18 ms·

Don't contribute anything relevant in web forums (2020)

220 points by signa11 5y ago

anamax 5y ago
There are a couple of assumption here regarding using e-mail as transport for a social network [1] said e-mail account is also used for other purposes (such as personal email) [2] said e-mail account is read with an ordinary e-mail reader. Neither assumption is required. If the email account in question is just for the social network, the interface can ignore other messages. If the email account is on a major host (such as google), there won't be delivery problems.
lvxferre 5y ago
smusamashah 5y ago
This is a very pessimistic view of the whole Web. Going by the author's point, we shouldn't even meet people at any place and have a discussion because anything you say will be gone forever. People were collecting knowledge in books since they were invented, then we got web and we started using that as medium to share knowledge. Books have a long lifetime, but even they are not forever. Look how web has contributed, it would never have if we didn't shared relevant stuff on someone else's website. Don't stop sharing relevant stuff on web forums.
m348e912 5y ago
So does this apply to HN as well?
- vitaflo 5y ago
  It says right in the article it applies to HN.
  - thomassmith65 5y ago
    Yes, right under the first sub-header: What Do I Mean With Web-Based Forums Here? In this article, I'm using the term "web-based forums" as an umbrella term for closed, centralized services like Reddit, *Hacker News*, Slashdot, Facebook, or any other web-based forum where you are able to add comments, articles, and so forth in most cases only after creating an account.
- xeeeeeeeeeeenu 5y ago
  Not everything. Unlike reddit or Facebook, HN definitely is archivable. It's plain HTML and its robots.txt doesn't block crawlers.
- winternett 5y ago
  HN allows us all to link to our own sites, and so far I think that that's a saving grace for credibility... Although mysteriously, many very strong conversations don't make it into the cue of awareness, so that is something that could use a bit of work. Overall, I think throughout the years HN has been a quite reliable site for news and interesting topics from people who think for me... Much better than most subreddits I'm subbed to. I wish they would have scaled it into other sub-topics other than IT like my primary industry (music making)... But then it would probably just turn into another reddit as well. Also, some of the features like saving threads, and a quicker way to view profile posts, and a solid native search method would do wonders.
alexb_ 5y ago
Luckily for me, I'm really good at contributing absolutely nothing relevant or helpful to threads on both Reddit and HN, opting instead to post comments that help nobody. Glad to know I've been doing the right thing all along!
- redweer 5y ago
  thanks for that insight
  - ableal 5y ago
    Nicely reduced to "All Cretans are liars" in four words ... ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Epimenides_paradox https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Epimenides_paradox )
orionblastar 5y ago
I used to post on Kuro5hin but now it is gone. I'd rather write ebooks and submit them to Amazon Kindle. Earn some money and Amazon isn't going to close any time soon.
winternett 5y ago
Very important points raised here.. It's been what I've been endlessly speaking on with my friends that thought of me as "beating a dead horse" for a long time now. The worst part about waking people up to the ills of modern social platforms is that each person has a dramatically different experience, and they never see the people who are struggling, they only see the success stories from people who far too often are getting all their ideas from the bottom, but paying to be on top. Social media sites, just like reddit often expose ideas and content to larger audiences than typically what personalized web sites can do. That leads to rampant idea theft without credibility, and to diluted and convoluted messages. Online communication and effective problem resolution (climate crisis, protests, valid discourse) is now completely hobbled because these large platforms serve profit, but also allow large interests to out-voice even scholars and trained experts. The entire "influencer" economy is based on people coming out of instant celebrity and then developing huge "influence" and it's totally screwing up positions of power and influence in real life because they suddenly get a large voice without proper experience and merits to their achievement. It's created a monster machine where we're suddenly doing drastically harmful things because people want to make money rather than listening to people who have a proven track record of doing good things to create positive change. We need to stop rewarding cheap mediocrity, and to stop trying to insert wise words into forums known for mis-management and reckless disregard for human good. Real world problem solving cannot be conducted along side memes and veiled corporate advertisements with convoluted money making agendas charading as thoughtful trustworthiness. The way to take back credibility is to withdraw completely from social media, only using social sites as a pointer back to official sources for trusted news and well curated personal web sites. This way, you can own (and potentially future-proof) your words and content once again. In running your own site, you can make backups, and better address plagiarism and idea theft -- which is very rampant online right now. I have hung onto my own personal sites for over 20 years now, I never felt that social platforms were reliable enough to give up my own personal domains and sites, and every day of frustration with sites like reddit just goes to confirm that idea. It's not an argument to reinforce academic emphasis on who to listen to, it's the move necessary to bring back accountability and originality of thought that isn't subject to 20 silly made up rules about how, when, and what you can post on reddit, and you can't quite get downvoted into oblivion by someone who wants to paraphrase you and steal your ideals as quickly (provided your posts are dated, tagged, and credited properly). Take back ownership of your words, they never gave you much to begin with for sharing on their platforms anyway.
ggm 5y ago
I post my answer to mailing lists I ask the questions on. More than once in the last 30 years I've found my answer in the ML archive, and its sometimes still the best clue back to what to do. ML archives last longer than specific websites, sometimes. Not always: Google is killing a lot of USENET/ML history
- u801e 5y ago
  Mailing list archives became easier to access with services like gmane and, more recently, public inbox. I don't think they were easy to browse prior to that.
  - ggm 5y ago
    Yea. I reached a point where I decided the risk-reward was ok and deleted my local ML archives. I now check headers for the mailman/listserv link to archive and if I see it, I do make the risky decision to rely on it. Probably I'll come to regret that, in 20 years time.
Semaphor 5y ago
122 comments from Oct 2020: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24934569 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24934569 I’m a bit confused about the API thing, considering they mainly talk about Reddit. Reddit has a vibrant third-party client ecosystem, thanks to their API. As far as I know, the API is not crippled in any way?
- throwaway81523 5y ago
  Reddit's API can't access their chat system, doesn't work well with their search function, and (like with their own web client) can't easily collect all of the comments from a long thread. Also, I expect they will eventually cripple it further or shut it down completely, like Twitter did.
  - Karrot_Kream 5y ago
    Representing threaded comments through an API is often implemented terribly. HN's API in that regard is absolutely bonkers. Lobsters probably has the most convenient API, returning the full comment tree in the response. As long as you're willing to do a bit of tree traversal, the Reddit API is fine. I also don't really think Reddit will be dropping API support any time soon. There's been no indications in that direction except for a change in the unauthenticated rate limit that was made a couple years back.
    - throwaway81523 5y ago
      > As long as you're willing to do a bit of tree traversal, the Reddit API is fine. But then you end up having to make 100s of queries per thread, getting just a few comments each time.
  - Semaphor 5y ago
    chat system: I see. I never use it as I prefer PMs, so I didn’t know about that. Long threads: As you said, it’s a general issue ;) Crippling: Maybe, but so far they haven’t.
quadrifoliate 5y ago
You might be tempted to say some of the following: - But Reddit has an API, and lots of third-party clients! - But you can just use https://old.reddit.com https://old.reddit.com or https://i.reddit.com https://i.reddit.com instead! The problem is that the user-hostile trends of current Reddit (e.g. locking the user out and prompting them to install an app) make it apparent that most of these workarounds and such are going to be made invalid in, say, the next 5 years. Even if they do survive, they will be mothballed and largely inaccessible to someone who is starting to use Reddit today. As it IPOs, these user-hostile patterns driven by people who focus on next quarter's returns to the exclusion of all else are only going to increase. So I agree with Karl's conclusion here – don't contribute anything relevant to forums that aren't decentralized to start off with. What do I suggest as an alternative? This is just my personal opinion, but I think email lists the most accessible decentralized substitute. It's 2022, and we have much better techniques to apply to spam filtering. I will take the tradeoff of the occasional spammy email for having my conversations with others archived under my own control without a ton of effort (I can just use regular old OS tools like Mail, Outlook, and such instead of the more complex information management efforts built by more dedicated folks.
- notriddle 5y ago
  > This is just my personal opinion, but I think email lists the most accessible decentralized substitute. It's 2022, and we have much better techniques to apply to spam filtering. I contend that this isn’t true. First of all, if it was true, there would not be so many deliverability problems with email. But, more importantly, there are solid, definitional reasons why spam filtering can never be particularly good. Is it spam if a bot copies questions from one mailing list to another one with a similar topic, in an attempt to build out a reputation? The copied “spam” emails have identical content to legitimate traffic, but there’s no human at the other end, and the seemingly-good user is eventually going to “cash in” on their reputation by posting actual spam. Similar tactics can attack Bayesian filters, and IP address-based systems are getting less useful over time as CG-NAT becomes more popular. Personally, I think “spam filtering” as a heuristic that you tack onto an otherwise spam-vulnerable protocol has been about as good as it will ever get for the last decade [1]. Email and traditional web forums share most of the same problems, but web forums have two big advantages: * Forums can reactively remove spam, as can USENET [2]. Mailing lists have to filter everything before fanning out. ML archives can be redacted, but anyone maintaining their own personal archive has to do any post-delivery filtering themselves. * Forums have somewhat more operational flexibility. You won’t see Reddit/HN-style voting in mailing lists unless you customize your local tooling to support it. Normally, all a ML can do is decide whether to block it entirely or not. [1]: https://craphound.com/spamsolutions.txt https://craphound.com/spamsolutions.txt [2]: http://wiki.killfile.org/projects/usenet/faqs/cancel/ http://wiki.killfile.org/projects/usenet/faqs/cancel/
keithnz 5y ago
HN without people contributing relevant things would suck. I get it, they have some idealized idea of what they want the internet to be and how people should interact, how information should be shared, blah blah. But the places and culture that end up encouraging people to contribute can be quite different from this "ideal", and sure it has flaws, and sure we can try and do things to improve things, but I kind of don't care, I like finding places on the internet that have people who love contributing, that something about that wee corner of the internet does a better job of creating that kind of culture than other corners.
- MikusR 5y ago
  You can read comments on HN without logging in or using an app.
  - mynameismon 5y ago
    So with Reddit. What is your point?
    - jeroenhd 5y ago
      With Reddit you can either read half the comments, the top three comments, or sometimes nothing, because "this community is available in the app" or "log in to read the rest of the discussion" or whatever other flavour of user hostile design the company put out this week. For some obscure reason it's also terribly slow on my desktop even if I'm logged in. It's a terrible experience all around. And no, I don't want to manually change the URL or install some third party add-on to fix their intentionally broken website.
      - veltas 5y ago
        Change the "www" in URL to "old". The redesign is awful.
    - NavinF 5y ago
      Depends on what side of the AB test you’re on. If you clear your cookies, you’ll find that the default web interface forces you to login after a random delay or after a few clicks.
dang 5y ago
Something relevant from October 2020: Don't contribute anything relevant in web forums - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24934569 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24934569 - Oct 2020 (122 comments)
JohnJamesRambo 5y ago
Reddit is almost the only useful site left to find actual things written by humans. If I Google my problem and put Reddit at the end I usually find my answer. Without it I’m lost in SEO blogpost hell. Please keep posting useful things to Reddit.
- iypx 5y ago
  I'd rather encourage people to post useful things on their own sites. Maybe, hopefully, one day, both google and other search engines might start penalizing content farms and have personal blogs and websites surface again. > Reddit is almost the only useful site left to find actual things written by humans. The one, most important thing (the way I see it), is never actually mentioned. I'm gonna call it: "organic advertising". I will never, consciously, take any advice I see on reddit/hn. Last time It was obvious for me, I was browsing/procrastinating throgh r/all, and somebody, a "real human" with an actual "real" account (I checked his history) posted a drawing made by his kid. Second-most upvoted comment is blatant Crayola advert (checked that guys history, every 10-15th comment he was praising $random_top_us_brand). Rest of the thread, at least another dozen Crayola mentions, by real people, who religiously believe in Crayola... Take a lot of top threads, there's always a swarm of seemingly "real" accounts religiously promoting most American top brands. Funnily enough, usually 1 brand per thread. Somehow fans of X never see the Y threads, and vice-versa... I refuse to believe actual people will go out of their way to defend/promote/etc their $favorite_brand. Only on reddit/hn.
  - kalleboo 5y ago
    > I refuse to believe actual people will go out of their way to defend/promote/etc their $favorite_brand. Only on reddit/hn. Those "Calvin peeing on Ford logo" decals predate social media
    - hakko 5y ago
      It's true. Those originated as bootleg sales at county fair booths in the 90s, along with the concrete geese. The writer of Calvin and Hobbes was actually quite against them and merchandising in general, having seen the saturation of Garfield merchandise in the 80s.
AlotOfReading 5y ago
I contribute to Askhistorians occasionally, which specializes in long form, long term answers in response to queries. It's a useful thing, but the "value proposition" as it were fundamentally relies on having large numbers of readers to attract subject matter experts and users with interesting questions. I've experienced everything listed. With that said, none of it matters because the model breaks down without the userbase. You can't move to an alternative because the historians aren't there, even if the questioners are. Even if you convince a subset of them to move, churn will eventually kill it anyway. The whole thing also needs to broadly in the flow of mainstream internet culture to make it useful. So what's the alternative?
TedShiller 5y ago
I never contribute anything relevant
- OrderlyTiamat 5y ago
  A very principled stance, I will take the same.
  - TedShiller 5y ago
    We are the only honest people here.
u801e 5y ago
I posted many things to usenet decades ago. Unfortunately, unless the Google groups archive contains it, it's been lost to time.
- admax88qqq 5y ago
  Turns out the platform matters less than just having somebody willing to archive it. Hard to get more open and federated than USENET.
ksec 5y ago
The only thing I partly agree on is the censorship part. But then hosting it on AWS or any public cloud / server would have had the same problem. You could do good old fashion collocation with your own server. But then Network / DC may refuse you as well. Otherwise it is the basic argument of Distribution and Discovery problem again. And I mean a lot of Web Forums are dying anyway. Hosting cost aren't going down, forum software are any faster or efficient, requires some scale before Ads revenue picks up. And the hassle to manage the software. Part of the reason why many are moving to Discord and Slack. The way things are going many Web Forum will be gone without any battle the blog mentioned.
ford 5y ago
I can see where the author is coming from, and I don't mean to discredit the many negatives they mention, but ironically enough people doing exactly what the article suggests against has led to many people (even my mother) googling things like "best coffee grinder reddit". Most of the alternatives sound like they would be much less discoverable and encourage much less interaction/discussion, which often is as interesting as the contribution itself. I do agree that any sort of cohesive, ongoing advice is better organized in a blog or other more permanent form. I also agree that the suggestion about "fixing web-based forums" could be a good idea. And perhaps it's also worth saving your particularly good contributions in storage you own
notreallyserio 5y ago
I figure if there comes the day that I write something of value, that I want my real name on, I could just choose to post it on reddit/HN/etc and my blog simultaneously and get the best of both worlds.
moron4hire 5y ago
I actually could do with a lot more knowledge being very transient. For example, I could be searching for how to do something in ASP.NET Core. In the year of our Lord, 2022, that means I'm doing it on either .NET 5 or 6. I definitely do not need results for anything involving .NET Core 1.1 from 5+ years ago. Even if it might technically work (which is doubtful, so many of the APIs have changed) there are almost certainly better ways that have evolved in the intervening years.
saberworks 5y ago
I have a ton of experience with this. I've been running a "Dark Forces II: Jedi Knight" fan site since early 1998. We've been in it so long that probably over 90% of our outbound links are at best broken or at worst lead to malware or pornography (of course I clean it up when I find it -- by removing the links and adding a note). And yet, stuff that people have been directly contributing to our site since 1998 is still available, still open, and freely available without creating an account. The only thing that saves content like this is people who care. Reddit doesn't care, they're in it for the dollars. Facebook doesn't care, google doesn't care (look how many services have been removed over the years). I miss the days of every site having their own community. I remember when most game companies would put a landing page for each new game that came out and that was about it. Hundreds or thousands of fan sites popped up and provided a community that far outlasted the direct revenue of most games. Then gaming companies decided to create their own "communities," but they're stale, without personality, and as soon as the game isn't making money anymore, the sites languish and are eventually deleted, along with all the helpful content that has been posted by users. I'm completely torn because you can't count on idiots like me (and all the people who have helped with my site over the decades!!) to keep things going forever. My take on this was to make all the content "open" -- it started with all our static assets being converted from 25 years of spaghetti HTML to clean markdown and a static site generator. Anyone can clone the repo, recreate the site (including all the static content) and upload it wherever they want. The next step was to open-source the dynamic back-end. The remaining two steps are somehow regularly distributing a database dump (with personal information stripped out, of course) and then finally figuring out how to make available regular dumps of the content that doesn't fit in git or the database (like the ~10G of maps, mods, and screenshots that users have submitted). These two are still being planned. I wish every site with anything to say had a plan for what to do when the owner is done maintaining it. Figure out a way to make the important content open and up. Internet Archive is great but they miss so much stuff, especially zip files, image files, etc. I don't think any of this works with a profit motive, however.
- NoahTheDuke 5y ago
  Wow, massassi.net is quite a trip through time. I spent many many hours on your site, playing Jedi Knight with friends and randos through GameSpy. Endless hours of entertainment toying with JED, trying to perfect my own levels, or installing various mods and texture packs. Thank you for the effort, you gave me quite a few cherished memories.
throw3838 5y ago
I gave up on Web long time ago, too much shallow garbage. Books are much better.
srcreigh 5y ago
Reddit and HN are both replicated by third parties. The content won't go away.
- throwawaysea 5y ago
  Who replicates Reddit? Are there archives of all the banned subreddits?
  - tpxl 5y ago
    The ArchiveTeam archives reddit.
WalterBright 5y ago
The article advises "Use NNTP". NNTP is what the D Language forums use: https://forum.dlang.org/ https://forum.dlang.org/ While it may look like any web forum, it is a shell around NNTP. This means you can access it via any NNTP software, like Thunderbird (what I use), by pointing to news.digitalmars.com There's a readonly version of it that consists of simple HTML pages: https://www.digitalmars.com/NewsGroup.html https://www.digitalmars.com/NewsGroup.html and even a mailing list you can sign up for. We've been very happy with it, been using it for 18 years. Occasionally people ask for "modern" forum software, but its restrictions are actually advantages.
- rhn_mk1 5y ago
  Does it allow the users to use it as if there was no NNTP at all? I.e. posting from the web interface.
  - Doxin 5y ago
    yes
- unhammer 5y ago
  And incredibly fast page loads! https://github.com/CyberShadow/DFeed https://github.com/CyberShadow/DFeed seems to be the source – is it general enough that other communities use it too?
  - WalterBright 5y ago
    There's nothing D specific about it - although it is implemented in D!
- alexvoda 5y ago
  Is the web ux shell open source?
  - bachmeier 5y ago
    It's all at the link someone else posted: https://github.com/CyberShadow/DFeed https://github.com/CyberShadow/DFeed
sekao 5y ago
Good points but the suggested alternatives are ignoring the most important piece of tech we have for synchronizing content: git. My problem with ActivityPub is that when you export your content, you get a big binary file that can't be incrementally updated. I'm exploring the idea of using git to clone a completely offline version of a message board in my BBS: https://ansiwave.net/ https://ansiwave.net/
lutorm 5y ago
I don't understand, surely there's a giant difference between posting on reddit/facebook and posting on a community-driven BBedit board, even if they're both "web-based".
ellis0n 5y ago
100% True. For 10 years I have been trying to get people interested in my programming language and software platform. 5 years ago I just got bans and couldn't create a topic due to lack of karma and it just never go frontpage r/programming or HN. I'm old school and I thought programmers would be interested in a simple mobile language with a real-time reverse debugger for live development created according to Bret Victor's principles, but it turned out to be in vain. Almost no one understands the concept of Bret Victor and in a year I found only one person like me who was busy :) Since this is programming, then it is difficult to find investments, because no one understands the product (investors are not programmers). I asked various people to donate, but it seems that the letters simply did not reach or were ignored (for example, I asked Amjad from Replit to donate several times, he arranged funny contests). As a result, it was easier for me to sell my time in web3 than to explain something to someone on public platforms about the perfect code, and the society was left without innovation. Later, I started seeing parts of my project as separate startups, here on HN and Reddit. If it were not for the complex technological implementation (I am a developer with 20 years of experience), then everything would have been lost a long time ago. Of course, later I realized all the mistakes, studied the market, marketing, accelerated by different methods. Conclusion: The problem of money and innovation is in 95% of startups, especially from developing countries with weak economies and IT startup sector, as I had. It is better for you to do something simple and not very technological or go to places where technology is developed like Silicon Valley or use remote accelerators. The issues: - no interest without money & marketing, public will not work for you - marketing & public is evil - language barrier - cultural barrier - commercial barrier (as old school, I didn't understand why r/programming moderator was banning me by low HQ and when I reported the moderator 'the ban stops tech progress', I got a second ban and can't hire someone to help me figure the issue due karma issue, lost it) - karma in public areas (I still can't access macrumors when I had it 5 years ago, but after the interface change my account is lost) - money, money, money again If someone wants to participate, welcome Programming platform https://www.reddit.com/r/acpu/ https://www.reddit.com/r/acpu/ Web3 demo app https://www.reddit.com/r/Web3Wallet/ https://www.reddit.com/r/Web3Wallet/
- jdrc 5y ago
  I like how you went from "other people's reddits" to creating your own distribution in there. Unfortunately the web is too big and too crowded now, and i do think that owning your distribution is the only solution.
LAC-Tech 5y ago
Interesting idea. However I once turned my most up-voted reddit post into a blog post and no one gave a shit. So that's my anecdotal counter.
banana_maker 5y ago
[flagged]
- etchalon 5y ago
  You said "No." but went on to completely agree with his statement.
  - nfkaT 5y ago
    [flagged]
  - Synaesthesia 5y ago
    Not really, he has an interesting point. The US permits Nazis openly under free speech laws, and holocaust denial and soon, while Germany bans it. However it is a serious problem in Germany and Europe whereas in the US its just kind of laughed at.
  - andrewzah 5y ago
    "In the USA, freedom-loving people think fans of the human monsters that tortured and murdered millions of Jews in the Second World War need the possibility to express their personal "opinion". I completely disagree with this viewpoint and this characterization of what Americans believe. You're conflating support for free speech, with support for things like nazism. Which is just incorrect. Nobody is starting out by saying "nazis need to be able to post their opinions online". It's just that the way free speech works, it unfortunately covers disgusting things like nazism exactly the same as it covers my own speech. That's the whole point of not letting the government abridge or prohibit speech. Imagine if the government did have those powers, and then decided that it was illegal to discuss LGBT concepts or specific religions. You can't have it both ways; I'm glad to have free speech because it protects ME (and my family, friends, etc) from being jailed for criticizing the government or having specific beliefs, etc, even if it has the side effect of people being able to post disgusting things online. Censoring discussion doesn't stop people from discussing it in secret, it always gets abused by the government given a long enough timeframe. The original snippet I replied to from the article was such a holier-than-thou comment, and their country's solution of censoring speech ("good" censorship) didn't even work!
Mortiffer 5y ago
I know HN has something against Blockchain. But there are some really smart people working on the idea of a permanent web. For instance https://www.arweave.org/ https://www.arweave.org/ is based on the concept that you prepay for 200 years of storage but storage cost is decreasing over time so it's also like a future option on advance of technology. I guess people also know IPFS i just didn't see it get mentioned. And also i hope everyone here who cares about this topic is donating to the Internet Archive which also a solution.
- valdiorn 5y ago
  current blockchain tech (at least mainstream) is hilariously inefficient at storing data. If you can provide me anything to the contrary I'd be very interested in reading about it.
ihateolives 5y ago
All these arguments by presumably hardcore STEM people always forget the most important thing - when you share your knowledge on whatever platform, be it as ephemeral as it is, now that knowledge has spread and more people possess it, even if they retain a part of it. We don't need 99,999% uptime or 3-2-1 backups or perfect GUI to share knowledge. I get it, IT people would be lost when SO goes down so they always want to build most reliable thing ever, but it's always a moving goalpost. Just contribute wherever you can.
egypturnash 5y ago
meh whatever, I'll keep on procrastinating on getting art drawn by answering questions on the Illustrator subreddit. My desire to put together a book on how I use Illustrator effectively is pretty much nil; my desire to make videos on the subject is even less despite people telling me I should do this and could make money on it. When Reddit dies I will find some other place to procrastinate by answering people's Illustrator questions. Every now and then a question results in me figuring out how to do a cool thing in Illustrator that I can then apply to my own work.
nebukadnet 5y ago
Does it really matter wether Reddit makes backups? If it is interesting enough to save, it will be reposted or copied or whatever. If it isn't it will get lost in the mass of other "interesting" things.
abetusk 5y ago
I don't know if it's a good enough alternative but one of the reasons why StackOverflow and Wikipedia have been so steadfast is because of their libre/free licensing (CC-BY-SA). Both are centralized but because the user content is clearly licensed to allow replication, it encourages dissemination, allows for users to know their content won't be lost and, in the worst case, can help bootstrap an alternative, should the main organization fold. I find it depressing to see how many sites don't follow this basic principle, that user content should, by default, be effectively dedicated to the commons. HN falls into this trap and I so I suspect it's only a matter of time before all the discussions and user generated content disappears from the web.
- carapace 5y ago
  I don't recall the details off the top of my head but I believe HN is archived in near-realtime in a few places and the result made freely available.
  - abetusk 5y ago
    Archive.org can archive Twitter and IMDB but both Twitter and IMDB do not have libre/free licensing for user generated content. Here is HNs policy [0]: """ Commercial Use: Unless otherwise expressly authorized herein or in the Site, you agree not to display, distribute, license, perform, publish, reproduce, duplicate, copy, create derivative works from, modify, sell, resell, exploit, transfer or upload for any commercial purposes, any portion of the Site, use of the Site, or access to the Site. ... """ If HN ever folds, the most likely condition will be someone owns the copyright and will not put it under a libre/free license for the community to use, effectively burying it. In the meantime, HN offers a (perhaps small) treasure trove of information about technical issues, trends, data on how a community forms, communicates and interacts with each other that is explicitly barred from use by the general public without individual approval. Though this would probably be met with a lot of resistance, HN is well within their right to sue all the "show HN" projects that use the HN data to display interesting trends, do data analysis or do other interesting projects with. [0] https://www.ycombinator.com/legal/ https://www.ycombinator.com/legal/
octoberfranklin 5y ago
Usenet was pretty magical back in the 1990s. It had none of the problems that this article points out. The closest thing it has to a modern successor is public-inbox. Demand that your forums provide a public-inbox archive. http://public-inbox.org/README.html http://public-inbox.org/README.html It stores the entire discussion history in a git archive. You can git-clone discussions, and then git-pull just the new stuff. It applies git's brilliant "everybody has a copy of the whole repository, not just the guy running the CVS server" to discussions. sr.ht and kernel.org use this for their mailing lists.
vbezhenar 5y ago
Web archive is good enough. Hopefully it won't disappear. Just ensure that any page on your website is few clicks away from main page. Right now I have an issue with one website that disappeared. I'm trying to rebuild it with old content, it had pages like 1-5, ... and middle pages required too many clicks and weren't archived. Best solution is good old site map with direct link to every page on the website.
unfocussed_mike 5y ago
I think I agree with this, actually. :-/
Freskis 5y ago
Reddit is a psychopath corporation. They are laser-focussed on engagement and signups, and don't care if they degrade the fabric of society while they do it. The website is designed to encourage conflict and divisive hate, millions of americans screaming hate between [ingroup] and [outgroup]. Clearly the API and old reddit will be removed soon, and the will have reached the final destination of their plans. Their psychopath tendencies are clear, and the path they are following has been clear for years.
5350-uiop-1130 5y ago
I love archive.today and i automatically use it for a lot of articles. Sometimes I will save the full page screenshot from there for posterity. It's really a beacon of light in the internet. Author is right in the sense why are we giving up all this content to an often antagonistic third-party service.
- hedgewitch 5y ago
  > Author is right in the sense why are we giving up all this content to an often antagonistic third-party service. Because it's seen and interacted with, whereas it otherwise might not be. People are vain. It's not more complicated than that.
phkahler 5y ago
Reddit is not stack overflow or quora. It's just people talking in public. Feel free to offer informative information, just be aware that you're having a conversation, not creating content for the ages. I thought this was obvious.
- kbelder 5y ago
  Exactly. I had a short conversation in the break room at work with a semi-acquaintance about the different types of doors on microwave ovens. I'm not offended that those comments are not preserved forever for posterity. Nor am I offended if somebody used them to train an AI. It's just me talking. That's 90% of Reddit.
2-718-281-828 5y ago
I have benefitted countless times from other people contributing on forums and I like to give back occasionally by doing so myself. And I don't see any problem with that whatsoever. And because many here seem to equate forum with reddit. There are loads of independent subject specific forums out there and I use dozens of them successfully.
streamofdigits 5y ago
Ideally you'd want some distilled and organized subset of "good" (informative) discussions, comments etc to persisted as a separate hierarchy that is subject focused and not timeline oriented. A subjective wikipedia of sorts (less encyclopedic, less moderated) that is composed on the fly.
iostream23 5y ago
The parts about accessibility, data portability, and alternative interfaces are very relevant: protocols instead of software, open standards. Remember the various messenger clients and then stuff like Trillian Pigeon etc? The federated stuff as well as web rings, remember those? Remember life before Google? Organic discovery of links is often quite ideologically and teleologically relevant, in terms of the people and minds that connect. It’s somewhat ironic that web forums such as HN are actually how we discover human filtered links.
antiterra 5y ago
I’ve posted idiotic things to Usenet years ago that I wish weren’t archived and impossible to delete. Ephemerality is sometimes your friend.
wccrawford 5y ago
When I help people in forums or social media, I don't do it for future people. I do it for the person I am responding to. If someone else gets something out of it, that's great, but I didn't aim it at them. And so I don't care if it disappears the next day. I just need that one person to get what they need. Worrying about the future in that situation is just going to add friction and make me more likely to not answer at all. Not everything has to be optimized to death. Sometimes it's okay to just do the easy thing.
- jordanpg 5y ago
  Agree, this article seems to be focused on a solution in search of a problem. Obviously random web forums are not the solution if you're wanting immortal, permanently searchable archived wisdom.
Saint_Genet 5y ago
Why does every "don't use centralized software owned by someone else" here end up with tons of people plugging their favorite niche project as if the network effect doesn't exist?
bjourne 5y ago
All good arguments, not just practical. I know how to host my own email, it's just not worth the hassle when you consider spam, whitelists, blacklists, and what have you. I know how to setup my own blog on my own web server on my own vps with my own commenting system. But again, I blog maybe twice per month, so not worth the hassle. If such things are not practical for me then they are well out of reach for average internet users that doesn't even know what a server is.
abruzzi 5y ago
this article seems to miss why I participate on forums. I'm not interacting with the software, I'm not creating some great post that will live on in history. I'm interacting with another person, who has asked a question. Should I refuse to answer because that person asked the question on a vbulletin system? (* I've never used reddit or discord. With the exception of HN, the only forums I use are old school--small, single purpose vbulletin, SMF, or PHPBB forums.)
taubek 5y ago
The biggest issue with self hosting things is discoverability of things. Regardless of the quality of my content I don't know how could I compete with the same content being published on Stack Overflow or Reddit.

220 points by signa11 5y ago

There are a couple of assumption here regarding using e-mail as transport for a social network [1] said e-mail account is also used for other purposes (such as personal email) [2] said e-mail account is read with an ordinary e-mail reader. Neither assumption is required. If the email account in question is just for the social network, the interface can ignore other messages. If the email account is on a major host (such as google), there won't be delivery problems.

lvxferre 5y ago

smusamashah 5y ago

This is a very pessimistic view of the whole Web. Going by the author's point, we shouldn't even meet people at any place and have a discussion because anything you say will be gone forever. People were collecting knowledge in books since they were invented, then we got web and we started using that as medium to share knowledge. Books have a long lifetime, but even they are not forever. Look how web has contributed, it would never have if we didn't shared relevant stuff on someone else's website. Don't stop sharing relevant stuff on web forums.

m348e912 5y ago

So does this apply to HN as well?

vitaflo 5y ago
It says right in the article it applies to HN.
- thomassmith65 5y ago
  Yes, right under the first sub-header: What Do I Mean With Web-Based Forums Here? In this article, I'm using the term "web-based forums" as an umbrella term for closed, centralized services like Reddit, *Hacker News*, Slashdot, Facebook, or any other web-based forum where you are able to add comments, articles, and so forth in most cases only after creating an account.
xeeeeeeeeeeenu 5y ago
Not everything. Unlike reddit or Facebook, HN definitely is archivable. It's plain HTML and its robots.txt doesn't block crawlers.
winternett 5y ago
HN allows us all to link to our own sites, and so far I think that that's a saving grace for credibility... Although mysteriously, many very strong conversations don't make it into the cue of awareness, so that is something that could use a bit of work. Overall, I think throughout the years HN has been a quite reliable site for news and interesting topics from people who think for me... Much better than most subreddits I'm subbed to. I wish they would have scaled it into other sub-topics other than IT like my primary industry (music making)... But then it would probably just turn into another reddit as well. Also, some of the features like saving threads, and a quicker way to view profile posts, and a solid native search method would do wonders.

alexb_ 5y ago

Luckily for me, I'm really good at contributing absolutely nothing relevant or helpful to threads on both Reddit and HN, opting instead to post comments that help nobody. Glad to know I've been doing the right thing all along!

redweer 5y ago
thanks for that insight
- ableal 5y ago
  Nicely reduced to "All Cretans are liars" in four words ... ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Epimenides_paradox https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Epimenides_paradox )

orionblastar 5y ago

I used to post on Kuro5hin but now it is gone. I'd rather write ebooks and submit them to Amazon Kindle. Earn some money and Amazon isn't going to close any time soon.

winternett 5y ago

Very important points raised here.. It's been what I've been endlessly speaking on with my friends that thought of me as "beating a dead horse" for a long time now. The worst part about waking people up to the ills of modern social platforms is that each person has a dramatically different experience, and they never see the people who are struggling, they only see the success stories from people who far too often are getting all their ideas from the bottom, but paying to be on top. Social media sites, just like reddit often expose ideas and content to larger audiences than typically what personalized web sites can do. That leads to rampant idea theft without credibility, and to diluted and convoluted messages. Online communication and effective problem resolution (climate crisis, protests, valid discourse) is now completely hobbled because these large platforms serve profit, but also allow large interests to out-voice even scholars and trained experts. The entire "influencer" economy is based on people coming out of instant celebrity and then developing huge "influence" and it's totally screwing up positions of power and influence in real life because they suddenly get a large voice without proper experience and merits to their achievement. It's created a monster machine where we're suddenly doing drastically harmful things because people want to make money rather than listening to people who have a proven track record of doing good things to create positive change. We need to stop rewarding cheap mediocrity, and to stop trying to insert wise words into forums known for mis-management and reckless disregard for human good. Real world problem solving cannot be conducted along side memes and veiled corporate advertisements with convoluted money making agendas charading as thoughtful trustworthiness. The way to take back credibility is to withdraw completely from social media, only using social sites as a pointer back to official sources for trusted news and well curated personal web sites. This way, you can own (and potentially future-proof) your words and content once again. In running your own site, you can make backups, and better address plagiarism and idea theft -- which is very rampant online right now. I have hung onto my own personal sites for over 20 years now, I never felt that social platforms were reliable enough to give up my own personal domains and sites, and every day of frustration with sites like reddit just goes to confirm that idea. It's not an argument to reinforce academic emphasis on who to listen to, it's the move necessary to bring back accountability and originality of thought that isn't subject to 20 silly made up rules about how, when, and what you can post on reddit, and you can't quite get downvoted into oblivion by someone who wants to paraphrase you and steal your ideals as quickly (provided your posts are dated, tagged, and credited properly). Take back ownership of your words, they never gave you much to begin with for sharing on their platforms anyway.

ggm 5y ago

I post my answer to mailing lists I ask the questions on. More than once in the last 30 years I've found my answer in the ML archive, and its sometimes still the best clue back to what to do. ML archives last longer than specific websites, sometimes. Not always: Google is killing a lot of USENET/ML history

u801e 5y ago
Mailing list archives became easier to access with services like gmane and, more recently, public inbox. I don't think they were easy to browse prior to that.
- ggm 5y ago
  Yea. I reached a point where I decided the risk-reward was ok and deleted my local ML archives. I now check headers for the mailman/listserv link to archive and if I see it, I do make the risky decision to rely on it. Probably I'll come to regret that, in 20 years time.

Semaphor 5y ago

122 comments from Oct 2020: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24934569 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24934569 I’m a bit confused about the API thing, considering they mainly talk about Reddit. Reddit has a vibrant third-party client ecosystem, thanks to their API. As far as I know, the API is not crippled in any way?

throwaway81523 5y ago
Reddit's API can't access their chat system, doesn't work well with their search function, and (like with their own web client) can't easily collect all of the comments from a long thread. Also, I expect they will eventually cripple it further or shut it down completely, like Twitter did.
- Karrot_Kream 5y ago
  Representing threaded comments through an API is often implemented terribly. HN's API in that regard is absolutely bonkers. Lobsters probably has the most convenient API, returning the full comment tree in the response. As long as you're willing to do a bit of tree traversal, the Reddit API is fine. I also don't really think Reddit will be dropping API support any time soon. There's been no indications in that direction except for a change in the unauthenticated rate limit that was made a couple years back.
  - throwaway81523 5y ago
    > As long as you're willing to do a bit of tree traversal, the Reddit API is fine. But then you end up having to make 100s of queries per thread, getting just a few comments each time.
- Semaphor 5y ago
  chat system: I see. I never use it as I prefer PMs, so I didn’t know about that. Long threads: As you said, it’s a general issue ;) Crippling: Maybe, but so far they haven’t.

quadrifoliate 5y ago

You might be tempted to say some of the following: - But Reddit has an API, and lots of third-party clients! - But you can just use https://old.reddit.com https://old.reddit.com or https://i.reddit.com https://i.reddit.com instead! The problem is that the user-hostile trends of current Reddit (e.g. locking the user out and prompting them to install an app) make it apparent that most of these workarounds and such are going to be made invalid in, say, the next 5 years. Even if they do survive, they will be mothballed and largely inaccessible to someone who is starting to use Reddit today. As it IPOs, these user-hostile patterns driven by people who focus on next quarter's returns to the exclusion of all else are only going to increase. So I agree with Karl's conclusion here – don't contribute anything relevant to forums that aren't decentralized to start off with. What do I suggest as an alternative? This is just my personal opinion, but I think email lists the most accessible decentralized substitute. It's 2022, and we have much better techniques to apply to spam filtering. I will take the tradeoff of the occasional spammy email for having my conversations with others archived under my own control without a ton of effort (I can just use regular old OS tools like Mail, Outlook, and such instead of the more complex information management efforts built by more dedicated folks.

notriddle 5y ago
> This is just my personal opinion, but I think email lists the most accessible decentralized substitute. It's 2022, and we have much better techniques to apply to spam filtering. I contend that this isn’t true. First of all, if it was true, there would not be so many deliverability problems with email. But, more importantly, there are solid, definitional reasons why spam filtering can never be particularly good. Is it spam if a bot copies questions from one mailing list to another one with a similar topic, in an attempt to build out a reputation? The copied “spam” emails have identical content to legitimate traffic, but there’s no human at the other end, and the seemingly-good user is eventually going to “cash in” on their reputation by posting actual spam. Similar tactics can attack Bayesian filters, and IP address-based systems are getting less useful over time as CG-NAT becomes more popular. Personally, I think “spam filtering” as a heuristic that you tack onto an otherwise spam-vulnerable protocol has been about as good as it will ever get for the last decade [1]. Email and traditional web forums share most of the same problems, but web forums have two big advantages: * Forums can reactively remove spam, as can USENET [2]. Mailing lists have to filter everything before fanning out. ML archives can be redacted, but anyone maintaining their own personal archive has to do any post-delivery filtering themselves. * Forums have somewhat more operational flexibility. You won’t see Reddit/HN-style voting in mailing lists unless you customize your local tooling to support it. Normally, all a ML can do is decide whether to block it entirely or not. [1]: https://craphound.com/spamsolutions.txt https://craphound.com/spamsolutions.txt [2]: http://wiki.killfile.org/projects/usenet/faqs/cancel/ http://wiki.killfile.org/projects/usenet/faqs/cancel/

keithnz 5y ago

HN without people contributing relevant things would suck. I get it, they have some idealized idea of what they want the internet to be and how people should interact, how information should be shared, blah blah. But the places and culture that end up encouraging people to contribute can be quite different from this "ideal", and sure it has flaws, and sure we can try and do things to improve things, but I kind of don't care, I like finding places on the internet that have people who love contributing, that something about that wee corner of the internet does a better job of creating that kind of culture than other corners.

MikusR 5y ago
You can read comments on HN without logging in or using an app.
- mynameismon 5y ago
  So with Reddit. What is your point?
  - jeroenhd 5y ago
    With Reddit you can either read half the comments, the top three comments, or sometimes nothing, because "this community is available in the app" or "log in to read the rest of the discussion" or whatever other flavour of user hostile design the company put out this week. For some obscure reason it's also terribly slow on my desktop even if I'm logged in. It's a terrible experience all around. And no, I don't want to manually change the URL or install some third party add-on to fix their intentionally broken website.
    - veltas 5y ago
      Change the "www" in URL to "old". The redesign is awful.
  - NavinF 5y ago
    Depends on what side of the AB test you’re on. If you clear your cookies, you’ll find that the default web interface forces you to login after a random delay or after a few clicks.

dang 5y ago

Something relevant from October 2020: Don't contribute anything relevant in web forums - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24934569 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24934569 - Oct 2020 (122 comments)

JohnJamesRambo 5y ago

Reddit is almost the only useful site left to find actual things written by humans. If I Google my problem and put Reddit at the end I usually find my answer. Without it I’m lost in SEO blogpost hell. Please keep posting useful things to Reddit.

iypx 5y ago
I'd rather encourage people to post useful things on their own sites. Maybe, hopefully, one day, both google and other search engines might start penalizing content farms and have personal blogs and websites surface again. > Reddit is almost the only useful site left to find actual things written by humans. The one, most important thing (the way I see it), is never actually mentioned. I'm gonna call it: "organic advertising". I will never, consciously, take any advice I see on reddit/hn. Last time It was obvious for me, I was browsing/procrastinating throgh r/all, and somebody, a "real human" with an actual "real" account (I checked his history) posted a drawing made by his kid. Second-most upvoted comment is blatant Crayola advert (checked that guys history, every 10-15th comment he was praising $random_top_us_brand). Rest of the thread, at least another dozen Crayola mentions, by real people, who religiously believe in Crayola... Take a lot of top threads, there's always a swarm of seemingly "real" accounts religiously promoting most American top brands. Funnily enough, usually 1 brand per thread. Somehow fans of X never see the Y threads, and vice-versa... I refuse to believe actual people will go out of their way to defend/promote/etc their $favorite_brand. Only on reddit/hn.
- kalleboo 5y ago
  > I refuse to believe actual people will go out of their way to defend/promote/etc their $favorite_brand. Only on reddit/hn. Those "Calvin peeing on Ford logo" decals predate social media
  - hakko 5y ago
    It's true. Those originated as bootleg sales at county fair booths in the 90s, along with the concrete geese. The writer of Calvin and Hobbes was actually quite against them and merchandising in general, having seen the saturation of Garfield merchandise in the 80s.

AlotOfReading 5y ago

I contribute to Askhistorians occasionally, which specializes in long form, long term answers in response to queries. It's a useful thing, but the "value proposition" as it were fundamentally relies on having large numbers of readers to attract subject matter experts and users with interesting questions. I've experienced everything listed. With that said, none of it matters because the model breaks down without the userbase. You can't move to an alternative because the historians aren't there, even if the questioners are. Even if you convince a subset of them to move, churn will eventually kill it anyway. The whole thing also needs to broadly in the flow of mainstream internet culture to make it useful. So what's the alternative?

TedShiller 5y ago

I never contribute anything relevant

OrderlyTiamat 5y ago
A very principled stance, I will take the same.
- TedShiller 5y ago
  We are the only honest people here.

u801e 5y ago

I posted many things to usenet decades ago. Unfortunately, unless the Google groups archive contains it, it's been lost to time.

admax88qqq 5y ago
Turns out the platform matters less than just having somebody willing to archive it. Hard to get more open and federated than USENET.

ksec 5y ago

The only thing I partly agree on is the censorship part. But then hosting it on AWS or any public cloud / server would have had the same problem. You could do good old fashion collocation with your own server. But then Network / DC may refuse you as well. Otherwise it is the basic argument of Distribution and Discovery problem again. And I mean a lot of Web Forums are dying anyway. Hosting cost aren't going down, forum software are any faster or efficient, requires some scale before Ads revenue picks up. And the hassle to manage the software. Part of the reason why many are moving to Discord and Slack. The way things are going many Web Forum will be gone without any battle the blog mentioned.

ford 5y ago

I can see where the author is coming from, and I don't mean to discredit the many negatives they mention, but ironically enough people doing exactly what the article suggests against has led to many people (even my mother) googling things like "best coffee grinder reddit". Most of the alternatives sound like they would be much less discoverable and encourage much less interaction/discussion, which often is as interesting as the contribution itself. I do agree that any sort of cohesive, ongoing advice is better organized in a blog or other more permanent form. I also agree that the suggestion about "fixing web-based forums" could be a good idea. And perhaps it's also worth saving your particularly good contributions in storage you own

notreallyserio 5y ago

I figure if there comes the day that I write something of value, that I want my real name on, I could just choose to post it on reddit/HN/etc and my blog simultaneously and get the best of both worlds.

moron4hire 5y ago

I actually could do with a lot more knowledge being very transient. For example, I could be searching for how to do something in ASP.NET Core. In the year of our Lord, 2022, that means I'm doing it on either .NET 5 or 6. I definitely do not need results for anything involving .NET Core 1.1 from 5+ years ago. Even if it might technically work (which is doubtful, so many of the APIs have changed) there are almost certainly better ways that have evolved in the intervening years.

saberworks 5y ago

I have a ton of experience with this. I've been running a "Dark Forces II: Jedi Knight" fan site since early 1998. We've been in it so long that probably over 90% of our outbound links are at best broken or at worst lead to malware or pornography (of course I clean it up when I find it -- by removing the links and adding a note). And yet, stuff that people have been directly contributing to our site since 1998 is still available, still open, and freely available without creating an account. The only thing that saves content like this is people who care. Reddit doesn't care, they're in it for the dollars. Facebook doesn't care, google doesn't care (look how many services have been removed over the years). I miss the days of every site having their own community. I remember when most game companies would put a landing page for each new game that came out and that was about it. Hundreds or thousands of fan sites popped up and provided a community that far outlasted the direct revenue of most games. Then gaming companies decided to create their own "communities," but they're stale, without personality, and as soon as the game isn't making money anymore, the sites languish and are eventually deleted, along with all the helpful content that has been posted by users. I'm completely torn because you can't count on idiots like me (and all the people who have helped with my site over the decades!!) to keep things going forever. My take on this was to make all the content "open" -- it started with all our static assets being converted from 25 years of spaghetti HTML to clean markdown and a static site generator. Anyone can clone the repo, recreate the site (including all the static content) and upload it wherever they want. The next step was to open-source the dynamic back-end. The remaining two steps are somehow regularly distributing a database dump (with personal information stripped out, of course) and then finally figuring out how to make available regular dumps of the content that doesn't fit in git or the database (like the ~10G of maps, mods, and screenshots that users have submitted). These two are still being planned. I wish every site with anything to say had a plan for what to do when the owner is done maintaining it. Figure out a way to make the important content open and up. Internet Archive is great but they miss so much stuff, especially zip files, image files, etc. I don't think any of this works with a profit motive, however.

NoahTheDuke 5y ago
Wow, massassi.net is quite a trip through time. I spent many many hours on your site, playing Jedi Knight with friends and randos through GameSpy. Endless hours of entertainment toying with JED, trying to perfect my own levels, or installing various mods and texture packs. Thank you for the effort, you gave me quite a few cherished memories.

throw3838 5y ago

I gave up on Web long time ago, too much shallow garbage. Books are much better.

srcreigh 5y ago

Reddit and HN are both replicated by third parties. The content won't go away.

throwawaysea 5y ago
Who replicates Reddit? Are there archives of all the banned subreddits?
- tpxl 5y ago
  The ArchiveTeam archives reddit.

WalterBright 5y ago

The article advises "Use NNTP". NNTP is what the D Language forums use: https://forum.dlang.org/ https://forum.dlang.org/ While it may look like any web forum, it is a shell around NNTP. This means you can access it via any NNTP software, like Thunderbird (what I use), by pointing to news.digitalmars.com There's a readonly version of it that consists of simple HTML pages: https://www.digitalmars.com/NewsGroup.html https://www.digitalmars.com/NewsGroup.html and even a mailing list you can sign up for. We've been very happy with it, been using it for 18 years. Occasionally people ask for "modern" forum software, but its restrictions are actually advantages.

rhn_mk1 5y ago
Does it allow the users to use it as if there was no NNTP at all? I.e. posting from the web interface.
- Doxin 5y ago
  yes
unhammer 5y ago
And incredibly fast page loads! https://github.com/CyberShadow/DFeed https://github.com/CyberShadow/DFeed seems to be the source – is it general enough that other communities use it too?
- WalterBright 5y ago
  There's nothing D specific about it - although it is implemented in D!
alexvoda 5y ago
Is the web ux shell open source?
- bachmeier 5y ago
  It's all at the link someone else posted: https://github.com/CyberShadow/DFeed https://github.com/CyberShadow/DFeed

sekao 5y ago

Good points but the suggested alternatives are ignoring the most important piece of tech we have for synchronizing content: git. My problem with ActivityPub is that when you export your content, you get a big binary file that can't be incrementally updated. I'm exploring the idea of using git to clone a completely offline version of a message board in my BBS: https://ansiwave.net/ https://ansiwave.net/

lutorm 5y ago

I don't understand, surely there's a giant difference between posting on reddit/facebook and posting on a community-driven BBedit board, even if they're both "web-based".

ellis0n 5y ago

100% True. For 10 years I have been trying to get people interested in my programming language and software platform. 5 years ago I just got bans and couldn't create a topic due to lack of karma and it just never go frontpage r/programming or HN. I'm old school and I thought programmers would be interested in a simple mobile language with a real-time reverse debugger for live development created according to Bret Victor's principles, but it turned out to be in vain. Almost no one understands the concept of Bret Victor and in a year I found only one person like me who was busy :) Since this is programming, then it is difficult to find investments, because no one understands the product (investors are not programmers). I asked various people to donate, but it seems that the letters simply did not reach or were ignored (for example, I asked Amjad from Replit to donate several times, he arranged funny contests). As a result, it was easier for me to sell my time in web3 than to explain something to someone on public platforms about the perfect code, and the society was left without innovation. Later, I started seeing parts of my project as separate startups, here on HN and Reddit. If it were not for the complex technological implementation (I am a developer with 20 years of experience), then everything would have been lost a long time ago. Of course, later I realized all the mistakes, studied the market, marketing, accelerated by different methods. Conclusion: The problem of money and innovation is in 95% of startups, especially from developing countries with weak economies and IT startup sector, as I had. It is better for you to do something simple and not very technological or go to places where technology is developed like Silicon Valley or use remote accelerators. The issues: - no interest without money & marketing, public will not work for you - marketing & public is evil - language barrier - cultural barrier - commercial barrier (as old school, I didn't understand why r/programming moderator was banning me by low HQ and when I reported the moderator 'the ban stops tech progress', I got a second ban and can't hire someone to help me figure the issue due karma issue, lost it) - karma in public areas (I still can't access macrumors when I had it 5 years ago, but after the interface change my account is lost) - money, money, money again If someone wants to participate, welcome Programming platform https://www.reddit.com/r/acpu/ https://www.reddit.com/r/acpu/ Web3 demo app https://www.reddit.com/r/Web3Wallet/ https://www.reddit.com/r/Web3Wallet/

jdrc 5y ago
I like how you went from "other people's reddits" to creating your own distribution in there. Unfortunately the web is too big and too crowded now, and i do think that owning your distribution is the only solution.

LAC-Tech 5y ago

Interesting idea. However I once turned my most up-voted reddit post into a blog post and no one gave a shit. So that's my anecdotal counter.

banana_maker 5y ago

[flagged]

etchalon 5y ago
You said "No." but went on to completely agree with his statement.
- nfkaT 5y ago
  [flagged]
- Synaesthesia 5y ago
  Not really, he has an interesting point. The US permits Nazis openly under free speech laws, and holocaust denial and soon, while Germany bans it. However it is a serious problem in Germany and Europe whereas in the US its just kind of laughed at.
- andrewzah 5y ago
  "In the USA, freedom-loving people think fans of the human monsters that tortured and murdered millions of Jews in the Second World War need the possibility to express their personal "opinion". I completely disagree with this viewpoint and this characterization of what Americans believe. You're conflating support for free speech, with support for things like nazism. Which is just incorrect. Nobody is starting out by saying "nazis need to be able to post their opinions online". It's just that the way free speech works, it unfortunately covers disgusting things like nazism exactly the same as it covers my own speech. That's the whole point of not letting the government abridge or prohibit speech. Imagine if the government did have those powers, and then decided that it was illegal to discuss LGBT concepts or specific religions. You can't have it both ways; I'm glad to have free speech because it protects ME (and my family, friends, etc) from being jailed for criticizing the government or having specific beliefs, etc, even if it has the side effect of people being able to post disgusting things online. Censoring discussion doesn't stop people from discussing it in secret, it always gets abused by the government given a long enough timeframe. The original snippet I replied to from the article was such a holier-than-thou comment, and their country's solution of censoring speech ("good" censorship) didn't even work!

Mortiffer 5y ago

I know HN has something against Blockchain. But there are some really smart people working on the idea of a permanent web. For instance https://www.arweave.org/ https://www.arweave.org/ is based on the concept that you prepay for 200 years of storage but storage cost is decreasing over time so it's also like a future option on advance of technology. I guess people also know IPFS i just didn't see it get mentioned. And also i hope everyone here who cares about this topic is donating to the Internet Archive which also a solution.

valdiorn 5y ago
current blockchain tech (at least mainstream) is hilariously inefficient at storing data. If you can provide me anything to the contrary I'd be very interested in reading about it.

ihateolives 5y ago

All these arguments by presumably hardcore STEM people always forget the most important thing - when you share your knowledge on whatever platform, be it as ephemeral as it is, now that knowledge has spread and more people possess it, even if they retain a part of it. We don't need 99,999% uptime or 3-2-1 backups or perfect GUI to share knowledge. I get it, IT people would be lost when SO goes down so they always want to build most reliable thing ever, but it's always a moving goalpost. Just contribute wherever you can.

egypturnash 5y ago

meh whatever, I'll keep on procrastinating on getting art drawn by answering questions on the Illustrator subreddit. My desire to put together a book on how I use Illustrator effectively is pretty much nil; my desire to make videos on the subject is even less despite people telling me I should do this and could make money on it. When Reddit dies I will find some other place to procrastinate by answering people's Illustrator questions. Every now and then a question results in me figuring out how to do a cool thing in Illustrator that I can then apply to my own work.

nebukadnet 5y ago

Does it really matter wether Reddit makes backups? If it is interesting enough to save, it will be reposted or copied or whatever. If it isn't it will get lost in the mass of other "interesting" things.

abetusk 5y ago

I don't know if it's a good enough alternative but one of the reasons why StackOverflow and Wikipedia have been so steadfast is because of their libre/free licensing (CC-BY-SA). Both are centralized but because the user content is clearly licensed to allow replication, it encourages dissemination, allows for users to know their content won't be lost and, in the worst case, can help bootstrap an alternative, should the main organization fold. I find it depressing to see how many sites don't follow this basic principle, that user content should, by default, be effectively dedicated to the commons. HN falls into this trap and I so I suspect it's only a matter of time before all the discussions and user generated content disappears from the web.

carapace 5y ago
I don't recall the details off the top of my head but I believe HN is archived in near-realtime in a few places and the result made freely available.
- abetusk 5y ago
  Archive.org can archive Twitter and IMDB but both Twitter and IMDB do not have libre/free licensing for user generated content. Here is HNs policy [0]: """ Commercial Use: Unless otherwise expressly authorized herein or in the Site, you agree not to display, distribute, license, perform, publish, reproduce, duplicate, copy, create derivative works from, modify, sell, resell, exploit, transfer or upload for any commercial purposes, any portion of the Site, use of the Site, or access to the Site. ... """ If HN ever folds, the most likely condition will be someone owns the copyright and will not put it under a libre/free license for the community to use, effectively burying it. In the meantime, HN offers a (perhaps small) treasure trove of information about technical issues, trends, data on how a community forms, communicates and interacts with each other that is explicitly barred from use by the general public without individual approval. Though this would probably be met with a lot of resistance, HN is well within their right to sue all the "show HN" projects that use the HN data to display interesting trends, do data analysis or do other interesting projects with. [0] https://www.ycombinator.com/legal/ https://www.ycombinator.com/legal/

octoberfranklin 5y ago

Usenet was pretty magical back in the 1990s. It had none of the problems that this article points out. The closest thing it has to a modern successor is public-inbox. Demand that your forums provide a public-inbox archive. http://public-inbox.org/README.html http://public-inbox.org/README.html It stores the entire discussion history in a git archive. You can git-clone discussions, and then git-pull just the new stuff. It applies git's brilliant "everybody has a copy of the whole repository, not just the guy running the CVS server" to discussions. sr.ht and kernel.org use this for their mailing lists.

vbezhenar 5y ago

Web archive is good enough. Hopefully it won't disappear. Just ensure that any page on your website is few clicks away from main page. Right now I have an issue with one website that disappeared. I'm trying to rebuild it with old content, it had pages like 1-5, ... and middle pages required too many clicks and weren't archived. Best solution is good old site map with direct link to every page on the website.

unfocussed_mike 5y ago

I think I agree with this, actually. :-/

Freskis 5y ago

Reddit is a psychopath corporation. They are laser-focussed on engagement and signups, and don't care if they degrade the fabric of society while they do it. The website is designed to encourage conflict and divisive hate, millions of americans screaming hate between [ingroup] and [outgroup]. Clearly the API and old reddit will be removed soon, and the will have reached the final destination of their plans. Their psychopath tendencies are clear, and the path they are following has been clear for years.

5350-uiop-1130 5y ago

I love archive.today and i automatically use it for a lot of articles. Sometimes I will save the full page screenshot from there for posterity. It's really a beacon of light in the internet. Author is right in the sense why are we giving up all this content to an often antagonistic third-party service.

hedgewitch 5y ago
> Author is right in the sense why are we giving up all this content to an often antagonistic third-party service. Because it's seen and interacted with, whereas it otherwise might not be. People are vain. It's not more complicated than that.

phkahler 5y ago

Reddit is not stack overflow or quora. It's just people talking in public. Feel free to offer informative information, just be aware that you're having a conversation, not creating content for the ages. I thought this was obvious.

kbelder 5y ago
Exactly. I had a short conversation in the break room at work with a semi-acquaintance about the different types of doors on microwave ovens. I'm not offended that those comments are not preserved forever for posterity. Nor am I offended if somebody used them to train an AI. It's just me talking. That's 90% of Reddit.

2-718-281-828 5y ago

I have benefitted countless times from other people contributing on forums and I like to give back occasionally by doing so myself. And I don't see any problem with that whatsoever. And because many here seem to equate forum with reddit. There are loads of independent subject specific forums out there and I use dozens of them successfully.

streamofdigits 5y ago

Ideally you'd want some distilled and organized subset of "good" (informative) discussions, comments etc to persisted as a separate hierarchy that is subject focused and not timeline oriented. A subjective wikipedia of sorts (less encyclopedic, less moderated) that is composed on the fly.

iostream23 5y ago

The parts about accessibility, data portability, and alternative interfaces are very relevant: protocols instead of software, open standards. Remember the various messenger clients and then stuff like Trillian Pigeon etc? The federated stuff as well as web rings, remember those? Remember life before Google? Organic discovery of links is often quite ideologically and teleologically relevant, in terms of the people and minds that connect. It’s somewhat ironic that web forums such as HN are actually how we discover human filtered links.

antiterra 5y ago

I’ve posted idiotic things to Usenet years ago that I wish weren’t archived and impossible to delete. Ephemerality is sometimes your friend.

wccrawford 5y ago

When I help people in forums or social media, I don't do it for future people. I do it for the person I am responding to. If someone else gets something out of it, that's great, but I didn't aim it at them. And so I don't care if it disappears the next day. I just need that one person to get what they need. Worrying about the future in that situation is just going to add friction and make me more likely to not answer at all. Not everything has to be optimized to death. Sometimes it's okay to just do the easy thing.

jordanpg 5y ago
Agree, this article seems to be focused on a solution in search of a problem. Obviously random web forums are not the solution if you're wanting immortal, permanently searchable archived wisdom.

Saint_Genet 5y ago

Why does every "don't use centralized software owned by someone else" here end up with tons of people plugging their favorite niche project as if the network effect doesn't exist?

bjourne 5y ago

All good arguments, not just practical. I know how to host my own email, it's just not worth the hassle when you consider spam, whitelists, blacklists, and what have you. I know how to setup my own blog on my own web server on my own vps with my own commenting system. But again, I blog maybe twice per month, so not worth the hassle. If such things are not practical for me then they are well out of reach for average internet users that doesn't even know what a server is.

abruzzi 5y ago

this article seems to miss why I participate on forums. I'm not interacting with the software, I'm not creating some great post that will live on in history. I'm interacting with another person, who has asked a question. Should I refuse to answer because that person asked the question on a vbulletin system? (* I've never used reddit or discord. With the exception of HN, the only forums I use are old school--small, single purpose vbulletin, SMF, or PHPBB forums.)

taubek 5y ago

The biggest issue with self hosting things is discoverability of things. Regardless of the quality of my content I don't know how could I compete with the same content being published on Stack Overflow or Reddit.