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Some thoughts on social networking and Usenet (2018)

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Re: Some thoughts on social networking and Usenet (2018)

#51

Post by pixl97 »

antod wrote: post #33

I seem to remember one reason usenet worked so well was the pretty stringent insistence on good netiquette. Of course it wasn't foolproof, but nearly all people wanted to follow the implied rules most of the time. Todays internet demographics and social media landscape though probably makes Eternal September pale into insignificance.

I agree. While spam and bad actors did exist, the crowd size was so small most of the time and the amount of spam tended to be far more limited and typically had a human at the other side posting the crap.

If you open up an HTTP POST api these days that publicly listed the amount of crap that will be posted to it is legion. You'll have spammers and spammers bots hit it endlessly. You'll have broken scripts pound at it till the end of time. You'll have clever users figure out how to turn it into a data storage API. You'll have every dark thing that hides in the shadows of humanity use you as its new cave. If you allow binary uploads then that API is now a porn site or serving warez. The people pushing the most questionable stuff will come from a vast range of proxied IPs and infected jumpboxes.

It's been some years now since I've been in charge of managing servers that require public facing internet presence and I cannot tell you how glad I am because of it. Attempting to maintain operational integrity on the open internet is like attempting to maintain structural integrity in a blast furnace.

Re: Some thoughts on social networking and Usenet (2018)

#52

Post by donut »

iisan7 wrote: post #3

Thanks for posting this. Everything old is new again. With buzz about moving to Mastodon, I was just thinking about why usenet couldn't be a viable social media platform as it represents so much of what people like about the fediverse, and then some. It would be fascinating to see the usenet protocol repurposed and new clients and newsgroups built upon lessons from the past decade.

> Thanks for posting this. Everything old is new again.

Right? It was such a good time :-) You're welcome.

> why usenet couldn't be a viable social media platform

I wonder if identity plays a role here. Centralizing points (likes, retweets, etc) drives people to work on getting attention with their posts, to drive engagement, but also invites troublemakers and controversy.

Re: Some thoughts on social networking and Usenet (2018)

#53

Post by TacticalCoder »

pmoriarty wrote: post #4

I so miss killfiles and scorefiles, and it's mindboggling how 30+ years after Usenet clients had them they're still virtually non-existent in any social media readers that I'm aware of. Usenet clients gave their users so much power, it's almost criminal that modern news readers have yet to catch up to them several decades later.

> I so miss killfiles and scorefiles, and it's mindboggling how 30+ years after Usenet clients had them they're still virtually non-existent in any social media readers that I'm aware of.

Indeed and I don't think people realize how great these were. There's some kind of fallacy you often read when you mention that, which to me can be summed with the following bogus reasoning: "Usenet got killed by the Web, so anything Usenet and Usenet clients had were wrong ways to do things".

Killfiles/scorefiles were better than any system I've used since then. Nothing even comes close.

Re: Some thoughts on social networking and Usenet (2018)

#54

Post by Melatonic »

darrenf wrote: post #37
commandlinefan wrote: post #7

Part of the problem with Usenet is that it isn't "free" like Twitter and Facebook are. (They're free because they host ads, and there are all sorts of problems with that, of course, but you don't pay a monthly subscription to them). Way back, it used to be you got an NNTP server bundled with your ISP which was ok, because you were the only customer who knew what that was and how to use it, so you weren't creating a l…

> Way back, it used to be you got an NNTP server bundled with your ISP which was ok, because you were the only customer who knew what that was and how to use it, so you weren't creating a lot of load on your ISP. Even then, the NNTP server didn't carry much content, wasn't well maintained, didn't save much In the UK, Demon Internet in the 90s maintained a usenet server for customers and one for non-customers (pubnews…

Anything to do with the later Demonoid?

Re: Some thoughts on social networking and Usenet (2018)

#55

Post by [deleted] »

gw98 wrote: post #44
jhallenworld wrote: post #22

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Some are still going.. https://groups.google.com/u/1/g/sci.electronics.design https://groups.google.com/u/1/g/comp.arch https://groups.google.com/u/1/g/rec.arts.sf.written https://groups.google.com/u/1/g/rec.radio.amateur.misc https://groups.google.com/u/1/g/comp.compilers

Crikey sci.electronics.design is a mess now (was active over 20 years ago on it).

[deleted]

Re: Some thoughts on social networking and Usenet (2018)

#56

Post by bbanyc »

commandlinefan wrote: post #7

Part of the problem with Usenet is that it isn't "free" like Twitter and Facebook are. (They're free because they host ads, and there are all sorts of problems with that, of course, but you don't pay a monthly subscription to them). Way back, it used to be you got an NNTP server bundled with your ISP which was ok, because you were the only customer who knew what that was and how to use it, so you weren't creating a l…

The lack of a business model is why any attempt to revive Usenet or run a new federated protocol like Mastodon is probably not going to get anywhere. Somebody's got to pay for it, and the quality of discussion isn't nearly good enough to attract paying customers. (The binaries may be, but isn't it silly to pay for piracy?) Ad-supported services have bad incentives all around, but nobody's ever come up with an alternative way to pay for it, aside from being small enough that voluntary donations will do.

Re: Some thoughts on social networking and Usenet (2018)

#58

Post by anthk »

bbanyc wrote: post #56
commandlinefan wrote: post #7

Part of the problem with Usenet is that it isn't "free" like Twitter and Facebook are. (They're free because they host ads, and there are all sorts of problems with that, of course, but you don't pay a monthly subscription to them). Way back, it used to be you got an NNTP server bundled with your ISP which was ok, because you were the only customer who knew what that was and how to use it, so you weren't creating a l…

The lack of a business model is why any attempt to revive Usenet or run a new federated protocol like Mastodon is probably not going to get anywhere. Somebody's got to pay for it, and the quality of discussion isn't nearly good enough to attract paying customers. (The binaries may be, but isn't it silly to pay for piracy?) Ad-supported services have bad incentives all around, but nobody's ever come up with an alterna…

Usenet isn't just for piracy.

Re: Some thoughts on social networking and Usenet (2018)

#59

Post by onion2k »

anthk wrote: post #58
bbanyc wrote: post #56

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The lack of a business model is why any attempt to revive Usenet or run a new federated protocol like Mastodon is probably not going to get anywhere. Somebody's got to pay for it, and the quality of discussion isn't nearly good enough to attract paying customers. (The binaries may be, but isn't it silly to pay for piracy?) Ad-supported services have bad incentives all around, but nobody's ever come up with an alterna…

Usenet isn't just for piracy.

No. We also used it for porn and flame wars.

Re: Some thoughts on social networking and Usenet (2018)

#60

Post by donut »

kkfx wrote: post #45

> Killfiles and Scorefiles That's one of the most important thing most people ignore: they means we can have our PERSONAL aggregator instead of using someone else algorithms and censorship. Sure at usenet time (or back at Xerox time where these concept was implemented for the first time in known history) the level of scoring and self-censoring technique was limited but nowadays it's a CENTRAL point. Usenet is a decen…

> have our PERSONAL aggregator

That's the dream, isn't it.

So if there are 100 people whose messages you willingly watch, how do you discover new people? (Maybe you do so organically when they mention them?)

And if you _do_ allow yourself to taste from the firehose of unfiltered messages, a single personal list of users/messages wouldn't scale and you have the classic spam problem. Do you share your rules with others (and form an aggregation like https://www.dnsbl.info/)?

Curious what you think about https://atproto.com/:

  Algorithmic choice
  
  Control how you see the world through an open market of algorithms.
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