3 ms·

Why are we all on HN and not Usenet, the original distributed link-sharing system?

• snaky 10y ago
  That's a very good question actually. GNUS is so much better than any web interface for that.
  • mbrock 10y ago
    "Better" in some sense. I've used Gnus a lot and I love it, but it's also very complicated, annoying to configure, hard to understand... and definitely doesn't work on iPhone. This web site is much, much easier to access than a newsgroup.
    • reitanqild 10y ago
      Alternatives did exists: I think I originally read newsgroups on Outlook Express and found it usable.
      • mbrock 10y ago
        That's true... though I happen to know that Outlook Express is notorious for strange NNTP protocol behavior... so that's another source of misery. Basically I'm just pointing out that one of the reasons that we seem to congregate mostly on centralized web sites is that they're extremely convenient in specific ways: you already have the client on all of your devices, etc.