. I can't remember why exactly this started happening, but there were a dedicated pool of assholes spamming Usenet groups they didn't like with garbage or vile crap posing as regular contributo…

> The clients were kind of a pain for anyone but comp.sci nerds

News clients were built into most email clients and were pretty user friendly. I dont think you needed to be a nerd to use it. Web forums were also pretty ugly in the late 90s.

Re: Trying to find some life on the Usenet (2020)

#38

Post by antupis »

cmplxconjugate wrote: post #33
glimshe wrote: post #31

First the BBSs, then Usenet... I think that one good thing from these services was the relatively high barrier of entry. Today, online services are all about low friction signup, which makes a lot of sense in the highly competitive Internet of 2023. But when computers were somewhat niche and you really had to figure out how to get things working, users were a lot more committed and thus the quality of discussions was…

I wouldn’t really say the visual aspect of HN really puts people off. I would argue that it’s more a function of discussion topics being more niche and technical. Ultimately the worst situation is when replies can consist of only a “joke” or meme (worst of all… a gif). Discussion is destroyed and instead replaced with a delta function; a single impulse response. “Click and move on”.

same thing happens at Reddit more niche topic -> better content. There is mainstream, then there is kinda messy middle where people are gatekeeping and it is kinda elitist place but when you go down enough in rabbit hole people start being just happy that you are sharing this hobby or topic of interest together.

Re: Trying to find some life on the Usenet (2020)

#39

Post by bawolff »

pyinstallwoes wrote: post #18
hsjqllzlfkf wrote: post #2

This isn't trolling, genuine question from someone who joined the internet after Usenet was already gone: I keep seeing people wanting to build distributed this and distributed that. According to Wikipedia, usenet was already distributed. Why did it die? Edit: follow-up question, what about freenet? Are they the same thing? Are they different, compatible, implementations of the same protocol? Are they incompatible bu…

Anything that depends on an ISP is not truly distributed or decentralized. You'd need a way to route ad-hoc networks deterministically. You'd have to replace BGP with something like DHT. Yggdrasil is one example of this although it is an 'overlay' and not a direct protocol replacement. https://yggdrasil-network.github.io

I think that is a silly definition, but doesn't usenet fit? It didn't start on the internet and supported rather arbitrary routing.
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