7 ms·

Really? Well IMVHO the best "re-invention" of social web, actually social internet is already there for long, long time, respond to the name of "usenet". No-on

by xte 8y ago

Really? Well IMVHO the best "re-invention" of social web, actually social internet is already there for long, long time, respond to the name of "usenet". No-one "own" it, it's an open and well-know standard so we have various client&servers and we can build other if someone wish. All interested posts can be kept on our personal computers, locally indexed for fully offline search (the best guarantee of censorship-resistance and the simpler and quicker solution), both client and servers are far simpler than modern webapps, ... That's the social, free, people-centric internet. Reinventing the wheel with complex and less effective solutions is not a good idea IMVHO... Sorry for being rude and for my poor English.

gweinberg 8y ago
I really don't understand why Usenet died out, when the replacements were all worse.
- scoggs 8y ago
  Maybe it was off putting to the less tech savvy? In a similar way to how people react to reddit the first few times they see it. You know, something like "How do I use this website? It's just tons of text. It's confusing and ugly. If I go to Google Images and search "usenet" it looks more like an FTP program than any sort of "social" website or social anything. It might be a case of people just not getting or knowing that Usenet is in fact a "social bulletin board" of sorts?
  - smacktoward 8y ago
    I was there when Usenet died. It died because it had absolutely no protections against spam or abuse of any kind whatsoever. My favorite discussion boards were buried alive under a colossal mountain of spam and binaries. Usenet was designed in a time when the Internet was only used by a tiny number of people, all of whom depended on prestigious institutions for their access to it and thus had strong motivations to not to abuse that access (since doing so would be something like career suicide). Many core assumptions in its design rest fundamentally on this always being true, which today it very much is not.
    - xte 8y ago
      That's true but only to a limited extent: if you see today's we still have active groups without spam, with highly valuable discussions... Spam is a symptom of our social degradation, and it's not a thing of usenet nor internet nor IT, it's about our society that reforms schools to form Ford-model workers at any level because they are easier to manage, that promote ignorance just to sell more stuff etc. Something that ANY communication free, user-centric, platform, usenet included, can contribute to reduce. When we are citizens we tend to be honest (on average), when we are consumers we tend to be raw and the right answer we all know that's not put "more cops" like in the prohibitionist era in the US or Victorian era in UK but empower people. We know even from today's data, there are more unwanted teenage pregnancies in US state with "chastity tendency" than in countries like French or Sweden with a strong sexual education at school, there are more violence in "strong police" (sorry I do not know how to name it in English) like Russia, USA, UK, Arab world than in "soft police" countries like Swiss.
      - scoggs 8y ago
        Agreed. I hate saying this but it seems like Usenet's downfall may have been the rise of anonymity? Or at least it played a large part in it. Of course using your true identity to participate in online social platforms isn't required for them to be good and on the other side of the coin even real live people on social media sites act terrible towards others and "ruin it for everyone", or any other type of buzzword / rationale used to describe the phenomenon.
        gweinberg 8y ago
        I don't think we need to be able to link posts to meatspace identities, but I think we do need to have some kind of persistent identities, and there need to be some kind of cost to create new ones.
        xte 8y ago
        IMVHO simply because of social degradation, in the past even outlaws normally behave far better in society, we (as society) simply became from adults to child, regardless of our age and that's the problem. Someone think that's being child it's easy, pleasant, so a nice selling point, also children are easy to manage so good for managers/politician etc, but there is a problem, children needs parents to live, they can't stand on their foots in the wild. On a more limited point of view usenet work well enough for any tech savvy user and commerce see no opportunity in developing it, preferring instead push less free and more profitable web tech solutions, so on one side peoples get advertisements of "new colorful, 'featureful' platforms" and on the other nntp client like desktop MUA does not improve in any way. Take as an example actual MUA for the masses like Thunderbird, they look '90-style, with all limitation of ancient clients, compare to webmail's evolution... Of course we have notmuch, mutt&forks, pine&forks, but they are not for the masses, so vast majority goes for actual pre-made webmail food...
- xte 8y ago
  Simply "sheep effect" + ignorance. usenet is text-based and normally used with a desktop client. People start to see colorful webapps and go for them without thinking. Consider that most "web users" now do not really know the difference between a browser and a webapp. Do not care about freedom as long as they feel free. It's the classic Chomsky frog, now water start to be a bit hot but still ok for most people, when it will boil... It will be simply too late to came back. An example scenario, GMail now is a semi-standard mail service (not really standard IMAP but can work with substantially any MUA) and a WebUI. If most people only know WebUI and tomorrow Alphabet decide to drop external IMAP+smtp support? If after decide to make service paid? What you have in hand with all your messages on Google servers? Another scenario, what if a government start to censor? Usenet can be blocked (and blocks circumvented) but still no one can really own it. A proprietary platform can be owned. Even if you have the code you still need server, users etc, with usenet you only need your PC.
  - krapp 8y ago
    >Simply "sheep effect" + ignorance. >People start to see colorful webapps and go for them without thinking. Don't describe common users as ignorant sheep or children who grasp at software because of the colors. The rest of your comment is fine but we don't need any more elitism here.
    - justtopost 8y ago
      While obviously hyperbole, it can be helpful to design for the common (often the lowest) denomonator. We don't and shouldn't demonize 'idiot-proofing', nor discount its utility. Sure, the 'sheeple' meme is cliche, but apropos.
      - xte 8y ago
        Compare classic unices to Windows/OSX: in class system you have to learn, you can't go further without, but if you learn you grow, your comfort augment, you can afford more thing in less time and ease. In Windows/OSX etc initial learning curve is't shorter and easier, but you can't grow. All the rest of your life remain in that's initial limited state, always depending on "expert" for anything. That's the difference between trying (and regularly fail) to be idiot-proof and trying to say "hey guys! You have to learn! It's easy, a bit long, and we can help, that's the path".
- jasode 8y ago
  >, when the replacements were all worse. Better or worse has multidimensional factors. You have to separate out what some techies like vs what the typical web surfer likes. Usenet doesn't have: 1) upvote/downvote and algorithmic ranking -- which is what Digg and Reddit were good at. Typical web surfers like to see the most upvoted stories and most upvoted comments. In contrast on Usenet, it requires a separate newsgroup reader and configuring filters and manual curation. This is too much techie work for regular folks that want a quick dopamine hit of random web content. 2) good spam control. No system is perfect but web forums like reddit and HN have less spam than Usenet. 3) rich text and formatting. The private web-based forums software like vBulletin and PhpBB are good at this. E.g. upload photos, add colorful smiley faces, avatars, etc. 4) no easy way to be "lurker" with Usenet (at least in the 1990s). To retrieve the latest Usenet posts, your newsgroup reader software had to have an "account id". Reddit and HN don't need any sign up just to read posts; just point the browser at a url. Therefore, instant gratification. Usenet is "worse" in some dimensions when considering multiple dimensions of convenience and usability. Yes, Usenet is better on some dimensions such as offline reading and non-central ownership. However, I think we can agree that typical web surfers don't care about those attributes.
  - xte 8y ago
    Well... Spam was not a real thing at the usenet golden age, killfile largely suffice. Today thanks to the experience we have from emails we can easily apply antispam to usenet. On rich text... Well, while I welcome an org-mode-formatted usenet I still do not see any point in having text formatting capabilities, most of formatted text on the web looks really ugly and it does not help reading. Also if we re-learn to write down text in terms of formatting (for instance knowing that more than 80 columns start to be hard to read, using short URLs etc), with the classic netiquette rules we write down better contents, and perhaps with more attention. Try only to compare readability of modern web-platforms respect of ancient usenet posts in a good client and also compare the "medium quality" of posts. Photos can be a problem often circumvented by base64-encode stuff, fidocad etc, however when you really need to insert an image or video in something you post? On upvotes, well personally I think gamification in general as a really bad idea and in general anything that pave the way to aggregators a bad idea. To let ideas, thoughts flow without soft-censorship we need to control us, individually, our information flow. That's why I favor RSS/Atom instead of modern aggregators, that's why I dislike HN interface etc. Generally speaking if you make a business well you have to follow or try to drive client's interests but if you make a free software o technical stuff you have to do what you think it's technically best, didactically best. Think for instance about child educations, or simpler think about Ubuntu's Unity desktop: nearly all of us GNU/Linux users from few years before Unity we start to put "launchers" on left or right side of the screen simply because we feel the need of more vertical space and we know that too long/big launchers list it's practically unuseful like having classic dummy users forest of desktop icons, we all have ha small top bar from Fluxbox to Gnome or Enlightenment. Unity devs see this and "force a bit" their users to choose this superior model. At first it was not much welcomed, now it's "The Standard" of modern GNU/Linux desktop, same for "hit a key, type something, hit enter on first mach" workflow vs classic menu-based searches. That's "education". Usenet is about users, a free software/protocol, not a commercial product. Of course it have rooms for improvements, but improvements does not means reinvent the wheel in a limited and anti-users way.
- oiuew83 8y ago
  Read or watch the news to understand why: jobs, market growth, yadda yadda.
- JoshMnem 8y ago
  It rapidly declined when Google pulled all the content into Google Groups. I'm pretty sure that's what killed it. Until that point it was great. It was an interesting kind of discussion forum that was worth paying for.
- walterstucco 8y ago
  Because you have to read, while social networks are the modern era equivalent of zapping on television People look at the screen and scroll, they don't even stop for reading the titles
scoggs 8y ago
You are not rude at all! Your English, while not 100% perfect, is very close to perfect and still easy to understand. If you want some help understanding where you made mistakes I'm glad to help. I'm always envious of non-English speakers seeming to speak English so well and apologizing for their bad English. Not many people I know (and of course myself) have an easy time learning 2nd and even 3rd languages. I can barely stumble around making conversation in Spanish but I try. I'd never be able to participate on HN if it were a Spanish-speaking website, though.
- xte 8y ago
  Thanks! While here is not the right place I always welcome corrections not only about my English but in general, corrections and constructive critics are a fundamental and terribly effective ontological path :-) A thing these days we somewhat lost unfortunately...
  - scoggs 8y ago
    Yes, I was going to say here is not the place so if you are interested make a suggestion or I can leave information on how you can find me (and I'll delete it very quick after you obtain it).
programmarchy 8y ago
There's not really a social graph for usenet, though, is there? Usenet is "file first", not "people first" like Andre discussed in his talk. Usenet seem too brittle, too centralized to ultimately become a decentralized social network. To achieve the use cases proposed in the video you'd have to implement a whole new layer on top of Usenet anyway.

by xte 8y ago

gweinberg 8y ago

I really don't understand why Usenet died out, when the replacements were all worse.

scoggs 8y ago
Maybe it was off putting to the less tech savvy? In a similar way to how people react to reddit the first few times they see it. You know, something like "How do I use this website? It's just tons of text. It's confusing and ugly. If I go to Google Images and search "usenet" it looks more like an FTP program than any sort of "social" website or social anything. It might be a case of people just not getting or knowing that Usenet is in fact a "social bulletin board" of sorts?
- smacktoward 8y ago
  I was there when Usenet died. It died because it had absolutely no protections against spam or abuse of any kind whatsoever. My favorite discussion boards were buried alive under a colossal mountain of spam and binaries. Usenet was designed in a time when the Internet was only used by a tiny number of people, all of whom depended on prestigious institutions for their access to it and thus had strong motivations to not to abuse that access (since doing so would be something like career suicide). Many core assumptions in its design rest fundamentally on this always being true, which today it very much is not.
  - xte 8y ago
    That's true but only to a limited extent: if you see today's we still have active groups without spam, with highly valuable discussions... Spam is a symptom of our social degradation, and it's not a thing of usenet nor internet nor IT, it's about our society that reforms schools to form Ford-model workers at any level because they are easier to manage, that promote ignorance just to sell more stuff etc. Something that ANY communication free, user-centric, platform, usenet included, can contribute to reduce. When we are citizens we tend to be honest (on average), when we are consumers we tend to be raw and the right answer we all know that's not put "more cops" like in the prohibitionist era in the US or Victorian era in UK but empower people. We know even from today's data, there are more unwanted teenage pregnancies in US state with "chastity tendency" than in countries like French or Sweden with a strong sexual education at school, there are more violence in "strong police" (sorry I do not know how to name it in English) like Russia, USA, UK, Arab world than in "soft police" countries like Swiss.
    - scoggs 8y ago
      Agreed. I hate saying this but it seems like Usenet's downfall may have been the rise of anonymity? Or at least it played a large part in it. Of course using your true identity to participate in online social platforms isn't required for them to be good and on the other side of the coin even real live people on social media sites act terrible towards others and "ruin it for everyone", or any other type of buzzword / rationale used to describe the phenomenon.
      - gweinberg 8y ago
        I don't think we need to be able to link posts to meatspace identities, but I think we do need to have some kind of persistent identities, and there need to be some kind of cost to create new ones.
      - xte 8y ago
        IMVHO simply because of social degradation, in the past even outlaws normally behave far better in society, we (as society) simply became from adults to child, regardless of our age and that's the problem. Someone think that's being child it's easy, pleasant, so a nice selling point, also children are easy to manage so good for managers/politician etc, but there is a problem, children needs parents to live, they can't stand on their foots in the wild. On a more limited point of view usenet work well enough for any tech savvy user and commerce see no opportunity in developing it, preferring instead push less free and more profitable web tech solutions, so on one side peoples get advertisements of "new colorful, 'featureful' platforms" and on the other nntp client like desktop MUA does not improve in any way. Take as an example actual MUA for the masses like Thunderbird, they look '90-style, with all limitation of ancient clients, compare to webmail's evolution... Of course we have notmuch, mutt&forks, pine&forks, but they are not for the masses, so vast majority goes for actual pre-made webmail food...
xte 8y ago
Simply "sheep effect" + ignorance. usenet is text-based and normally used with a desktop client. People start to see colorful webapps and go for them without thinking. Consider that most "web users" now do not really know the difference between a browser and a webapp. Do not care about freedom as long as they feel free. It's the classic Chomsky frog, now water start to be a bit hot but still ok for most people, when it will boil... It will be simply too late to came back. An example scenario, GMail now is a semi-standard mail service (not really standard IMAP but can work with substantially any MUA) and a WebUI. If most people only know WebUI and tomorrow Alphabet decide to drop external IMAP+smtp support? If after decide to make service paid? What you have in hand with all your messages on Google servers? Another scenario, what if a government start to censor? Usenet can be blocked (and blocks circumvented) but still no one can really own it. A proprietary platform can be owned. Even if you have the code you still need server, users etc, with usenet you only need your PC.
- krapp 8y ago
  >Simply "sheep effect" + ignorance. >People start to see colorful webapps and go for them without thinking. Don't describe common users as ignorant sheep or children who grasp at software because of the colors. The rest of your comment is fine but we don't need any more elitism here.
  - justtopost 8y ago
    While obviously hyperbole, it can be helpful to design for the common (often the lowest) denomonator. We don't and shouldn't demonize 'idiot-proofing', nor discount its utility. Sure, the 'sheeple' meme is cliche, but apropos.
    - xte 8y ago
      Compare classic unices to Windows/OSX: in class system you have to learn, you can't go further without, but if you learn you grow, your comfort augment, you can afford more thing in less time and ease. In Windows/OSX etc initial learning curve is't shorter and easier, but you can't grow. All the rest of your life remain in that's initial limited state, always depending on "expert" for anything. That's the difference between trying (and regularly fail) to be idiot-proof and trying to say "hey guys! You have to learn! It's easy, a bit long, and we can help, that's the path".
jasode 8y ago
>, when the replacements were all worse. Better or worse has multidimensional factors. You have to separate out what some techies like vs what the typical web surfer likes. Usenet doesn't have: 1) upvote/downvote and algorithmic ranking -- which is what Digg and Reddit were good at. Typical web surfers like to see the most upvoted stories and most upvoted comments. In contrast on Usenet, it requires a separate newsgroup reader and configuring filters and manual curation. This is too much techie work for regular folks that want a quick dopamine hit of random web content. 2) good spam control. No system is perfect but web forums like reddit and HN have less spam than Usenet. 3) rich text and formatting. The private web-based forums software like vBulletin and PhpBB are good at this. E.g. upload photos, add colorful smiley faces, avatars, etc. 4) no easy way to be "lurker" with Usenet (at least in the 1990s). To retrieve the latest Usenet posts, your newsgroup reader software had to have an "account id". Reddit and HN don't need any sign up just to read posts; just point the browser at a url. Therefore, instant gratification. Usenet is "worse" in some dimensions when considering multiple dimensions of convenience and usability. Yes, Usenet is better on some dimensions such as offline reading and non-central ownership. However, I think we can agree that typical web surfers don't care about those attributes.
- xte 8y ago
  Well... Spam was not a real thing at the usenet golden age, killfile largely suffice. Today thanks to the experience we have from emails we can easily apply antispam to usenet. On rich text... Well, while I welcome an org-mode-formatted usenet I still do not see any point in having text formatting capabilities, most of formatted text on the web looks really ugly and it does not help reading. Also if we re-learn to write down text in terms of formatting (for instance knowing that more than 80 columns start to be hard to read, using short URLs etc), with the classic netiquette rules we write down better contents, and perhaps with more attention. Try only to compare readability of modern web-platforms respect of ancient usenet posts in a good client and also compare the "medium quality" of posts. Photos can be a problem often circumvented by base64-encode stuff, fidocad etc, however when you really need to insert an image or video in something you post? On upvotes, well personally I think gamification in general as a really bad idea and in general anything that pave the way to aggregators a bad idea. To let ideas, thoughts flow without soft-censorship we need to control us, individually, our information flow. That's why I favor RSS/Atom instead of modern aggregators, that's why I dislike HN interface etc. Generally speaking if you make a business well you have to follow or try to drive client's interests but if you make a free software o technical stuff you have to do what you think it's technically best, didactically best. Think for instance about child educations, or simpler think about Ubuntu's Unity desktop: nearly all of us GNU/Linux users from few years before Unity we start to put "launchers" on left or right side of the screen simply because we feel the need of more vertical space and we know that too long/big launchers list it's practically unuseful like having classic dummy users forest of desktop icons, we all have ha small top bar from Fluxbox to Gnome or Enlightenment. Unity devs see this and "force a bit" their users to choose this superior model. At first it was not much welcomed, now it's "The Standard" of modern GNU/Linux desktop, same for "hit a key, type something, hit enter on first mach" workflow vs classic menu-based searches. That's "education". Usenet is about users, a free software/protocol, not a commercial product. Of course it have rooms for improvements, but improvements does not means reinvent the wheel in a limited and anti-users way.
oiuew83 8y ago
Read or watch the news to understand why: jobs, market growth, yadda yadda.
JoshMnem 8y ago
It rapidly declined when Google pulled all the content into Google Groups. I'm pretty sure that's what killed it. Until that point it was great. It was an interesting kind of discussion forum that was worth paying for.
walterstucco 8y ago
Because you have to read, while social networks are the modern era equivalent of zapping on television People look at the screen and scroll, they don't even stop for reading the titles

scoggs 8y ago

You are not rude at all! Your English, while not 100% perfect, is very close to perfect and still easy to understand. If you want some help understanding where you made mistakes I'm glad to help. I'm always envious of non-English speakers seeming to speak English so well and apologizing for their bad English. Not many people I know (and of course myself) have an easy time learning 2nd and even 3rd languages. I can barely stumble around making conversation in Spanish but I try. I'd never be able to participate on HN if it were a Spanish-speaking website, though.

xte 8y ago
Thanks! While here is not the right place I always welcome corrections not only about my English but in general, corrections and constructive critics are a fundamental and terribly effective ontological path :-) A thing these days we somewhat lost unfortunately...
- scoggs 8y ago
  Yes, I was going to say here is not the place so if you are interested make a suggestion or I can leave information on how you can find me (and I'll delete it very quick after you obtain it).

programmarchy 8y ago

There's not really a social graph for usenet, though, is there? Usenet is "file first", not "people first" like Andre discussed in his talk. Usenet seem too brittle, too centralized to ultimately become a decentralized social network. To achieve the use cases proposed in the video you'd have to implement a whole new layer on top of Usenet anyway.