22 ms·

Ask HN: I miss Usenet. Are there any modern equivalents?

• EddieDante 4y ago
  You can still access USENET if you have an account on <https://www.eternal-september.org/ https://www.eternal-september.org/>. <https://news.individual.net https://news.individual.net> works, too, but I think it costs ten euros a year.
  • pwg 4y ago
    At least eternal-september and nntp.aioe.org are free access -- but both have text only newsgroups, no binaries groups.
    • bitwize 4y ago
      There's a reason for that. Binaries groups were historically dens of piracy and CSAM. They consume HUGE amounts of traffic and hosting them presents liability issues to the providers.
      • nisegami 4y ago
        Usenet binary groups still exist and are heavily used for piracy.
      • Arubis 4y ago
        > dens of piracy and CSAM Tangential, but fascinating that we've binned these categories together. The latter is likely orders of magnitude more harmful to society.
        • bitwize 4y ago
          Indeed, but I was just listing them as "two major illegal things that binaries newsgroups are used for", not tie them together or relate them in a jejune "four horsemen of the infocalypse" kind of way.
        • cies 4y ago
          I'd argue that piracy is beneficial to society. Copyright (and most of IP-law) is a scam at this point. 10y is enough on any IP-thingy (to have a head start on the rest of the market); but that's just my opinion. Yeah looking at you Mickey Mouse.
        • corrral 4y ago
          The former's arguably net-beneficial, in a world with effectively eternal copyright terms. It's shouldn't be possible for Disney to own so much of the last ~100 years of popular media, for example, because most of that should no longer be ownable.
        • Taywee 4y ago
          It's not about "harmful to society" in this case, but more "illegal, attracting attention from entities that make hosting the service much more painful and difficult". More than once, I've had thoughts about developing some sort of discussion platform, but binned it because the thought of hosting it and having to deal with the not-fun problems of reducing spam and handling illegal content made it entirely untasteful. At least spam reduction can be done entirely on my own terms, but illegal content requires me to then coordinate with external companies or agencies, report content, figure out how to deal with and purge the content (or quarantine and hang onto it hand it over when requested), and live with the the pain of having to field DLNAs and other copyright claims. I obviously have different feelings about piracy than I do about CSAM, but from a hosting perspective, both are just big pain points that make hosting a service where people can share non-text content a pain in the ass.
    • beej71 4y ago
      It sounds like that would be fine with the OP who is looking for tech community and discussion.
  • emmelaich 4y ago
    https://www.techradar.com/au/best/best-usenet-providers https://www.techradar.com/au/best/best-usenet-providers (of 2022) Seems to be oriented toward binaries though.
• PaulHoule 4y ago
  I think people overlook web forums. I would point to https://coderanch.com/ https://coderanch.com/ https://www.dpreview.com/forums https://www.dpreview.com/forums and https://polyamory.com/ https://polyamory.com/ as good examples. There are a lot of dead forums out there, but there are also ones where the administrators make the effort to greet new users and make them feel welcome. For instance that last forum covers a fraught issue where emotions run pretty high but the administrators do a good job of "onboarding" new users.
  • WR7wh5Un 4y ago
    This is true. I have tried to maintain the same type of "great people" in my forum. It's a lot of hard work and it's been costly to maintain over the years. It is also admittedly very limited in focus.
• Bostonian 4y ago
  Usenet still exists, but some groups are mostly (but not entirely) spam, at least when you view them through Google Groups, for example comp.lang.python at https://groups.google.com/g/comp.lang.python https://groups.google.com/g/comp.lang.python . It would be great if a coordinated effort to mark spam as spam cleaned up comp.lang.python. https://groups.google.com/g/comp.lang.fortran https://groups.google.com/g/comp.lang.fortran has less spam, and I regularly flag spam there.
• Angostura 4y ago
  > Arguably, Reddit fills some of this niche, but Usenet was tech-focused, generally quite professional and frankly didn't have the same clientele as Reddit does I see you didn't hang out in alt.wesley.crusher.die.die.die much
  • lambic 4y ago
    Or anything in the alt or rec hierarchies really.
    • revscat 4y ago
      alt.religion.scientology is where many of the secrets around Xenu, etc., were originally leaked. Not all of the alt.* hierarchy was vapid.
      • lambic 4y ago
        Yep, alt.religion.scientology, alt.tv.northern-exp, and news.admin.net-abuse.email were my main hangouts.
    • kwoff 4y ago
      My first thought when seeing "tech-focused" was "let's see, I hung out in alt.atheism... wait, that's like /r/atheism?" (I see there's also an /r/nonsequitur/, kinda like alt.non.sequitur though the reddit version seems a more....attached to reality.)
  • AtlasBarfed 4y ago
    Didn't alt.barney.die.die.die.die have more dies? I don't remember exactly Usenet was a cost to ISPs unfortunately. But, it wasn't centrally controlled or moderated either. It also was minimally technical to use, which served as a good filter. But I guess reddit's subreddits may be the best alternative with viewership and specific groups/areas. You know... it should be possible with tagging to take something like twitter reddit, and generate "views" that are groups. Maybe make some spec with three letters, maybe R and an S, and heck another S for the hell of it. Balkanization and content gardens/API walls block integration of like minded content.
• joshstrange 4y ago
  > Arguably, Reddit fills some of this niche, but Usenet was tech-focused, generally quite professional and frankly didn't have the same clientele as Reddit does. It all depends on the community you want to hang out in. Usenet was tech-focused because the only people who knew about it or had access were tech-focused and the community was smaller (see: Eternal September). One of your best options are niche, smaller or heavily moderated reddit communities or web forums that share the same characteristics.
• sponaugle 4y ago
  The question is - What are you missing? I suspect you probably miss something that has more to do with the participants. In the early days of Usenet there were very few ways to access it from the perspective of an average person. You either had to be working on one of the small number of companies that were internet connected or were at a university. That significantly restricted the available pool of people using it, and also filtered that pool. Up through the early 90s that natural filter mechanism kept the focus of individual groups small, reduced noise, and increased signal. Over time as internet access became more widespread that signal to noise decreased, and most modern forums still have difficulty with it. There are a few other interesting characteristics - the specific nature of the tree approach and the availability of lots of specific groups gave it some uniqueness - Today you might see a bit of that in Reddit subs, Facebook groups, and other similar platforms, albeit lacking the tree.
  • InefficientRed 4y ago
    Piggy-backing off of this post: the answer is to get off the high-trafficked parts of the public internet. Examples: 1. Meatspace user groups / interest groups. 2. University lecture series (the type of weekly seminar that all graduate students and faculty in a given research area attend). You can usually attend as a member of the public if you have an "in". 3. Mailing lists and discord servers for specific projects.
    • vorpalhex 4y ago
      "Moving Castles" was the terminology I heard someone propose[0]. Unfortunately they got too caught up in the crypto nonsense but the idea was sound - good communities have to be guarded and they occasionally "lower the drawbridge" to bring on newcomers, potentially with semi-public spaces. This could be a minecraft server, a facebook group or what have you. Since the group is motile, they aren't affected by platforms being subpar. They can avoid stagnation by bringing in newcomers, but have a way to vet incoming people too before allowing them "internal" access. [0]: https://trust.support/feed/moving-castles https://trust.support/feed/moving-castles
  • sillyquiet 4y ago
• billyjobob 4y ago
  https://getaether.net/ https://getaether.net/ is an attempt at a modern usenet, i.e. decentralised discussion. However it doesn’t have many users or third party clients. https://xn--gckvb8fzb.com/superhighway84/ https://xn--gckvb8fzb.com/superhighway84/ is a more directly nostalgia inspired clone of usenet.
• dym_sh 4y ago
  discord /s every specialized sub-group now holds small portion of the web by/for themselves and only needs to interact with those of same mindset — no need to keep every single word in public forever. but what you really missing is people of the same~ish age-group having enough time and topics to argue about
• DeathArrow 4y ago
  I think you can find the same vibe in Reddit, some forums and some mailing lists. Also, HN not being subject focused works for me because I am interested in more than one subject. One idea is if HN would introduce some tags, or categories so someone can filter if he's only interested in one subject.
• thesuitonym 4y ago
  Usenet is still there, I download TV shows from it all the time. The discussion forums are still there, too, but are completely overridden with spam. Most of the public unix [0][1][2] servers have a Usenet server that federates with some other tilde servers, though not the wider usenet. I stumbled across a group called ALTEXXANET [3] that claims to have one, though I've not checked to see if it's still there. What were some of the newsgroups you were interested in? When and why did you stop checking them? [0] http://sdf.org/ http://sdf.org/ [1] https://tildeverse.org/ https://tildeverse.org/ [2] https://tilde.club/wiki/usenet-news.html https://tilde.club/wiki/usenet-news.html [3] http://www.altexxanet.org/usenet.html http://www.altexxanet.org/usenet.html
  • jdc0589 4y ago
    A friend was still using it for tv/movie download a couple years ago too
  • NoGravitas 4y ago
    I use a feed with no binaries groups, which is how I like it. Most groups aren't exactly overrun with spam, they're just not very active. One or two spam messages a day looks like a lot when actual users are only posting one or two messages a week. But if a group is active (like comp.sys.raspberry-pi), you hardly notice the spam.
• lrhegeba 4y ago
  HackerNews seems a viable alternative with a daily delivery of interesting topics, excellent moderators and often highly interesting comments from a diverse crowd of users -> check it out ;-)
• abruzzi 4y ago
  I never thought of usenet as tech focused. There were many areas that were non-tech topics. Sure there was comp.sys., but all the alt. boards and others. Web forums were kind of the spirtual successor, and many of them have subject subforums, but within that most web forums segregate discussion by thread. I find that much more useful since usenet felt like a mailing list of post after post after post. Threads allow me to ignore discussion that aren't relevant to me. I haven't migrated from web foums to reddit or facebook groups though I'm sure there is much information in those places. I prefer that independent web forums introduce some friction to participating. You have to create an account, and some forums have limits for new members until they reach a certain post count. While the friction is small that does seem to discourage bad behavior a little. I have easily found forums for subjects I'm interested in, but none of them are tech, so I don't know whether you'll find web forums on current tech subjects.
• the_biot 4y ago
  > If I remember my computing history correctly, Google ended up acquiring and eating Usenet, becoming Google Groups. Usenet was a distributed set of news peering relationships, exchanging posts via NNTP. There was nothing to acquire, so that's not what happened. Google merely set up a web interface to it, which was eventually extended to the abomination that was Google Groups. This was intended to be some sort of mix of Usenet group and mailing list, all via a web interface. In reality it was awful and I suspect development on it stopped 10+ years ago.
  • jghn 4y ago
    Dejanews built that frontend on top of an archive they had. Google bought Dejanews and thus the archive.
    • iso1631 4y ago
      Google really destroyed that archive, there's posts from the 80s and 90s I know used to be in deja and in early google that just can't be found any more.
      • btrettel 4y ago
        And it seems that a lot of uuencoded content was removed at some point. You can see the text of the message, but the uuencoded part is mostly cut out. Here's an example: https://groups.google.com/g/misc.int-property/c/f2-dV5wVP9U/m/VethbajH648J https://groups.google.com/g/misc.int-property/c/f2-dV5wVP9U/... If anyone here knows how to get the uuencoded part of that message, I'd be interested.
        • that_courtney 4y ago
          You can't. It was never there. I wrote the first custom NNTP client for Deja. (This was a high-performance replacement for the community, open source client.) All it did was receive and dump articles in a format for the indexer. It did some light processing, including stripping uuencode content. So uuencode never even made it into the archive.
• pupppet 4y ago
  … [166/256] GIANT FILE… [167/256] GIANT FILE… [169/256] GIANT FILE… … Kids today will never know the pain.
  • jhallenworld 4y ago
    "GIANT FILE" == porn... How many of us attempted to automate this process :-)
  • genpfault 4y ago
    Isn't that what parchive[1] and/or RAR recovery volumes were for? [1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Parchive https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Parchive
  • jandrese 4y ago
    That's what parity data was for. There were even clients that would seek out all of the binaries that had enough parts for a full download and do all of the work for you. That said, alt.binaries was a big reason that ISPs started dropping Usenet. The other being the ever decreasing signal to noise ratio as the entire system proved to be vulnerable to spam and trolls. Yet another example of why moderation is a necessary evil if you want to scale up a discussion group.
  • spc476 4y ago
    The solution to that was a perl script called (I think) aub (Assemble USENET binaries). I remember back in the 90s, some friends and I in college would run that as a cron job to accumulate files over time. This was long enough ago that the version we ran was Perl 4.
    • deleted 4y ago
      [deleted]
    • chasd00 4y ago
      This is interesting, i know that same script. I thought a buddy of mine out of Arlington TX wrote it around '96 or '97. I didn't know it existed outside of our autonomous vehicle systems lab. We used it to accumulate and categorize certain pictures.
• fritigern 4y ago
  Take a look at https://lemmy.ml/ https://lemmy.ml/ . It's a federated reddit alternative that has a very usenet-like feeling. You can also go for one of the other instances (there are some good ones like feddit.de and also some really crazy ones).
  • dym_sh 4y ago
    cool technology, not enough people. which can be said about usenet too lol like, even fedi/ration with mastodon &co is not enough to overcome pure network effect of twitter and reddit
    • fritigern 4y ago
      It has been growing fast since the beginning of this year. I moved most of my "aimlessly scrolling through stuff" from Reddit to lemmy.ml .
• jks 4y ago
  This is not technically Usenet, but you can access various mailing lists via NNTP at nntp://news.gmane.io. There used to be a browser interface, but apparently that attracted abuse and legal threats.
• thom 4y ago
  Usenet (IRC channels too) had a sense of _place_ that I think is less common in mainstream social media, but still exists to an extent in forums, just with a worse interface overall. I remember some things fondly (partly because I was a teenager) but I'd struggle to say it was superior and certainly no healthier than today. I don't remember it being tech-focused or professional, unless you only hung out in comp.* and not alt.*. Like, who remembers Terry Tickle etc?
  • cies 4y ago
    > Usenet (IRC channels too) had a sense of _place_ Not sure what you mean by this, but they sure were not fully clad with ads and tricks to get you to pay for some virtual gifts or pro-accounts.
    • thom 4y ago
      There was plenty of spam, to be fair. What I mean is, I don't feel like I inhabit or share a space on Twitter or Facebook (or here) with actual humans I feel I know. I did feel that in various Usenet groups and IRC channels. There's a kinetic, physical quality, an explicit coming-together, like having your favourite, regular table at a pub, compared to standing on a busy street screaming at anonymous strangers. But tbh I don't really seek _out_ those niches now, and presumably they exist.
      • chromaton 4y ago
        I think signature lines on the posts helped with that.
      • wishfish 4y ago
        I enjoy Twitter but I agree with your assessment. Disagree a little about Facebook though. No argument about FB the company being soulless, evil, etc. But FB groups can be a great experience. Especially the smaller ones focused on a niche subject. Those are some nice communities, but it can take a while to find the right ones. You're correct about the niches existing. There are little corners of the internet that exist as the neighborhood pub. Not just small FB groups and Discord channels. But I also know blogs still going strong with their 200-1000 regular commentators. The only problem is the audience for those blogs is aging. Not exactly a problem for me since I'm aging too. But does make me a little sad for their longevity because they have a problem attracting new users.
• deleted 4y ago
  [deleted]
  • DonHopkins 4y ago
    So somebody just needs to spin up 3 million dang-bots to moderate them. Is dang containerized yet?
    • noasaservice 4y ago
      Oof, that, past the docker analogy, has some VERY macabre other meanings.
      • mgdlbp 4y ago
        https://qntm.org/mmacevedo https://qntm.org/mmacevedo MMAcevedo (Mnemonic Map/Acevedo), also known as Miguel, is the earliest executable image of a human brain.
        • tonyg 4y ago
          https://www.ida.liu.se/~tompe44/lsff-book/Vernor%20Vinge%20-%20The%20Cookie%20Monster.htm https://www.ida.liu.se/~tompe44/lsff-book/Vernor%20Vinge%20-...
• woofcat 4y ago
  I think a lot of people feel the same way however you need a critical mass of users. I'm just presuming I'm younger than you however I miss the old days of discussion forums, you'd have some for web comics, anime, TV shows all with their set of screen names that you learned and inside jokes that lived on. Along with this is my love of IRC (which I'm still idling in) Now with the internet feeling like it's just Reddit, Facebook, Google, Discord, LinkedIn, and Pintrest a lot of the fun inside jokes have gone to die, and the groups are so large that no-one even looks at a username.
  • niek_pas 4y ago
    > Now with the internet feeling like it's just Reddit, Facebook, Google, Discord, LinkedIn, and Pintrest a lot of the fun inside jokes have gone to die, and the groups are so large that no-one even looks at a username. I've found that niche subreddits are the exception to this rule.
• tzs 4y ago
  I'm disappointed that NNTP servers and clients didn't get wider use outside of Usenet. Most public forums back in the day would have been vastly improved if they had been done as an NNTP server with each sub-forum as a newsgroup rather than doing them with something like phpBBB on an HTTP server. Heck, most forums today would have better threading and post organization with NNTP than they do with the popular web forum systems. Same goes for non-chat communication within companies. Newsgroups on an internal NNTP server would be better in most ways than mailing lists for topics in which people actually need to discuss things as a group.
  • iso1631 4y ago
    Back in the late 90s I had some forum software which would sync with NNTP, either posting from the forum into NNTP and vice versa. I ran it, and linked it to a new group. Nobody ever posted in usenet, and I suspect nobody read in there.
  • Sohcahtoa82 4y ago
    > Heck, most forums today would have better threading and post organization with NNTP than they do with the popular web forum systems. I beg to differ. NNTP's lack of moderation is a bug, not a feature. Between the spam and abuse, NNTP would be an utter cesspool in today's world.
    • commandlinefan 4y ago
      > NNTP would be an utter cesspool I've seen Usenet, and I've seen Reddit. I'll take Usenet.
      • Aeolun 4y ago
        You can only take Usenet because Reddit exists. If it didn’t Usenet would be more of a cesspool than it already is.
      • Sohcahtoa82 4y ago
        Whatever platform gets popular is bound to become a cesspit. If Usenet was as popular as Reddit, you would hate Usenet just as much.
• mprime1 4y ago
  This may help to quench your nostalgia https://github.com/mrusme/superhighway84 https://github.com/mrusme/superhighway84
• cpach 4y ago
  I’ll take the liberty to re-post what I wrote in a similar thread: It can be quite difficult to find online oases […]. HN is quite unique. Have you considered starting your own Slack, invite interesting people and build a new oasis? (Or Matrix channel.) It would take some work to get people to join, but it’s not impossible. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31582270 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31582270
• kazinator 4y ago
  > Google ended up acquiring and eating Usenet, becoming Google Groups. That is false and nonsensical. Usenet is a federated network of NNTP servers; Google just joined that with their own implementation having an awful web front end, which they proceeded to revise in even worse directions. That happened right in the middle of a decline that was happening, driven by ISPs shutting down their NNTP servers. So it might have looked like Usenet is somehow transitioning to Google. Google did also acquire a Usenet archive, and then make it impossible to use. Anhyway, Usenet is alive and (sort of) well. There are new posts daily in newsgroups like comp.unix.programmer, comp.lang.c. Even comp.lang.lisp sees some action. See you there! -- Hey look, comp.lang.awk has a new post, from the somewhat kooky, but topical, KPop 2GM -- I'm currently using the news.eternal-september.org NNTP server. Note: there is spam, but not nearly as much as you see through the Google Groups interface, and that's the interface that offers no filtering features. You need a newsreader with killfile processing. I use the terminal-based slrn (S-Lang Read News). It has a score feature for assigning scores to articles based on matches on arbitrary fields. If you give something a -9999 score, it disappears. The fields have a lot of information. You can kill based on what server someone is coming from, or what client they are supposedly using, if you want.
• zuminator 4y ago
  stackexchange.com isn't a full replacement but definitely fulfills some of the use cases of Usenet.
  • kroltan 4y ago
    Yep, as long as it's vaguely a "question", the smaller communities have very different tolerances to opinion-based-ness. It's subject-focused, and the quality is generally pretty high (StackOverflow is a different beast though, due to sheer scale)
• onion2k 4y ago
  The main difference between Usenet and Reddit/SO/etc was posting speed. The Usenet groups I posted in were slow by today's standards. No one expected an immediate response, and the groups didn't hide things after a few hours. Paging back through 5 or 6 pages of threads in `tin` was common. The equivalent today is probably a subject-specific mailing list.
• holler 4y ago
  https://sqwok.im https://sqwok.im has old school forum feel mixed with new age chat, with both tech and non-tech ppl.
  • zaik 4y ago
    Are there any plans to federate using ActivityPub or XMPP or some other internet standard?
• nonameiguess 4y ago
  There's still vBulletin/phpBB places out there. I spend a lot of time on Dragon Mount discussing Wheel of Time, or Lakers Ground talking about the LA Lakers. Physics Forums has always pretty good for any kind of academic discussion, not just physics. The problem is discoverability. How would I find these places today if I hadn't already found them in 2001? I have no idea. Unfortunately, the solution is also discoverability. Likely the biggest reason I still find these places satisfying is they're niche sites full of long-time contributors who know each other that have never become popular and never had eternal September happen because they're hard to find.
• dontbenebby 4y ago
• slightwinder 4y ago
  Oh, that's a fascinating wild post. > Google ended up acquiring and eating Usenet, becoming Google Groups. They did not acquire usenet, they acquired Dejanews, a big usenet-archive and gateway to the usenet. Usenet itself is made of decentraliced servers. Everyone can have one, most big providers and tech-companies had one in the early days. Each with their own groups. There also were public groups, maintained by some hive-mind-org or something. Anyway, Usenet still exists, it's not dead, technically. But there is also not much alive either. File sharing on commercial servers seems to be very popular now, and the discusion-groups are receiving more spam than actual worthy content. > Reddit fills some of this niche, but Usenet was tech-focused, 50:50 I'd say. There were many tech-groups. But pretty fast there were also an equal amount of non-tech-groups. And in terms of hyper-focus I would say, reddit has far more focus today than usenet ever delivered. It's more about finding a sub and filling it. > generally quite professional and frankly didn't have the same clientele as Reddit does. I get the impression your problem is more about the people, not the platform. Yes, usenet had more nerds and expert, more technical capable people. But usenet was also significant smaller, as was the whole internet at the time. You had some kind of natural selection, as internet generally, and usenet specifically only lured very specific people in. With special interests, from a special age and culture. Today it's different, you have anyone from anywhere making a space. I'd say those time are lost forever. At best you get some overhomogenized communities, like this hackernews here. But if you look at reddit, discord, or web-forums in general, you will still find hyper-focused spaces. Just not necessarily with the kind of people your chemistry matches with.
  • Freebytes 4y ago
    Does alt.sex.robots fit into tech or non-tech?
    • no-dr-onboard 4y ago
      Depends on the use case :)
  • adrianmonk 4y ago
    > maintained by some hive-mind-org or something I believe you may be thinking of the backbone cabal[1]. But maybe not, since it's secret and doesn't exist. --- [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Backbone_cabal https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Backbone_cabal
• justusthane 4y ago
  Maybe check out some Tilde servers? https://tildeverse.org/ https://tildeverse.org/ Some of them run their own NNTP servers as well.
  • sehro 4y ago
    Does that link rick roll everyone, or just me? EDIT: Turns out was from a cached point in time where it was doing that.
    • kixiQu 4y ago
      Everyone clicking through from hacker news
• nprz 4y ago
  Urbit.
• jhallenworld 4y ago
  Reddit is in theory the same.. but it also is loaded with spam, in the form of ads paid to reddit. This is worse. Compare: FPGA group on USENET, very little spam: https://groups.google.com/g/comp.arch.fpga https://groups.google.com/g/comp.arch.fpga Reddit, full page animated old-spice ads: https://www.reddit.com/r/FPGA/ https://www.reddit.com/r/FPGA/ Also as much as you dislike google groups, just compare the UI of the above two.. ugh.. of course there is old reddit: https://old.reddit.com/r/FPGA/ https://old.reddit.com/r/FPGA/
  • Sohcahtoa82 4y ago
    > full page animated old-spice ads This is what ad blockers are for. I don't see any ads on reddit.
    • snapetom 4y ago
      Except that the majority of content there are posted from karma-farming bot aggregators. Reddit does the same thing digg did that got them killed - curate submissions, but they wisely didn't announce it. Reddit uses a combo of algos, mods, and other bots to promote this curated content and bury unwanted content on frontpage subs. Ad blockers unfortunately don't work on those.
• rsync 4y ago
  It's clearly reddit. ... which is not to say I love reddit or believe it has the same aesthetic as usenet, etc. ... but it's reddit.
• civilized 4y ago
  For the last couple years I've wondered if people would like something that combined the sleek, text-focused front end of HN with the ability to make subreddit-like moderated communities. The "boringness" of the front end would keep the riff-raff out - why would they bother when Reddit et al give them a much bigger and more meme-addled audience - and it'd be more like the second coming of old-school Usenet that so many older techies seem to long for. If only I were a software engineer rather than a data scientist.
  • deleted 4y ago
    [deleted]
• ginjas 4y ago
  [dead]
  • noasaservice 4y ago
    • sph 4y ago
      We're talking about technology here, not your opinion of the author or their politics. -- "Eschew flamebait. Avoid unrelated controversies and generic tangents." "Please don't use Hacker News for political or ideological battle. It tramples curiosity." https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
      • noasaservice 4y ago
        I am talking about the technology. Yarvin's own writings indicate that Urbit was written to be that of a medieval castle, limited landed ownership (with 2^32 stars) with the intent that new people would have to buy from these star-landlords. Those "political views" were encoded into the basis of Urbit at the deepest architectural levels. So again, saying to avoid "flamebait" is just a distractor from discussing the real issues with Urbit itself. The "politics and technology" are one in the same.
        • sph 4y ago
          > Yarvin's own writings indicate that Urbit was written to be that of a medieval castle, limited landed ownership (with 2^32 stars) with the intent that new people would have to buy from these star-landlords. None of this fits the fascist political ideology. Let us discuss the merits and cons of a technology that promotes artificial scarcity (cough IPv4 cough). It's an interesting topic, but it's not what you were doing with your previous comment and you know that.
          • noasaservice 4y ago
• GuB-42 4y ago
  Usenet is a spam-riddled cesspool, the only advantage it has over Reddit is that it is technically more open and it doesn't annoy you with its mobile app. I heard stories that it was better before eternal September, but I wasn't there, maybe some greybeards can comment on that. And sure, some newsgroups stayed good, but the same can be said of Reddit. Some subreddits are very nice and technical, others are terrible.
• jacobsenscott 4y ago
  I think different projects are now active in different places depending on the whims of that project. They might have their own forum like https://discuss.rubyonrails.org/ https://discuss.rubyonrails.org/, or they might be active on discord, or reddit, or they might just discuss everything on github, or mailing lists. Back in the usenet days there was really only one place to host discussions, and that was usenet. But now there are lots of places. I guess this makes it harder to find, and makes it harder to jump from community to community. Reddit is probably the closest thing. And I wouldn't judge all subreddits by the "front page" subreddits. I think the ruby and emacs subs are good.
• bigbillheck 4y ago
  > generally quite professional It most certainly was not.
• CTmystery 4y ago
  > HN is topic-focused, rather than subject-focused Can you explain what you mean by this?
  • PopAlongKid 4y ago
    Not the OP, but I'll take a stab at it: On HN, each thread is about a specific topic, and rarely has any direct connection to or overlap with to any other thread/topic, A subject-oriented forum, by contrast, is (supposed to be) about a general subject, such as a programming language or financial advice, all the posted topics are common to the one subject.
• myth_drannon 4y ago
  There are some BBS based mail networks, but they are hyper specific to retro stuff I believe. Based on your description of Usenet I think what you miss is the context around Usenet (exact period of life, young/single/student for example) and not the Usenet itself. You can find plenty of places where there are forum like discussions, but it won't be the same without the context.
• PopAlongKid 4y ago
  I don't see it mentioned yet that there are some still active, moderated Usenet groups, such as misc.legal.moderated and misc.taxes.moderated, which don't include spam. Back in the day, even some unmoderated groups were mostly self-moderated, such as the comp.*.oracle and comp.*.perl newsgroups. What spam there was, was posted by humans, not bots, and was quickly ignored to oblivion.
• tonguez 4y ago
  • dang 4y ago
    We've banned this account for repeatedly posting unsubstantive and flamebait comments and ignoring our requests to stop. https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
• Razengan 4y ago
  I really miss having a NATIVE app to access content from different communities in a standard format. Along with the IRC Comic Chat in Windows 98 :’)
  • timbit42 4y ago
    Would Tapatalk fulfill that at all?
    • Razengan 4y ago
      I’ll look at it!
• bdcravens 4y ago
  Reddit. Most know the reputation that the largest subreddits have, but if you drill down past those troll-targets, you'll find very specialized subreddits that have very focused conversation.
• m-p-3 4y ago
  Something like that? https://github.com/mrusme/superhighway84 https://github.com/mrusme/superhighway84
• bfuller 4y ago
  Telegram is really a great organizational app and social platform. I created and sold a startup based solely on telegram interactions.
• nanomonkey 4y ago
  I have found similar scenes in the p2p/decentralized/dWeb protocols groups. Scuttlebutt, Mastadon, DAT/Beaker Browser/Hypercore, IPFS, Gun protocol. If you're interested, the Internet Archive is doing a dWeb Camp where a bunch of these folks will be coming together in the northern California woods to build further community.
• ms123 4y ago
  You're welcome to have a virtual drink on https://midnight.pub https://midnight.pub :)
• knaik94 4y ago
  Smaller communities won't be as active, but discord servers have been great for talking with like minded people about hyper-specific things. The thing I like about discord is that even if the main server seems pretty general, they have channels and those tend to get much more specific. It's up to the community how real time it feels. I know some servers that have global interest and there's usually someone to talk to regardless of when you ask a question. On the other hand I have also noticed servers where it's becomes obvious who is on EST vs PST. Google groups hasn't been the main method of communication for a while. There's discords for TV shows and Games, but I also see discord for development projects. Some even use patreon and have discord access as a subscription benefit where the developer posts beta builds. For example, Uberduck https://uberduck.ai/ https://uberduck.ai/ has an pretty active discord for developers. Uberduck have a free tier when you can synthesize TTS that sound like well known voice actors or singers. https://app.uberduck.ai/speak#mode=tts-reference&voice=cave-johnson https://app.uberduck.ai/speak#mode=tts-reference&voice=cave-... And it has a paid tier if you want to clone your own voice. EleutherAI's discord has a similar healthy discord community. GPT-NeoX talk there. Two Minute Papers , the youtube channel run by Dr.Károly Zsoln has its own unofficial discord as well. Unofficial but Dr. Károly Zsoln has shared a twitter linking to it, so he is aware of it. Lichess.org has a discord server. I can't promise if your hyper-specific interests will have discord server dedicated to it, but there's many. In fact my university has a specific server for CS and Math and you can ask for help, and from the last time I checked, specific professors do come and answer questions, although more likely it's other classmates.
• porlw 4y ago
  The thing I miss about Usenet is maintaining article and comment scoring in trn (based on the subject, keywords and/or author) With this I could easily surface interesting articles or replies by insightful people, while avoiding subjects and authors in which I had no interest. This worked at a thread level, so I could quickly see any new threads, and new replies added to threads I was following, skipping over everything I had already marked as read. For me this was more effective than the communal post scoring that took over on web forums, reddit, hn etc.
• Arathorn 4y ago
  Matrix is literally intended to be a successor to USENET (although we haven't got the long-form async messaging sorted yet - https://matrix.org/blog/2020/12/18/introducing-cerulean/ https://matrix.org/blog/2020/12/18/introducing-cerulean/ gives a hint of how it could work though)
• heckyeahs 4y ago
  4chan
  • micromacrofoot 4y ago
    not like this
• ardit33 4y ago
  Blind.... but it is geared towards the workplace, and not tech and gadgets in general. It has more unfiltered conversations, as people do speak their mind a bit more. (some eggregious ones, do get flagged/removed though).
• bluedino 4y ago
  My favorite part of usenet was the FAQ's. I didn't have internet access at the time but I downloaded the comp.lang.c faq along with 3d graphics programming faq from a local BBS. Tons of fun reading! http://www.faqs.org/faqs/C-faq/faq/ http://www.faqs.org/faqs/C-faq/faq/ The worst part about Facebook groups, Reddit, and even most forums is the same questions being repeated over and over. You can do sticky threads and links on subreddits (not really sure how you would do it on Facebook) but it's not often done.
• nope96 4y ago
  I miss the local BBS's more. But in Chicago there were chi.* Usenet groups which where interesting as well. (They're still active... barely) Reddit has /r/chicago but it's not the same feel. NextDoor sounds like something I don't want to check out (What happened to EveryBlock?) I'm not on Facebook, maybe there's some good local conversation happening there. . .? I'm surprised nothing has come close to BBS's yet in terms of meeting locals.
• derekzhouzhen 4y ago
  I think what you miss is the time when only the intelligent and sensible <10% of the population are on-line. There was no social network, so Usenet was where the cool kids hanged out. Now that everyone is on-line, and dragged 99% of the intelligent and sensible people over to social networks, so the remaining 0.1% of the population is not large enough to make Usenet interesting any more.
• SeanLuke 4y ago
  This is a strangely rose-tinted view of Usenet. Usenet was a mess well before Eternal September. You can't talk about Usenet without talking about alt.* After alt.* was inagurated, the very first group was (IIRC) alt.swedish.chef.bork.bork.bork. Then there were alt.destroy.the.earth and alt.pave.the.earth, which were bitter enemies despite their opposition to alt.save.the.earth, because if you destroyed the earth there'd be nothing left to pave. Alt was also the home of the Big Seven sex groups, plus piracy in the alt.binaries groups. The talk.* groups had problems as well. Oh, and then there was alt.2600, which purposely had a moderator who rejected any and all postings: you had to hack USENET and assume moderator privileges to post there. I think easily the closest thing we have nowadays to USENET is reddit. And, to be honest, if you average over its entire audience, it's more tame than USENET was.
  • goatcode 4y ago
    >[redd]it's more tame than USENET was Of course it is, it's beholden to advertisers. Chairman Pao saw to its taming, right before getting canned.
  • not2b 4y ago
    You do not recall correctly, not even close. See https://www.livinginternet.com/u/ui_alt.htm https://www.livinginternet.com/u/ui_alt.htm (and I knew Brian Reid and John Gilmore in those days).
  • jandrese 4y ago
    > Oh, and then there was alt.2600, which purposely had a moderator who rejected any and all postings: you had to hack USENET and assume moderator privileges to post there. This is the kind of internet we lost when it went all corporate.
    • throwaway892238 4y ago
      Defacing websites with crude messages and garish colors was the internet's graffiti. Ascii and Demoscene was its street art. Zines and hacker radio were the warehouse art shows. We have all these documentaries about punk music, but so few about punk computing.
• midislack 4y ago
  People still use Usenet, it's still going. Some groups get hundreds of ppd still.
  • zafiro17 4y ago
    Comp.misc for computer stuff Misc.news.internet.discuss for oddball Sci.misc for science These are three decent groups for content similar to HN. If you need a usenet provider, try solani.org (no cost) or individual.net (paid but excellent) For clients, any *nix install will have slrn, tin, pan, or possibly knode. Thunderbird is on mac and windows as well as BSD/Linux.
• epilys 4y ago
  I wrote a dependency tree python3 library to make your own NNTP servers: https://pypi.org/project/nntpserver/0.0.3/ https://pypi.org/project/nntpserver/0.0.3/ https://github.com/epilys/nntpserver.py https://github.com/epilys/nntpserver.py It's used in my link aggregator forum, https://sic.pm/ https://sic.pm/ which also has a mailing list bridge functionality. As a demo, I have implemented a HN mirror on NNTP: (quoting README.md) hnnntp.py querying news.ycombinator.com (hackernews) API and caching results in an sqlite3 database. A public instance might be online at nessuent.xyz:564 (TLS only)
• dredmorbius 4y ago
  Usenet died for a number of reasons, and those reasons are core to what has kept any revival of NNTP-based forums, or strongly-similar variants / derivatives, from succeeding. I've given my own take on this (just one random space alien cat's take, some familiarity, no major at-the-coalface experience) in a piece that's seen some currency, "Why Usenet Died", posted at ... Reddit: https://old.reddit.com/r/dredmorbius/comments/3c3xyu/why_usenet_died/ https://old.reddit.com/r/dredmorbius/comments/3c3xyu/why_use... The TL;DR: 1 It got spammed to death. 2. It lost control over its culture, and that culture was crucial to its functioning. 3. It was too problematic for ISPs (or others) to provide ready access to it: spam, harassment, child pornography, and copyright violations all posed massive concerns. 4. There was no viable business model for providing the service. Beyond that: There has been a Usnet 2.0, or rather, Usenet II The original Usenet was small and had very limited access. As of April, 1988, there were 381 newsgroups, 57,979 messages, an estimated 141,000 readers, of a total user population on connected hosts of 880,000, via Brian Reid's "USENET Readership Summary Reports". Virtually all were at selective-admissions universities, tech companies, and a small selection of government agencies. (In many ways, 1980s Usenet was the equivalent of edu-only Facebook. Think through that a few times.) Usenet had many useful features ... and failings. Much of Usenet's decentralisation and client-independence meant that bad nodes, general adversaries, and flouting of tradition (the Eternal September, spammers, AOL, ...) could destroy it. Usenet had little to no archival, filtering, or spam protections. There were attempts to bolt on solutions. Those ... fared poorly in general, either in effectiveness or unintended consequences. In spirit and role, the closest thing to Usenet for the moment is probably Reddit. For anyone interested in my views on Reddit, see the recent and pinned posts in https://old.reddit/r/dredmorbius https://old.reddit/r/dredmorbius Much of Usenet's early success was a direct result of its institutional foundation: selective-admissions, computer-science-heavy research universities. Those had a group-communications problem, and could support the infrastructure for a solution, but couldn't scale appreciably beyond the million or so member community of late 1980s / early 1990s Usenet. Today's Internet is global, is non-selective, has no common culture (other than, perhaps, advertising and other forms of behavioural manipulation), and no domimant institution (with the same exception). This bodes poorly for re-emergence of any Usenet-type mechanism. Another chief problem is that static group forums have their own strengths and weaknesses, but among those is overhead and latency. This is exhibited on Usenet itself in the huge land-rush of newsgroups defined when world+dog decided that they had to be there ... most of which turned into unmoderated and unused wastelands, either flooded with spam or entirely empty. Slapping labels on room plaques does not a community make. You can still spin up your own limited-access NNTP server, and run email and Web-based gateways. I've been active on the Fediverse for over a decade (Diaspora, Mastodon), and though there's some similarities, and considerable shared individuals, the scope is not the same, and group discussion in particular is ... not well-facilitated. (There are bolt-ons, e.g., gup.pe on Mastodon.) Email lists and IRC (which does* support pretty flexible temporary channel creation) are other options, both of which afford control and free-flowing forum characteristics.
• nootropicat 4y ago
  The forum/mailing list format is over, most good discussions happen on discord now (some people swear by telegram - mostly Russians). I'm not claiming it's a change for the better. I'm old enough to have caught the tail end of phpBB forums about every niche so I know what was lost. From a technical perspective forums are superior for long term discussions (especially for non-members!), but in terms where new stuff happens and where community forms - it's over. The closest replacement are specific channels on discord that allow sometimes for week-long discussions. One of main social effects I see is that knowledge starts to get siloed. There are many technical details that exist online only on specific chats, which aren't google searchable. The main negative is that if you don't even know where to look or ask, it's way harder to figure out anything. There's also a positive: because people are forced to join they are more likely to contribute. In fact I have observed this in myself: often I only join some discord to look for one thing, but I just leave the server on afterwards. In many cases I see something worth responding to and morph from an observer into an active participant. This would never have happened on a forum. It's possible this factor is solely responsible for the current dominance of discord/telegram. One future shift I can see is a move away from chats into VR. I don't think it's going to happen with zoomers, but alpha gen - assuming they grow up in VR spaces may find it natural to prefer literal talking as anime and furry avatars, with (almost) full nonverbal communication, instead of writing text messages to each other. In a way, it would be a return to the historical norm of human communication. From a social trend perspective it's the same direction as the move away from forums into chats: worse information search (basically gone with VR). More emphasis on contributing and on personal relationships. The main disadvantage I can see is that it's going to place much stronger emphasis on people's characteristics: age, gender, native language.
  • eanc 4y ago
    I hate chats so much. Having to ask something manually and then wait and hope for minutes/hours/days for a manual reply, I can’t think of something more opposed to what people who are familiar with what computers can do for humanity should recognize the value in, and yet here we all are.
    • nootropicat 4y ago
• wvenable 4y ago
  You dismiss Reddit pretty quickly but if you want a bulletin board-style forum on hyper-specific subjects then it's a good option. I'm subscribed to some hyper-specific tech subjects and the posts are very professional and helpful. The other place I've found even more hyper-specific subjects is, ironically, Facebook. I, in general, stay off of Facebook but when I was looking for details on some very rare hardware, the communities there were actually the most active and useful. You may be lamenting Eternal September and not the loss of Usenet itself.
• usrn 4y ago
  Newsgroups are still there. I still read and post to them as do plenty of other people. Your ISP probably doesn't provide a news server anymore but there are plenty of free ones for the text only groups.
• ChrisArchitect 4y ago
  Discord is terrible and wish there wasn't this stupid push to put everything into them. Sure you get initial 'ooh I'm part of something going on here' feeling but it's just a giant unindexed chat that is ephemeral and fleeting. It's a realtime chat -- with channels! Big deal. No one tried to use IRC back in the day as a forum. Chaotic if need to catch up god forbid you miss something from a day ago. It's just so bad and nowhere like forums. A symptom of a generation that can only deal with their immediate present and has no sense of history and just goes through life like that.
  • rightbyte 4y ago
    Reddit is like that too. You can't "bump" old threads to continue discussions. Ephemeral is a perfect term to describe the new internet.
• PopAlongKid 4y ago
  Trivia: one of the first newsreaders that helped make Usenet popular in the 1980s was rn[0], written by Larry Wall, the same fellow who created Perl. [0]It was one of the first newsreaders to take full advantage of character-addressable CRT terminals [Wikipedia]
• beebmam 4y ago
  As an experiment, I'd love to see a forum which required all users to use their real identities, where identities for user accounts must be legally verified through an accredited notary service, similar to E-Verify/I-9 verification. I'm curious how much less toxic behavior on a platform like that would be.
  • Evenjos 4y ago
    I'm in a community like this, which is also very heavily moderated. It still has toxic elements because the people who run the platform think a certain way.
  • slightwinder 4y ago
    So, like Facebook? Twitter? Or any other social network. Ok, they are not notary certified identities, but bit's pretty common and depending on the platform also demanded and enforced, with enough people following the demand. But I don't get the impression it made the platforms a better place. People only learned to better hide their tracks, or don't care about it.
    • beebmam 4y ago
      What? Facebook/Twitter and others do not require Notary-verified identification.
      • slightwinder 4y ago
        Yes, as I wrote they don't require notary-verification, but they still have verifications and some demand usage of real names. Most platforms even have verified accounts for somewhat important people. My point is, a notary alone would change nothing. People already use their real identity, and they are still toxic. But, it of course would have an effect, for the simple reason that the expensive and long verification will filter out many casual users, so your user base is smaller and more dedicated from the beginning. But for this, you can also just open a commercial forum, maybe even with a fee for posting. That would probably have far more impact on the quality than any identity-check. I remember the Something Awful-Site seems to fare quite successful with that approach.
• zanethomas 4y ago
  usenet still exists see: supernews
• FuriouslyAdrift 4y ago
  I sure miss all the crazy fun at alt.devilbunnies back in the day
• jll29 4y ago
  The OP resonates with me, and I feel like firing up M-x gnus again to browse the likes of comp.ai.nat-lang, comp.compilers, comp.std.c and alt.fan.montypython. Perhaps it's time for a new USENET group, comp.misc.hn? I'd much prefer to read HN in a TUI with keyboard navigation than from a Web browser.
• jtode 4y ago
  I've been thinking about this myself. I made some real-world friends from usenet. Not extremely close ones obviously, but I hung out mostly in a ng dedicated to a band (Ween) and when I travelled to see shows, I always had folks to hang out with even if I went alone. During the high days of that group, there were a number of websites dedicated to the band, but usenet was the home (members of the band even showed up now and then). Then one day someone created the first web forum dedicated to it, and it quickly racked up far more users than the newsgroup. The writing was on the wall. I went and created an account but I could not STAND the web forum interfaces at the time - compared to Free Agent with its conversation threading, the web's early discussion forums were a bad, mean joke. But ignorant people for whom internet=www spoke in their legions and it was only a couple years before nobody came to the usenet forum anymore. I briefly got into Delphi Forums at the behest of my first gf and there was one decent place I hung out in for a few years, but looking back, the evolution of right wing ratfucking on the internet was in full swing and the people I had lively debates with in there eventually became (in many cases) Facebook "friends" as we all onboarded there. And there I lingered till 2016. Reddit is circling the drain at this point, even the subs that are dedicated to my own politics have become appalling lowest common denominator echo chambers. I would love to go back to Usenet, much like NYC disco scenesters of the 70s would love to go back to Studio 54, but in both cases, it was a special place and a special time, and now we live here. I wish I had a better answer, but I'm pretty sure that's the answer.
• patcon 4y ago
  Hard to participate as an English-speaker, but just to scope out a still-thriving BBS: students at the local university maintain a telnet BBS called PTT, which is essentially the Reddit of Taiwan. As I understand, it's been crucial in recent political movements (like the Sunflower movements and parliamentary occupation) and lost of current events in Taiwan: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/PTT_Bulletin_Board_System https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/PTT_Bulletin_Board_System
• aaron695 4y ago
• Thorentis 4y ago
  Honestly I think Reddit, at least in terms of topic segmentation, original demographic, and rough functionality (threads conversations) is the closest thing we have. The biggest difference: the maturity and culture (compared to when reddit started). This isn't a problem that needs "solving". If you want a different community, you either need to find one or start one. HN is probably the closest demographic to what Usenet had, so advertising anything you start here would make sense. I've thrown around the idea of a paid access forum with heavy amounts of curation, strict rules etc. The biggest obstacle is the network effect. The only ways I have thought of to overcome this initially are: have a launch date with pre-signups so that a chunk of people join at the same time, and, have some high profile individuals from within your demographic agree to join. Eg find some CEOs or CTOs, academics, thought leaders, commentators, whoever - people with big names within your target demographic - and have them sign on to participate. This will attract more people and might help with the initial network effect hurdle.
• wrp 4y ago
  Most of this thread is devoted to correcting his understanding of Usenet history rather than providing useful info. What he wants is to find subject-focused discussion forums. The answer is to stop thinking in terms of Usenet and look for forums on special interest web sites. You can find anything from boardgaming (https://boardgamegeek.com/ https://boardgamegeek.com/) to computational fluid dynamics (https://www.cfd-online.com/ https://www.cfd-online.com/). I find the best forum experience is when you have strong moderation by subject-area specialists whose only concern is to keep things on-topic.
• Aeolun 4y ago
  Superhighway84
• 1vuio0pswjnm7 4y ago
  Usenet did not require a "web browser" nor Javascript. Advertising came eventually but it was not accompanied by surveillance. Famously, the first advertisement on the internet was allegedly via Usenet, from an immigration lawyer. But ads were basically just spam as I recall, much less invasive on ads on the www, and easier to filter out. Most importantly, I never read anything on Usenet that suggested, "If we do not have a robust advertising ecosystem, all this "free content" will disappear." Even regulators today are prone to believe this nonsense. Quite silly. I remember getting news and other content from Usenet without the presence of any advertising. With Usenet, the cost was the internet connection. That's it. No allegedly "necessary" trade-off between (a) allowing personal data collection and surveillance and (b) accessing "free content". Accessing mainstream news is still just as "free" today as it was then. Relatively little news or other "content" on the www is password protected. Except in the heydays of Usenet there were no advertising company-sponsored browser vendor Javascript engine-powered "paywalls" to try to annoy users into paying (more) money, on top of the internet connection charges.
• WheelsAtLarge 4y ago
  The best Usenet providers: https://www.tomsguide.com/best-picks/the-best-usenet-providers https://www.tomsguide.com/best-picks/the-best-usenet-provide... I haven't test any of them but it SEEMS like Usenet is alive and kicking...
• epberry 4y ago
  DZone is like this, with different Zones and then with tags that get pretty specific. https://dzone.com/cloud-computing-tutorials-tools-news https://dzone.com/cloud-computing-tutorials-tools-news
• tptacek 4y ago
  Google ended up acquiring and eating Usenet, becoming Google Groups. I'm not sure if this is dead yet. That's absolutely not what happened. What actually happened was that binaries traders took over the Internet's best discussion medium and used to to shuttle uuencoded chunks of huge files to every single Usenet server in the world, and screamed bloody murder when anyone failed to keep up. This naturally drove the cost of serving Usenet wildly up, and independent ISPs dropped the service just as the retail Internet came of age, because haphazardly serving porn videos and pirated software to 0.5% of their customer base wasn't worth the cost of giant fast disk arrays. Things like DejaNews were just the dying gasp of Usenet. Google didn't ruin anything (though I sorely wish they could have kept the archives online).
• h0p3 4y ago
  This can be done on Aether, especially if one is willing to maintain their own records. Hard to find enough of the right people to agree to use such a tool, I suppose. Not sure what else we can do besides try to make them.
• gitgud 4y ago
  > HN is topic-focused, rather than subject-focused. What does this mean? topic is literally a synonym for subject
• zzo38computer 4y ago
  We still have Usenet. I use the aioe server (I do not use the binary newsgroups). I also have my own NNTP server (although currently there are very few messages so far, but anyone who is interested in this things can join if they want to do). Currently the messages are only on my NNTP server, but it would be possible to be propagated to/from other servers too. I set up NNTP instead of using mailing lists/forums, since I think that NNTP is better. (It would be acceptable to also allow subscribing like it is a mailing list, and web interface, but the NNTP must be primary.) There is still some spam, but the spam seems to come from Google, as far as I can tell.