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> Usenet was a place where top talents of the world used to talk together with amateurs on the more disparate topics. Twitter has adopted some of these functio
by beaumartinez 15y ago
> Usenet was a place where top talents of the world used to talk together with amateurs on the more disparate topics.
Twitter has adopted some of these functions: it allows anyone to hold open conversations on any topic (albeit limited to 140 characters); enough (important) people are on Twitter and use it with enough frequency to make this possible.
- cipherpunk 15y agoWhen I hear Twitter being compared to the golden age of Usenet, I reach for my pistol. Nothing of real substance fits into 140 characters. Which is unfortunate, really, since Twitter is so popular these days.
- btilly 15y agoNot even remotely the same. When I got involved in the early 90s, sci.math (to name a random example) had over 100,000 regular readers. Participants ran the range from beginners who didn't understand Calculus to tenured professors to random kooks. (Sometimes those categories overlapped - eg Alexander Abian.) Conversations regularly were complex meandering affairs where participants frequently kept 3-6 different threads of the same conversation going in the same posts. I am not aware of any discussion forum today that is online with anything like that readership and range of participants. I'm also not aware of any with that tolerance for complex conversations. (You can do it with email - I have - but when people mix top posting with bottom posting with interleaved posting, it turns into a mess. To do it like Usenet did you must use interleaved posting.)
- lukeschlather 15y agoYou see some very cool, informative, deep conversations on Reddit and HN from time to time. The main missing thing is the userbase.
- btilly 15y agoThe more important qualifier is "from time to time". What I miss most about Usenet is that there were always interesting conversations, that were expected to take place over time. Here how many conversations are still going on a day later? A week later?
- Alex3917 15y agoTwitter has replaced Usenet to roughly the same extent that 4chan has replaced Plato's academy.
- lsc 15y agoLeaving aside the character limit, it's quite difficult to follow a 'thread' on twitter. It's a great broadcast medium for short updates "server X is down" and so on, but not so great for conversations.
- kahawe 15y agoI strongly doubt half of those "VIPs" are actually taking care of their twittering/facebooking themselves so at best you reach someone actually working directly for said "VIP".