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

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

news.ycombinator.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

201–210 of 330 posts

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

#201

Post by photochemsyn »

Energy and Information go hand in hand, the relationship being Entropy. Just as nobody is going to say, "Hey, free decentralized energy for everyone, come and get it" without people at least wondering, 'what's the game here?', well, information - in the form of a high-quality site full of reliable information and real people and interesting conversations - well, that's like an oil well just sitting there waiting to be grabbed by the first party that can gain control of it. It's like saying, 'hey, free land for everyone!' - well, the supply of land is not infinite.

As things stand in the USA, the government generally is controlled by oligarchs who view decentralized independent information systems as a threat to their continued grasp on power, much in the same way that decentralized independent energy production outside of state or corporate control is viewed.

There's always the French Revolution approach to the problem of consolidated oligarchic power, but then you get Napoleon, which isn't much better. A difficult problem to solve, indeed.

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

#203

Post by SoftTalker »

JohnFen wrote: post #98
myself248 wrote: post #73

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The costs of transporting Usenet weren't zero, they were simply borne by your ISP because it was understood as a necessary part of internet access. I think that's what we're missing here. If we simply paid for this stuff as part of our regular internet bill again, we could solve a lot of the "nothing works for free" problems.

> they were simply borne by your ISP Well, not necessarily your ISP. I've never had an ISP that supplied Usenet feeds. But yes, the cost was borne by somebody that wasn't you. (Probably -- if you didn't have access to someone else's Usenet feeds, there were services that would provide one to you for a fee.)

ISPs in the 1990s often provided Usenet newsgroups. I had EarthLink dialup and had Usenet groups

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

#204

Post by throwaway81523 »

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.

Usenet had moderation schemes that weren't widely used, but that worked well in the groups that used them. I remember a system called STUMP though I don't remember what it stood for. Basically posts had to be approved by moderators using PGP signatures, and I think there might have been a CA-like scheme for moderators to delegate moderation authority. It seemed well designed and generalizeable, but it was near the tail end of Usenet's heyday, so it didn't catch on much.

Added: to expand, Usenet was and is mostly unmoderated. There were a few groups that wanted or needed moderation, and for those, workable methods came into existence.

Mostly, anonymity is good: https://wakaba.c3.cx/shii/shiichan

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

#205

Post by SoftTalker »

hombre_fatal wrote: post #157
hattmall wrote: post #107

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…

Since independent forums never went anywhere, you have to ask yourself why Reddit still "won". In other words, if indie forums are so compelling, why didn't they prevent the success of Reddit? Single sign on across a bunch of forums was always a holy grail. Users don't want to register for 10 forums either. I remember EZBoard (a free forum host in the early 2000s) had an EZBoard Gold membership where you paid monthly…

No I much prefer email groups to online forums or Reddit. Easy to register, just send a subscribe message. Trolls can be ignored or banned by the list administrators.

I am subscribed to several specific interest email lists. The information I get there is typically much better than what I find online.

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

#206

Post by phire »

gregw134 wrote: post #7

Two years ago this is where someone would chime in with a blockchain-based solution, paying moderators with usenetcoin.

There is circularity in that Proof-of-work was originally proposed as a solution to bulk email spam.

Didn't work as a solution for that either.

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

#207

Post by knowledge-clay »

GuB-42 wrote: post #113
knowledge-clay wrote: post #31

The solution to a lot of problems is simply to not scale platforms past something like 1000 users. At that level, you can have a community that is guided by individual people and their relationships, rather than anonymized and centralized. And the infrastructure is much simpler to set up and maintain: we just need more tools tailored to being easy to set up and administer at this scale. m15o has built a ton of exampl…

The problem with small communities is that you don't necessarily have enough competent and available people to run the system reliably. Or worse, the people in charge leave, sometimes taking the servers with them, and no one else knows how to maintain it. That's why Reddit and Discord are so successful. You can create your small community for close to zero cost and zero technical expertise, no one is going to pull th…

> The problem with small communities is that you don't necessarily have enough competent and available people to run the system reliably. Or worse, the people in charge leave, sometimes taking the servers with them, and no one else knows how to maintain it.

Don’t get me wrong, I acknowledge these are problems. But I have so little faith in big platforms these days that I don’t really see an alternative.

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

#208

Post by phire »

stubybubs wrote: post #101
gregw134 wrote: post #7

Two years ago this is where someone would chime in with a blockchain-based solution, paying moderators with usenetcoin.

Well have I got an LLM-based solution for you, my friend.

Would be an interesting experiment.

My hypothesis is that an LLM would actually do a pretty good job at moderation, but only if the community didn't know it was an LLM doing the work.

Moderation is really just applied sentiment analysis, which is an area LLMs are quite strong in. However, as soon as the community learned it was an LLM doing the moderation, it would be torn to pieces by people abusing it.

On top of hallucinations, it's one of the major problems preventing many LLM usecases going into production; They are inherently vulnerable to hostile input.

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

#209

Post by beej71 »

bigbillheck wrote: post #151
myself248 wrote: post #73

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The costs of transporting Usenet weren't zero, they were simply borne by your ISP because it was understood as a necessary part of internet access. I think that's what we're missing here. If we simply paid for this stuff as part of our regular internet bill again, we could solve a lot of the "nothing works for free" problems.

> The costs of transporting Usenet weren't zero Famously so. "This message will cost the net hundreds if not thousands of dollars."

Thanks for this... I'd forgotten and now am feeling all nostalgic.

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

#210

Post by pasquinelli »

gregw134 wrote: post #7

Two years ago this is where someone would chime in with a blockchain-based solution, paying moderators with usenetcoin.

> Two years ago this is where someone would chime in with a blockchain-based solution, paying moderators with usenetcoin.

that was then, now we can use a llm to moderate automatically, or even better, instead of a new internet community--with all the trouble that entails-- we could all just talk to chatgpt forever.

Post reply on HN