5 ms·

You know, the people who talk about USENET and IRC are people who don't want to be "updated" to what modern users demand. I don't know if you've had a look arou

You know, the people who talk about USENET and IRC are people who don't want to be "updated" to what modern users demand. I don't know if you've had a look around you lately, but the modern internet is a dumpster fire. Anyways, ideally you would be able to connect to services with whichever client you want. You could use a pretty eye candy client, or then not. With the web, however, it's an impossible feat to implement a standards compliant browser.

manigandham 7y ago
Modern internet is both good and bad. Depends on the site. Generalizations don't work. However if those technologies are to ever be popular than they'll need to be redesigned to keep pace with what the vast majority expect, which is in response to the OPs comment. Otherwise you can already go post on usenet right now. > "Anyways, ideally you would be able to connect to services with whichever client you want." Make it happen. This is my other point. People complain that all these fantastic legacy technologies aren't used but nobody puts in the work to modernize and use them. If it was that simple, where are all the companies doing it?
- rdiddly 7y ago
  Is it companies, that would or should do it? Colleges and other publicly-funded entities are who did it the first time. Companies can only do what's profitable. (Or what they can convince investors will someday be profitable, but we can ignore that aberration in the long term.)
  - manigandham 7y ago
    I didn't mean it that deeply, just that if people who believe these older technologies can drive modern incarnations then I would expect them to have produced products by now.
Alex3917 7y ago
> the people who talk about USENET and IRC are people who don't want to be "updated" to what modern users demand. IRC is objectively terrible. If you ask a question, the only way to get the answer is if you stay logged in until someone answers you. That's like buying a phone that doesn't ring unless you're already holding it up to your ear, or an email client that deletes all your email unless you happen to be looking at your inbox at the moment a new message arrives.
- sha666sum 7y ago
  I agree. What makes IRC good is that it's a text-only chat with a wide range of highly configurable, blazing fast clients. Not supporting images, quoting or reactions could be considered a feature, since these distract from the actual conversation at hand (consider newbies clogging the conversation with screenshots, or 100 people adding reaction emojis to a message).
- mehhh 7y ago
  I disagree with your false equivalency. IRC is akin to a cellphone without voicemail, as when your disconnected from the network (cellular or IRC) you just don't get communications. Scrollback and voicemail can be useful, but a good chunk of the population does not want either, hence unread backscroll and unconfigured/full voicemail boxes being very common.
  - hombre_fatal 7y ago
    >but a good chunk of the population does not want either The largest Freenode channels I'm on like #node.js and #javascript have about 10 regulars max, myself included. It's pretty much dead for any purpose other than hanging out with a handful of curmudgeons feeding off a corpse out of habit. Doesn't seem like "a good chunk" to me. IRC lacks the only feature I really care about in a chat network: new people to talk to, users. I wonder how many HNers who praise IRC only like the idea of it but don't even use it these days, either. And I haven't even heard HNers bring up usenet outside of downloading free shit so I know that's especially dead wrt this thread as a decentralized Reddit. So it always makes me chuckle to see "yeah, well, some people like it like that!" which is apparently virtually nobody. Or it's like how my two friends and I loved the failed, abandoned supermall in my hometown because the three of us could longboard down its parking garage.
smacktoward 7y ago
Usenet turned into a dumpster fire even more quickly than the Web did. It was completely overrun with spam and binaries by the late '90s.
- joecool1029 7y ago
  However, the spam mostly died off now. It's possible to have great convos with boomers complaining about each other finally. A small number of people came back because of the pseudoanonymous qualities. Honestly the only thing that really sucks is Google Groups users bumping 15 year old threads. Oh and binaries didn't go away, that's a feature and you just don't have to sync alt.bin.* if you want to avoid. I think it's great though for snatching rare/out of print stuff.
  - smacktoward 7y ago
    The spam died off because Usenet died off. If users ever went back to Usenet, the spam would come back again behind them. There's nothing in the design of Usenet that can stop spammers from spamming. (There wasn't anything back in the '90s in the design of email to stop spammers from spamming, either; but enough people cared enough about email that billions were spent to add that spam-proofing. Nobody cared enough about Usenet to invest a similar amount, so it's still as unprotected as it was when Monica Lewinsky was in the news.)

manigandham 7y ago

Modern internet is both good and bad. Depends on the site. Generalizations don't work. However if those technologies are to ever be popular than they'll need to be redesigned to keep pace with what the vast majority expect, which is in response to the OPs comment. Otherwise you can already go post on usenet right now. > "Anyways, ideally you would be able to connect to services with whichever client you want." Make it happen. This is my other point. People complain that all these fantastic legacy technologies aren't used but nobody puts in the work to modernize and use them. If it was that simple, where are all the companies doing it?

rdiddly 7y ago
Is it companies, that would or should do it? Colleges and other publicly-funded entities are who did it the first time. Companies can only do what's profitable. (Or what they can convince investors will someday be profitable, but we can ignore that aberration in the long term.)
- manigandham 7y ago
  I didn't mean it that deeply, just that if people who believe these older technologies can drive modern incarnations then I would expect them to have produced products by now.

Alex3917 7y ago

> the people who talk about USENET and IRC are people who don't want to be "updated" to what modern users demand. IRC is objectively terrible. If you ask a question, the only way to get the answer is if you stay logged in until someone answers you. That's like buying a phone that doesn't ring unless you're already holding it up to your ear, or an email client that deletes all your email unless you happen to be looking at your inbox at the moment a new message arrives.

sha666sum 7y ago
I agree. What makes IRC good is that it's a text-only chat with a wide range of highly configurable, blazing fast clients. Not supporting images, quoting or reactions could be considered a feature, since these distract from the actual conversation at hand (consider newbies clogging the conversation with screenshots, or 100 people adding reaction emojis to a message).
mehhh 7y ago
I disagree with your false equivalency. IRC is akin to a cellphone without voicemail, as when your disconnected from the network (cellular or IRC) you just don't get communications. Scrollback and voicemail can be useful, but a good chunk of the population does not want either, hence unread backscroll and unconfigured/full voicemail boxes being very common.
- hombre_fatal 7y ago
  >but a good chunk of the population does not want either The largest Freenode channels I'm on like #node.js and #javascript have about 10 regulars max, myself included. It's pretty much dead for any purpose other than hanging out with a handful of curmudgeons feeding off a corpse out of habit. Doesn't seem like "a good chunk" to me. IRC lacks the only feature I really care about in a chat network: new people to talk to, users. I wonder how many HNers who praise IRC only like the idea of it but don't even use it these days, either. And I haven't even heard HNers bring up usenet outside of downloading free shit so I know that's especially dead wrt this thread as a decentralized Reddit. So it always makes me chuckle to see "yeah, well, some people like it like that!" which is apparently virtually nobody. Or it's like how my two friends and I loved the failed, abandoned supermall in my hometown because the three of us could longboard down its parking garage.

smacktoward 7y ago

Usenet turned into a dumpster fire even more quickly than the Web did. It was completely overrun with spam and binaries by the late '90s.

joecool1029 7y ago
However, the spam mostly died off now. It's possible to have great convos with boomers complaining about each other finally. A small number of people came back because of the pseudoanonymous qualities. Honestly the only thing that really sucks is Google Groups users bumping 15 year old threads. Oh and binaries didn't go away, that's a feature and you just don't have to sync alt.bin.* if you want to avoid. I think it's great though for snatching rare/out of print stuff.
- smacktoward 7y ago
  The spam died off because Usenet died off. If users ever went back to Usenet, the spam would come back again behind them. There's nothing in the design of Usenet that can stop spammers from spamming. (There wasn't anything back in the '90s in the design of email to stop spammers from spamming, either; but enough people cared enough about email that billions were spent to add that spam-proofing. Nobody cared enough about Usenet to invest a similar amount, so it's still as unprotected as it was when Monica Lewinsky was in the news.)