Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

USENET rises again?

theregister.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

221–230 of 235 posts

Re: USENET rises again?

#221

Post by ZWoz »

fluoridation wrote: post #139
mindcrime wrote: post #96

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Sorry, but you make it sound like there are many. That allow posting, and free, I think I only know one. It's been a while since I looked. I could have sworn there were at least a handful, but either A. I might be mis-remembering or B. the landscape might have changed since I checked last. That said, there seem to be quite few who offer cheap if not actually free access. And by "cheap" I mean, on the order of $10.00…

That seems rather expensive given the service being provided, i.e. read-write access to a text-only discussion board. Where's all the cost going?

Most paid services have binary feeds. Those few, who offer text-only groups don't have big enough client base to make service cheap.

Re: USENET rises again?

#222

Post by BearhatBeer »

listenallyall wrote: post #201
BearhatBeer wrote: post #200

Earlier quoted context omitted.

GP of the reply chain was referring to how at a point in the past Usenet was allegedly more difficult to access. That's why some of my responses were in the past tense - I was disagreeing about how, back then, it was more difficult to access. Hence the use of the past tense. All in perfectly proper English.

bla bla bla, Usenet died because the "high IQ" (according to you) snobs on it were (are?) annoying as fuck posting these twisted explanations instead of accepting they were wrong about something

There's still time to switch your career path. You don't have to do this.

Re: USENET rises again?

#223

Post by pseudalopex »

rout39574 wrote: post #64
karaterobot wrote: post #48

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I consider something a social network when it is designed to create and make use of a graph of relationships between people. This is distinct from social media , though we use the two interchangeably a lot of the time. The "network" part is about the graph of relationships, the "social" part is about people (and not servers, as I suppose is the case with Usenet). I'm not sure about Reddit, I don't use it often, but i…

I agree: > designed to create and make use of a graph of relationships between people. I assert that a universe of people maintaining killfiles is exactly this. It is the default-trust map of social network, in which one imagines that the exceptional cases are those whom one wishes to shun. I think a requirement that one be able to "follow a person", that is to say watch all the things that individual says, is excess…

What was more useful wasn't the question. Social network and social media emerged 20 years ago when people needed a name for following humans.

Usenet was not designed for kill files. Kill files were designed for Usenet. You could construct a very limited social graph from everyone's kill files. But no one had everyone's kill files. And you could construct a limited social graph from everyone's tax records also. Are taxes a social network?

Re: USENET rises again?

#224

Post by jjav »

tptacek wrote: post #219
jjav wrote: post #206

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> When I read comments like this, I assume the person writing it didn't spend much time in conversations on Usenet. You should not assume, does not lead to good conversation. I've been nonstop on usenet since the late 80s, still am. I used to run a site for my university. I was a heavy poster and reader through the 90s. My usage volume has decreased, but still sometimes post. Read daily. Usenet rocks. Wish it had mor…

These are all things you can do with HN, which has one of the simplest and most limited interfaces of all the Internet message boards. Just like with NNTP, you have to write software to do it, but it's straightforwardly doable. People have done several of them!

I disagree that you can do these things in HN.

I guess you're thinking that one could curl down the text and then process it locally as much as one wishes, feed it to some custom reader and consume it that way. Which you're right, is possible, but not exactly within HN at that point.

And HN is the simplest use case. Tell me how I do any of the above things with messages people insist on sending via whatsapp or facebook or any such walled gardens that go out of their way to prevent interoperability?

Give me SMTP and NNTP, open standards with infinite flexibility where I own and control the experience.

Re: USENET rises again?

#225

Post by usrusr »

throwaway14356 wrote: post #134
usrusr wrote: post #92

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"Including this one" is a good example, for how the rules of how content is selected for presentation define the medium. Even with exactly the same people, exactly the same dang occasionally nudging people this way or that way, this place would be an entirely different if the effective feed composition wasn't the one it is. So much of the identity of these online communities is an emergent consequence of the mechanis…

i notice that a forum for a productive effort gets much less useful if there is a "general" sub form. It seems to ruin organization permanently. One could in stead have a "i don't know where to put this" section that forces the mod to move or delete it.

Then on the other hand, I know of some off topic situations that I consider very valuable, because any forum set up specifically for the topic in question would draw a very different audience.

Re: USENET rises again?

#226

Post by Parker51 »

joecool1029 wrote: post #102

I don't have any affiliation with any provider but I contribute or maintain most of the Usenet clients for Gentoo. As others have stated the majority of Usenet subscribers now use it for binary groups, not text groups. I use it for both. Rather than talk about whether it should or shouldn't come back I'm just going to give a starting point to view text groups. There's enough information on handling binary groups. (/r…

"As for clients, on mobile there's nothing available for android last I've checked."

There's PhoNews, but it wasn't very good the last time I tried the free version. It ran slowly, or sometimes not at all, trying to follow a small number of newsgroups off of an NNTP server run by my ISP (that otherwise worked well with other non-mobile newsreaders).

Re: USENET rises again?

#227

Post by amadeuspagel »

jtode wrote: post #95
mindcrime wrote: post #18

I was in an AI conference yesterday, and there was a bunch of discussion in the chat about Slack channels, Discord servers, etc. So I was literally just lamenting the state of shared discussion forums, and commented that we all need to go back to Usenet and drop all these lame "walled garden" proprietary forums. I'd like to tell people "install Thunderbird, sign up for a free Usenet provider, and join comp.ai, comp.m…

The spam is the biggest issue. We never solved it there, and it's only being controlled on usenet's imitators through tight control, which is not a feature of usenet. One setup I could see working is a pubkey setup where anyone who posts, always encrypts with their private key, and anyone you want to hear from, you add their public key to your list of keys you decrypt to read. Aggregators can occupy public keys as th…

> One setup I could see working is a pubkey setup where anyone who posts, always encrypts with their private key, and anyone you want to hear from, you add their public key to your list of keys you decrypt to read.

The most important thing that web forums like this one enable is interaction between people who don't know each other.

Re: USENET rises again?

#228

Post by cykros »

chrisco255 wrote: post #167
BearhatBeer wrote: post #146

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Usenet faded because ISPs all conspired to drop it, en masse, in the early 2000's. Used to be every ISP from Comcast down to the mom and pops had Usenet. Now it's not just uncommon, it's nearly impossible to find any ISP that has their own Usenet feed. And yes the excuse given to drop it was piracy.

Usenet faded because the UX was terrible. It was common in the early 90s because it predates the world wide web, and most people back then were highly technical and could deal with the warts. Everything moved to the web, and Usenet clients were hit or miss. Neither Windows nor Mac came packaged with a client for it, so it certainly wasn't easily discoverable for people who joined the internet later. They probably nev…

For years, Google Groups supported Usenet access.

Usenet faded because it wasn't monetizable, outside of subscription based binary providers (who were in large part turning around and pumping that money into the legal defense funds, because they were primarily servicing the swashbuckling community).

The platforms that are actively used are codependent. They demand you use them. They send you emails when you haven't logged in in awhile. They foment opposition just to keep you engaged, so you'll view their ads.

Usenet, on the other hand, lets you use it, if you feel like it, assuming you know where to look.

The only sort of people who would use Usenet would be those that make decisions for themselves, rather than doing what the marketers tell them. It never stood a chance against this sort of opposition.

Re: USENET rises again?

#229

Post by chriscappuccio »

BearhatBeer wrote: post #146
jtode wrote: post #95

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The spam is the biggest issue. We never solved it there, and it's only being controlled on usenet's imitators through tight control, which is not a feature of usenet. One setup I could see working is a pubkey setup where anyone who posts, always encrypts with their private key, and anyone you want to hear from, you add their public key to your list of keys you decrypt to read. Aggregators can occupy public keys as th…

Usenet faded because ISPs all conspired to drop it, en masse, in the early 2000's. Used to be every ISP from Comcast down to the mom and pops had Usenet. Now it's not just uncommon, it's nearly impossible to find any ISP that has their own Usenet feed. And yes the excuse given to drop it was piracy.

I carried Usenet in 2000 and dropped soon after because the volume was huge amounts of binaries and nobody used it. No conspiracy necessary.

Re: USENET rises again?

#230

Post by jtode »

amadeuspagel wrote: post #227
jtode wrote: post #95

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The spam is the biggest issue. We never solved it there, and it's only being controlled on usenet's imitators through tight control, which is not a feature of usenet. One setup I could see working is a pubkey setup where anyone who posts, always encrypts with their private key, and anyone you want to hear from, you add their public key to your list of keys you decrypt to read. Aggregators can occupy public keys as th…

> One setup I could see working is a pubkey setup where anyone who posts, always encrypts with their private key, and anyone you want to hear from, you add their public key to your list of keys you decrypt to read. The most important thing that web forums like this one enable is interaction between people who don't know each other.

People could auto-trust those who have been trusted by those they trust; this could have a user setting deciding how many degrees of separation they are willing to trust. Everybody's public key (ie. the ability to read their signed posts) is public, it's a question of which ones you choose to read.

There are many ways to skin this cat, but every one that's gonna work involves cooperation, rather than adversarial control.

Post reply on HN