4 ms·
I loved USENET. Still do for the few comp.sys groups I visit and that are still active.
by ddingus 7y ago
I loved USENET. Still do for the few comp.sys groups I visit and that are still active.
- jandrese 7y agoI loved how efficient it was. Unfortunately, that was also the downfall as it allowed people to spam efficiently. I'm still bummed that everything went to the web instead of trying to fix the moderation problem on the Usenet. I have never seen an online discussion forum as fast and featureful as my old Usenet client.
- ddingus 7y agoAnd real, no hassle, threaded discussion! I have similar thoughts. Perhaps solving that problem would still count.
- blotter_paper 7y agoHashcash? More realistically, for all the places where a web-of-trust model fails moderation seems like the perfect fit for it. I see no reason we can't have multiple teams of moderators whitelisting/blacklisting different content in the same namespace, with their changes applied only to users who opt-in.
- na85 7y agoFederated accounts between servers might be a nice overlay feature set. Servers can just reject mail from any unauthenticated user, and sync user databases periodically.
- kevin_thibedeau 7y agoFederated moderation enables extremists to blacklist people who endorse something they don't personally like and limit their ability to use other sites.
- dmd 7y agoThis is a plot point in Neal Stephenson's "Fall".
- TMWNN 7y agoReddit, despite its own flaws, is the closest thing to Usenet in terms of a text-oriented display with keyboard-heavy navigation (with Reddit Enhancement Suite).
- jandrese 7y agoReddit is definitely closest to the old Usenet experience, but its search engine and filters leave something to be desired.
- anthk 7y agoI prefer uncensored.citadel.org. Yes, no https support, but you can login over SSH with ssh bbs@uncensored.citadel.org and use it as a modern BBS. It works great.
- EamonnMR 7y agoI love finding these retro-net communities. Another good one is the bboard at sdf.org.
- astronautjones 7y agowarning for other users: i randomly clicked on the israel subforum and politics one and... yikes. chan-level bigotry
- jandrese 7y agoI'm not in love with the interface to be honest. It's great if you want to consume absolutely everything, but if you want to pick and choose in a topic thread there isn't a summary view as far as I can tell. It's kind of like reading specific #hashtags on Twitter.
- anthk 7y agokillfiles, and you are done. Even better, slrn has a TUI assistant. My ~/.jnewsrc comp.lang.c! comp.lang.c.moderated! comp.lang.fortran! comp.lang.perl.misc! comp.lang.perl.moderated! comp.unix.shell! rec.arts.int-fiction! rec.games.int-fiction! rec.games.roguelike.nethack! rec.humor.funny.reruns! rec.humor.funny! rec.humor!
- allenbrunson 7y ago> killfiles, and you are done. no, that didn't work. and that's a lot of the reason that usenet died. no matter how many of the regulars in any given group might killfile the local trolls, there was always at least a few people that did almost nothing but spar with them, filling the group with information-free dross that nobody sane was interested in. and there was nothing stopping the trolls from mutating their email addresses frequently, in an attempt to evade killfiles. hacker news is more-or-less drama-free because the mods have the power to remove disruptive users. if you'd try to apply a killfile-like solution here, HN would be long dead by now.