5 ms·

I never got into the pre-web stuff, so I don't know exactly what the differences are. Don't those things still exist? Isn't the comment section of this HN po

I never got into the pre-web stuff, so I don't know exactly what the differences are. Don't those things still exist? Isn't the comment section of this HN post a form of async, text-only communication?

pmoriarty 9y ago
It's still centralized, and owned and run by a commercial entity that uses it to further their own interests, with a record of its users' interests and opinions. The capabilities and features of web forums are also really dumbed-down and limited compared to what you could get with the mail clients and news clients of even 20 or 30 years ago.
- DerfNet 9y ago
  Could you expand on that second line a bit? I'm curious what features we're currently missing out on compared to decades past.
  - pmoriarty 9y ago
    From a recent thread on "Why kernel development still uses email": [1] "This is one of the things that web-based forums have yet to get right. Email (and NNTP news) clients from 20 or 30 years ago are far superior in this respect, because they can intelligently deal with threading and folding. These features alone makes large conversations much easier to deal with than on web-forums. To add to that, email (and NNTP news) clients even from 20 or 30 years ago have other powerful features that web forums have yet to catch up on: - kill files[2] (which you can use to filter out unwanted articles/mails based on content or metadata such as subject, user, etc) - scoring - user-configurable anti-spam filtering or other "intelligent" filtering (such as bayesian filtering not just for spam/ham, but for interesting/unintersting content) - tagging not just on a site-wide level but at the client level so each user can tag messages/articles the way they make sense to them - other advanced filtering and scripting based on any of the above Web-based forums are just incredibly primitive compared to this many-decade-old technology." [1] - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15373179 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15373179 [2] - https://wikivisually.com/wiki/Kill_file https://wikivisually.com/wiki/Kill_file
    - ptero 9y ago
      I cannot agree more. When one is used to thread and folding for email or usenet, the user experience of web mail/forum seems woefully inadequate. When I first saw that gmail starts a new thread when you change a subject I did not believe it at first; I thought I have made a mistake in replying. Text-based clients of old (tin, pine, etc.) still outperform current monstrosities by a wide margin.
      - krapp 9y ago
        That's not an inherent limitation of the web or web forums, though - I've seen those features implemented in a lot of them. And of course, there's nothing stopping anyone from building a web forum and offering an endpoint for third party clients, they just don't, mostly because web forums themselves have more or less been superseded by Facebook, Twitter and Youtube, and no one seems to care about them anymore. The only pre-web feature that web forums can't really implement is decentralization.
    - CaptSpify 9y ago
      the tl;dr is: The user controls the content, not the site. One of the things we keep forgetting as we move forward is that client-control > server-control.
      - flukus 9y ago
        > One of the things we keep forgetting as we move forward is that client-control > server-control. I'm not sure if we're forgetting it, as an industry we seem hell bent on removing user control. SaaS, cloud hosting, software walled gardens, invasive automatic updates, hidden software in hardware, etc. We're losing more and more control all the time. Around here it's nearly heresy to suggest the companies run their own servers.
        CaptSpify 9y ago
        It's increasingly frustrating too as we've shown over and over and over again at how bad the security, user-interaction, pricing and support is for all of those systems. Yet we don't care, because "it's easier". There's a clear agenda to take back the power and voice that the computers are giving to the common man: http://opentranscripts.org/transcript/coming-war-general-computation/ http://opentranscripts.org/transcript/coming-war-general-com...
  - zeveb 9y ago
    NNTP was often hosted locally to the machine that you were reading on, so browsing it is incredibly fast, so much faster than using a website that it's not funny. Plus, the clients had things like killfiles, so that one could ignore a troll or a subject (or even fancier stuff, like scoring: maybe a user tends to have worthless comments, but what he says about one subject is really worthwhile).
- ntoe845noe 9y ago
  Yeah, I'm really surprised that most web forum software doesn't even let you sort comments by author, date, subject (which most comments don't have), etc. There were all sorts of useful things that usenet provided. (Not the least of which is kill files for ignoring trolls.)
  - anigbrowl 9y ago
    I think this is deliberate. Have you noticed how google makes it...very very difficult to get results of things in date order? When I've asked people who work there why (often in relation to things where the date information is well-structured, like legal opinions or scientific papers) they always respond with some vague and very obvious bullshit. Long story short, a lot of the large internet companies withhold or obscure functionality that users really want in order to keep them engaged and sell more ads. We have the technology to do a lot better than we are doing, but capital prefers to manufacture scarcity in the guise of abundance.
    - Razengan 9y ago
      > We have the technology to do a lot better than we are doing, but capital prefers to manufacture scarcity in the guise of abundance. Yes, the tight coupling of progress to profits is becoming very counter-productive. Too many good ideas and products that get killed because they can’t make enough money (and the criteria for “enough” keeps rising unnecessarily and exponentially, i.e. something has to sell in tens of millions to be considered a “success” even if half a million would be profitable.) We will need to rethink the role of money in human civilization if we don’t want it to become a corporate hell where every action is dictated by how much money it makes.
    - visarga 9y ago
      > a lot of the large internet companies withhold or obscure functionality that users really want For example, Google only lets you get a few results at the top of their search. What if you want to get the whole 100,000 of them? Sometimes it's important, for science.
      - 9y ago
deleted 9y ago
[deleted]
DanBC 9y ago
One difference is that HN is hosted on a server under the control of YC. If YC ever decide to destroy HN they can. With an HN Usenet newsgroup it'd be distributed across all the servers that carry that group. You could download software and host it yourself.
Santosh83 9y ago
Usenet and mailing lists are distributed. Web forums (like HN) are not. You can setup your own NNTP or mail server if you wanted, but there's only one place to post HN comments & that's right here, subject to all the pros & cons that entails.

pmoriarty 9y ago

It's still centralized, and owned and run by a commercial entity that uses it to further their own interests, with a record of its users' interests and opinions. The capabilities and features of web forums are also really dumbed-down and limited compared to what you could get with the mail clients and news clients of even 20 or 30 years ago.

DerfNet 9y ago
Could you expand on that second line a bit? I'm curious what features we're currently missing out on compared to decades past.
- pmoriarty 9y ago
  From a recent thread on "Why kernel development still uses email": [1] "This is one of the things that web-based forums have yet to get right. Email (and NNTP news) clients from 20 or 30 years ago are far superior in this respect, because they can intelligently deal with threading and folding. These features alone makes large conversations much easier to deal with than on web-forums. To add to that, email (and NNTP news) clients even from 20 or 30 years ago have other powerful features that web forums have yet to catch up on: - kill files[2] (which you can use to filter out unwanted articles/mails based on content or metadata such as subject, user, etc) - scoring - user-configurable anti-spam filtering or other "intelligent" filtering (such as bayesian filtering not just for spam/ham, but for interesting/unintersting content) - tagging not just on a site-wide level but at the client level so each user can tag messages/articles the way they make sense to them - other advanced filtering and scripting based on any of the above Web-based forums are just incredibly primitive compared to this many-decade-old technology." [1] - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15373179 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15373179 [2] - https://wikivisually.com/wiki/Kill_file https://wikivisually.com/wiki/Kill_file
  - ptero 9y ago
    I cannot agree more. When one is used to thread and folding for email or usenet, the user experience of web mail/forum seems woefully inadequate. When I first saw that gmail starts a new thread when you change a subject I did not believe it at first; I thought I have made a mistake in replying. Text-based clients of old (tin, pine, etc.) still outperform current monstrosities by a wide margin.
    - krapp 9y ago
      That's not an inherent limitation of the web or web forums, though - I've seen those features implemented in a lot of them. And of course, there's nothing stopping anyone from building a web forum and offering an endpoint for third party clients, they just don't, mostly because web forums themselves have more or less been superseded by Facebook, Twitter and Youtube, and no one seems to care about them anymore. The only pre-web feature that web forums can't really implement is decentralization.
  - CaptSpify 9y ago
    the tl;dr is: The user controls the content, not the site. One of the things we keep forgetting as we move forward is that client-control > server-control.
    - flukus 9y ago
      > One of the things we keep forgetting as we move forward is that client-control > server-control. I'm not sure if we're forgetting it, as an industry we seem hell bent on removing user control. SaaS, cloud hosting, software walled gardens, invasive automatic updates, hidden software in hardware, etc. We're losing more and more control all the time. Around here it's nearly heresy to suggest the companies run their own servers.
      - CaptSpify 9y ago
        It's increasingly frustrating too as we've shown over and over and over again at how bad the security, user-interaction, pricing and support is for all of those systems. Yet we don't care, because "it's easier". There's a clear agenda to take back the power and voice that the computers are giving to the common man: http://opentranscripts.org/transcript/coming-war-general-computation/ http://opentranscripts.org/transcript/coming-war-general-com...
- zeveb 9y ago
  NNTP was often hosted locally to the machine that you were reading on, so browsing it is incredibly fast, so much faster than using a website that it's not funny. Plus, the clients had things like killfiles, so that one could ignore a troll or a subject (or even fancier stuff, like scoring: maybe a user tends to have worthless comments, but what he says about one subject is really worthwhile).
ntoe845noe 9y ago
Yeah, I'm really surprised that most web forum software doesn't even let you sort comments by author, date, subject (which most comments don't have), etc. There were all sorts of useful things that usenet provided. (Not the least of which is kill files for ignoring trolls.)
- anigbrowl 9y ago
  I think this is deliberate. Have you noticed how google makes it...very very difficult to get results of things in date order? When I've asked people who work there why (often in relation to things where the date information is well-structured, like legal opinions or scientific papers) they always respond with some vague and very obvious bullshit. Long story short, a lot of the large internet companies withhold or obscure functionality that users really want in order to keep them engaged and sell more ads. We have the technology to do a lot better than we are doing, but capital prefers to manufacture scarcity in the guise of abundance.
  - Razengan 9y ago
    > We have the technology to do a lot better than we are doing, but capital prefers to manufacture scarcity in the guise of abundance. Yes, the tight coupling of progress to profits is becoming very counter-productive. Too many good ideas and products that get killed because they can’t make enough money (and the criteria for “enough” keeps rising unnecessarily and exponentially, i.e. something has to sell in tens of millions to be considered a “success” even if half a million would be profitable.) We will need to rethink the role of money in human civilization if we don’t want it to become a corporate hell where every action is dictated by how much money it makes.
  - visarga 9y ago
    > a lot of the large internet companies withhold or obscure functionality that users really want For example, Google only lets you get a few results at the top of their search. What if you want to get the whole 100,000 of them? Sometimes it's important, for science.
    - 9y ago

deleted 9y ago

[deleted]

DanBC 9y ago

One difference is that HN is hosted on a server under the control of YC. If YC ever decide to destroy HN they can. With an HN Usenet newsgroup it'd be distributed across all the servers that carry that group. You could download software and host it yourself.

Santosh83 9y ago

Usenet and mailing lists are distributed. Web forums (like HN) are not. You can setup your own NNTP or mail server if you wanted, but there's only one place to post HN comments & that's right here, subject to all the pros & cons that entails.