8 ms·

Mailing lists? Bring back usenet! In all seriousness, by far the best professional discussion i have ever had was at a company in 2000 which ran an internal NN

by twic 5y ago

Mailing lists? Bring back usenet! In all seriousness, by far the best professional discussion i have ever had was at a company in 2000 which ran an internal NNTP server. For me, that combined the relevant strengths of email with a format more suited to active multi-party discussion.

superkuh 5y ago
Just be the change you want to see. I've been posting on alt.startrek and alt.cyberpunk sporadically again for a couple years now. https://www.eternal-september.org/ https://www.eternal-september.org/ is a great group that provides free text group access and posting.
- walterbell 5y ago
  > Just be the change you want to see. Timeless advice. Still applicable in tech thanks to open-source software, even as people lose agency in other areas.
hdjjhhvvhga 5y ago
It was because of people, not the medium. Usenet was a great place for discussions, especially (but not only) on technical topics, by and for relatively competent people - at the beginning most people using it were from the academia. At some point (around AOL?) the inflow of newbies completely broke that paradigm. Mind you, newsgroups had their dark aspects, too. Some binary groups had contents you'd prefer not to see - simply because the public at large was not really aware NNTP exists.
- Multicomp 5y ago
  > At some point (around AOL?) the inflow of newbies completely broke that paradigm. That event was called Eternal September, and netiquette has never been the same, or so I am told.
  - kevin_thibedeau 5y ago
    Kids these days have no respect for saving bandwidth with their inane top posting.
- sp332 5y ago
  Yeah, when AOL allowed Usenet access.
- globular-toast 5y ago
  I think it's a bit of both. Most people under 30 have only known the type of email emitted by Microsoft products, Gmail, spammers and retailers etc. To these people, bottom-quoting is the only option that exists (mail readers like Gmail will hide your message from them if you attempt to do top or inline/correct/sane quoting)). HTML mail is normal and expected. Proprietary attachments with "invitations" and the like is normal and expected. It's just a completely different thing to what those users were using back then. Mailing lists work because they work best with old-fashioned email. Old-fashioned email just works better. It requires a certain level of training to use properly (e.g. how to do inline quoting etc.). This is a good thing. But people seem reluctant to learn skills as an adult, especially when it comes to IT. More importantly, mailing lists rely on etiquette (netiquette) to function well. This is essential for any interactions between responsible adults. But nowadays people have been trained to expect coded rules. They are used to operating in a playpen where they can test the boundaries with no consequences, like children. Discord is just the latest regression in a long line of distilling what it means to have discourse into a few easily managed rules. It's ironic because, on the face of it, Discord with its huge array of "stickers", "emojis" and "fun" attachments etc. seems like it should be more expressive and allow for deeper discussion. But, in fact, by pushing aside language, etiquette and training in favour of emojis, canned phrases, and strict rules we get shallow, repetitive, and, frankly, boring exchanges. Great for mindless drones to do bullshit jobs, I'm sure. Bad for deep and enlightening discussion and debate.
  - speed_spread 5y ago
    I find plain mailing lists to be less search-friendly. They're fine if you're an active participant but IMO need to be complemented with a proper web facade for passive consultation of past issues, design decisions, etc.
    - minusf 5y ago
      really depends on the mailing list software. unfortunately there is basically google grouops and/or mailman2/mailman3. for self hosting there isn't even a choice at all: mailing lists suffer even more from what forums suffer as well: little software choice that ticks all the boxes for different people with different needs. however the real (search) power of the mailing lists is of course that you have the mails locally for the lists where you are subscribed to... i remember forum searches becoming so heavy, site wide search forms had to be hidden behind sign up walls... and it was mostly poor keywords search, forget about full text. with local emails at least i get a shot at organizing and searching for it. try saving a local copy of a forum thread...
- ColinWright 5y ago
  As others have said, it was the "Eternal September": https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eternal_September https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eternal_September It was when the flood of incomers was large enough that the enculturation process failed.
  - wyager 5y ago
    I think the enculturation model is incomplete; I think another big aspect of it is that the system’s capacity as an IQ filter diminishes. It’s easy to get 100 people together that are mostly >2stddev, but it’s basically impossible to get 10,000 people together that are mostly >2stddev. The same process has occurred on many websites. I don’t think the culture necessarily changes as much as the userbase just gets dumber.
    - BizarroLand 5y ago
      IQ doesn't have the relevance you think it does, it's basically an thinly veiled excuse to be an elitist jerk. Being technical is a pathway and IQ only identifies how fast you can travel down that pathway. Someone who started before you but who moves slower can still be far beyond you or have gone down paths to treasures you would never discover because you with your high IQ decided it was dumb.
    - exo-pla-net 5y ago
      Axiom 1: Knowledgeable and mature people are repulsed by windbags and vicious people. Axiom 2: There are vastly more windbags and vicious people than there are knowledgeable and mature people. Axiom 3: Online moderation / gatekeeping is imperfect. Axiom 4: Successful moderation depends on a few keystone people. Lemma 1: A community of knowledgeable, mature people will be under perpetual assault by entropy. The internet baseline of know-nothing gasbags and vicious, damaged people will be pounding on the gates of any community. Lemma 2: Some of the horde will bypass any gatekeeping and moderation to land blows on the knowledgeable and mature people. They'll be repulsed, and some will leave the community. Lemma 3: The keystone moderators are inevitably among the people subjected to these blows. After a serious blow or one blow too many, some will get fed up and leave, and moderation will get worse, increasing the rate of knowledgeable and mature people getting repulsed by their own community and leaving. A hole will form in the fortifications, and the barbarians will flood in, driving out everyone mature and knowledgeable. Thereom: A knowledgeable, mature online community that is open to new users will eventually collapse into the internet baseline. Corollary 1: If you're knowledgeable and mature and currently part of an open online community you love, you too will eventually get repulsed by it and leave. Enjoy it while it lasts. Corollary 2: There are several knowledgeable and mature people here on Hacker News. They're here entirely because of dang. He is our keystone, weathering the assault of the barbarians for all of our sake. When he throws in the towel, we're done.
shuntress 5y ago
My problem with using email for communicating with strangers is that my email address feels like it must be a closely guarded secret known to only a select few or given out only when there is no other option. If there was less potential for abuse through spam, scams, or (less likely but still worrying) targeted attacks then I would be much more likely to use email for regular communication outside of work.
- pvarangot 5y ago
  I envy you if you can guard your email address. I have a six digit name and initial of last name Gmail address and I get email for more Pedros with a last name starting with a V that I wanted to know existed. It's so broken... Last week I had to create a new email to sign up for Playstation Whatever because they won't let me "recover" the account someone on Brazil created with my email even though they can't have ever possible validated the email.
  - twobitshifter 5y ago
    This happened to me with someone’s bank account and they didn’t have confirmation so I kept getting emails with pii after that, including the recovery phone number, address, etc. (I alerted the bank to their issue)
    - metalliqaz 5y ago
      I have a first initial last name email from the early days of gmail. The amount of PII and private conversations I've received is incredible. Someone on the other side of the country tried to email himself his business loan application... twice.
    - josephg 5y ago
      Hah that happened to me a few years ago too. HSBC emailed me all the login details for someone’s internet banking account. I emailed back saying they had the wrong email address for their customer. They said if I wanted to change the email address on the account I’d need to go into a branch to do it. It took several attempts back and forth before they finally just disabled internet banking again for that account. But that was way too much effort. I don’t bother now. My Gmail address (josephg) is a cornucopia of junk. It gets the pay slips from a mechanic, lollypop orders, delivery notifications for shoes, Indian cell phone bills, and all sorts of things. I declared bankruptcy on that account years ago and moved on.
lostlogin 5y ago
> usenet It hasn’t gone away. It’s usage has changed though.
caymanjim 5y ago
I used Usenet quite a bit in the 80s/90s, and ran a Usenet/NNTP server for a small ISP for a while. I miss a lot about it, but it wouldn't work well today. Its distribution model required vast amounts of storage and bandwidth even back then, before the days of spam and Internet marketing. And it was unregulated and unmoderated, which is a laughable idea now. There are just too many bad actors to even consider it. I do think it's a useful model for private discussions, with plenty of supporting software. It wouldn't be bad for internal company use. But it doesn't have animated emojis and trophies, so no one would use it now. Google Groups used to be handy for shadowing a bunch of Usenet groups, but that's gone now. I'm not sure how much Usenet exists these days. In all seriousness, Reddit is the modern successor. I dislike a lot about Reddit; their UI/UX is a contender for the worst in the entire world; and they provide a forum for a lot of the most unpleasant people in the world (not quite 4chan bad, but pretty bad). But at the end of the day, Reddit is where most threaded public conversations moved to.
- VLM 5y ago
  NNTP does not equal Usenet. Some of the most interesting applications of NNTP would never connect to the legacy usenet network, which as you mention is/was a mess.
- wott 5y ago
  > Its distribution model required vast amounts of storage and bandwidth even back then It didn't, as long as your server didn't distribute binary newsgroups, which where the only thing requiring a substantial amount of space. Furthermore, servers had no obligation to keep a long retention history, and could limit it to a few months if they wanted so.
  - ruslan 5y ago
    Besides, text messages compress very well. Yes, I vote for NNTP. In my previous life I used to run a local NNTP/Usenet/Fidonet gateway, storage was not an issue at all, but bandwidth was.
- kjs3 5y ago
  Its distribution model required vast amounts of storage and bandwidth even back then, before the days of spam and Internet marketing. The NNTP distribution model was you could take whatever subset of feeds you wanted and keep them however long your storage and bandwidth allowed. Back in the day, a 56Kbps link worked pretty well. A T-1 meant you could pick up the funner binaries feeds. You don't need some multi-meg JS frameworks to read that content. Now, it works fine with GigE and multi-terabyte storage. There's even an RFC for running it over TLS. Reddit is the modern replacement? Things are that bad?
ptman 5y ago
Matrix is mostly used to chat. But really it is just a distributed graph database. Some of the founders of the project have very nice memories of NNTP and something like NNTP (but modern) can certainly be built on top of matrix.

by twic 5y ago

superkuh 5y ago

Just be the change you want to see. I've been posting on alt.startrek and alt.cyberpunk sporadically again for a couple years now. https://www.eternal-september.org/ https://www.eternal-september.org/ is a great group that provides free text group access and posting.

walterbell 5y ago
> Just be the change you want to see. Timeless advice. Still applicable in tech thanks to open-source software, even as people lose agency in other areas.

hdjjhhvvhga 5y ago

It was because of people, not the medium. Usenet was a great place for discussions, especially (but not only) on technical topics, by and for relatively competent people - at the beginning most people using it were from the academia. At some point (around AOL?) the inflow of newbies completely broke that paradigm. Mind you, newsgroups had their dark aspects, too. Some binary groups had contents you'd prefer not to see - simply because the public at large was not really aware NNTP exists.

Multicomp 5y ago
> At some point (around AOL?) the inflow of newbies completely broke that paradigm. That event was called Eternal September, and netiquette has never been the same, or so I am told.
- kevin_thibedeau 5y ago
  Kids these days have no respect for saving bandwidth with their inane top posting.
sp332 5y ago
Yeah, when AOL allowed Usenet access.
globular-toast 5y ago
I think it's a bit of both. Most people under 30 have only known the type of email emitted by Microsoft products, Gmail, spammers and retailers etc. To these people, bottom-quoting is the only option that exists (mail readers like Gmail will hide your message from them if you attempt to do top or inline/correct/sane quoting)). HTML mail is normal and expected. Proprietary attachments with "invitations" and the like is normal and expected. It's just a completely different thing to what those users were using back then. Mailing lists work because they work best with old-fashioned email. Old-fashioned email just works better. It requires a certain level of training to use properly (e.g. how to do inline quoting etc.). This is a good thing. But people seem reluctant to learn skills as an adult, especially when it comes to IT. More importantly, mailing lists rely on etiquette (netiquette) to function well. This is essential for any interactions between responsible adults. But nowadays people have been trained to expect coded rules. They are used to operating in a playpen where they can test the boundaries with no consequences, like children. Discord is just the latest regression in a long line of distilling what it means to have discourse into a few easily managed rules. It's ironic because, on the face of it, Discord with its huge array of "stickers", "emojis" and "fun" attachments etc. seems like it should be more expressive and allow for deeper discussion. But, in fact, by pushing aside language, etiquette and training in favour of emojis, canned phrases, and strict rules we get shallow, repetitive, and, frankly, boring exchanges. Great for mindless drones to do bullshit jobs, I'm sure. Bad for deep and enlightening discussion and debate.
- speed_spread 5y ago
  I find plain mailing lists to be less search-friendly. They're fine if you're an active participant but IMO need to be complemented with a proper web facade for passive consultation of past issues, design decisions, etc.
  - minusf 5y ago
    really depends on the mailing list software. unfortunately there is basically google grouops and/or mailman2/mailman3. for self hosting there isn't even a choice at all: mailing lists suffer even more from what forums suffer as well: little software choice that ticks all the boxes for different people with different needs. however the real (search) power of the mailing lists is of course that you have the mails locally for the lists where you are subscribed to... i remember forum searches becoming so heavy, site wide search forms had to be hidden behind sign up walls... and it was mostly poor keywords search, forget about full text. with local emails at least i get a shot at organizing and searching for it. try saving a local copy of a forum thread...
ColinWright 5y ago
As others have said, it was the "Eternal September": https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eternal_September https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eternal_September It was when the flood of incomers was large enough that the enculturation process failed.
- wyager 5y ago
  I think the enculturation model is incomplete; I think another big aspect of it is that the system’s capacity as an IQ filter diminishes. It’s easy to get 100 people together that are mostly >2stddev, but it’s basically impossible to get 10,000 people together that are mostly >2stddev. The same process has occurred on many websites. I don’t think the culture necessarily changes as much as the userbase just gets dumber.
  - BizarroLand 5y ago
    IQ doesn't have the relevance you think it does, it's basically an thinly veiled excuse to be an elitist jerk. Being technical is a pathway and IQ only identifies how fast you can travel down that pathway. Someone who started before you but who moves slower can still be far beyond you or have gone down paths to treasures you would never discover because you with your high IQ decided it was dumb.
  - exo-pla-net 5y ago
    Axiom 1: Knowledgeable and mature people are repulsed by windbags and vicious people. Axiom 2: There are vastly more windbags and vicious people than there are knowledgeable and mature people. Axiom 3: Online moderation / gatekeeping is imperfect. Axiom 4: Successful moderation depends on a few keystone people. Lemma 1: A community of knowledgeable, mature people will be under perpetual assault by entropy. The internet baseline of know-nothing gasbags and vicious, damaged people will be pounding on the gates of any community. Lemma 2: Some of the horde will bypass any gatekeeping and moderation to land blows on the knowledgeable and mature people. They'll be repulsed, and some will leave the community. Lemma 3: The keystone moderators are inevitably among the people subjected to these blows. After a serious blow or one blow too many, some will get fed up and leave, and moderation will get worse, increasing the rate of knowledgeable and mature people getting repulsed by their own community and leaving. A hole will form in the fortifications, and the barbarians will flood in, driving out everyone mature and knowledgeable. Thereom: A knowledgeable, mature online community that is open to new users will eventually collapse into the internet baseline. Corollary 1: If you're knowledgeable and mature and currently part of an open online community you love, you too will eventually get repulsed by it and leave. Enjoy it while it lasts. Corollary 2: There are several knowledgeable and mature people here on Hacker News. They're here entirely because of dang. He is our keystone, weathering the assault of the barbarians for all of our sake. When he throws in the towel, we're done.

shuntress 5y ago

My problem with using email for communicating with strangers is that my email address feels like it must be a closely guarded secret known to only a select few or given out only when there is no other option. If there was less potential for abuse through spam, scams, or (less likely but still worrying) targeted attacks then I would be much more likely to use email for regular communication outside of work.

pvarangot 5y ago
I envy you if you can guard your email address. I have a six digit name and initial of last name Gmail address and I get email for more Pedros with a last name starting with a V that I wanted to know existed. It's so broken... Last week I had to create a new email to sign up for Playstation Whatever because they won't let me "recover" the account someone on Brazil created with my email even though they can't have ever possible validated the email.
- twobitshifter 5y ago
  This happened to me with someone’s bank account and they didn’t have confirmation so I kept getting emails with pii after that, including the recovery phone number, address, etc. (I alerted the bank to their issue)
  - metalliqaz 5y ago
    I have a first initial last name email from the early days of gmail. The amount of PII and private conversations I've received is incredible. Someone on the other side of the country tried to email himself his business loan application... twice.
  - josephg 5y ago
    Hah that happened to me a few years ago too. HSBC emailed me all the login details for someone’s internet banking account. I emailed back saying they had the wrong email address for their customer. They said if I wanted to change the email address on the account I’d need to go into a branch to do it. It took several attempts back and forth before they finally just disabled internet banking again for that account. But that was way too much effort. I don’t bother now. My Gmail address (josephg) is a cornucopia of junk. It gets the pay slips from a mechanic, lollypop orders, delivery notifications for shoes, Indian cell phone bills, and all sorts of things. I declared bankruptcy on that account years ago and moved on.

lostlogin 5y ago

> usenet It hasn’t gone away. It’s usage has changed though.

caymanjim 5y ago

I used Usenet quite a bit in the 80s/90s, and ran a Usenet/NNTP server for a small ISP for a while. I miss a lot about it, but it wouldn't work well today. Its distribution model required vast amounts of storage and bandwidth even back then, before the days of spam and Internet marketing. And it was unregulated and unmoderated, which is a laughable idea now. There are just too many bad actors to even consider it. I do think it's a useful model for private discussions, with plenty of supporting software. It wouldn't be bad for internal company use. But it doesn't have animated emojis and trophies, so no one would use it now. Google Groups used to be handy for shadowing a bunch of Usenet groups, but that's gone now. I'm not sure how much Usenet exists these days. In all seriousness, Reddit is the modern successor. I dislike a lot about Reddit; their UI/UX is a contender for the worst in the entire world; and they provide a forum for a lot of the most unpleasant people in the world (not quite 4chan bad, but pretty bad). But at the end of the day, Reddit is where most threaded public conversations moved to.

VLM 5y ago
NNTP does not equal Usenet. Some of the most interesting applications of NNTP would never connect to the legacy usenet network, which as you mention is/was a mess.
wott 5y ago
> Its distribution model required vast amounts of storage and bandwidth even back then It didn't, as long as your server didn't distribute binary newsgroups, which where the only thing requiring a substantial amount of space. Furthermore, servers had no obligation to keep a long retention history, and could limit it to a few months if they wanted so.
- ruslan 5y ago
  Besides, text messages compress very well. Yes, I vote for NNTP. In my previous life I used to run a local NNTP/Usenet/Fidonet gateway, storage was not an issue at all, but bandwidth was.
kjs3 5y ago
Its distribution model required vast amounts of storage and bandwidth even back then, before the days of spam and Internet marketing. The NNTP distribution model was you could take whatever subset of feeds you wanted and keep them however long your storage and bandwidth allowed. Back in the day, a 56Kbps link worked pretty well. A T-1 meant you could pick up the funner binaries feeds. You don't need some multi-meg JS frameworks to read that content. Now, it works fine with GigE and multi-terabyte storage. There's even an RFC for running it over TLS. Reddit is the modern replacement? Things are that bad?

ptman 5y ago

Matrix is mostly used to chat. But really it is just a distributed graph database. Some of the founders of the project have very nice memories of NNTP and something like NNTP (but modern) can certainly be built on top of matrix.