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Ask HN: Could Usenet get revived, to replace the soon to be unusable Reddit?

182 points by netfortius 3y ago

I recall the comp., sci., and soc.culture., from just before AOL opened the flood gates (access), and even soon thereafter, as they used to be so fun...

dredmorbius 3y ago
I wrote a few years ago of my understanding of why Usenet died to some positive reception. There are four principle failings: <https://old.reddit.com/r/dredmorbius/comments/3c3xyu/why_usenet_died/ https://old.reddit.com/r/dredmorbius/comments/3c3xyu/why_use...> 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. All of those are significant, but I would (and did) argue that points 3 & 4 were the final nails in the coffin. Anti-spam measures and tightly-curated / moderated newsgroups could survive despite the spam, but with firms willing to brave the very real legal and financial risks, and without any other viable financial support, Usenet fell to a mix of mailing lists and early online blogging / forum software (phpBB, Slashdot, and others). There've been several attempts to revise or update Usnet (most noteably Usenet II),. Those ... have also failed to take hold. (Though in fairness: social media is extremely fickle, many apparently well-structured, and occasionally well-capitalised, attempts have similarly foundered, and the limelite often moves on with time.) Gaining traction and viability is a mix of luck, timing, and execution (mostly getting out of your own way). Reddit can be seen as a response to points 1, 3, and 4. Reddit offers reasonably good spam defences, it has evolved protections against legally-problematic content (with some large bumps along the way), and it's attempting to develop advertising as a business angle. And has had some success at all of these. Reddit's has still fallen flat on the second point, and fails further in many people's view (my own included) in that it simply isn't a very good discussion forum. There are small and limited spaces that work, sometimes. But even moderately large subreddits are a hot mess, and the very largest could have the late Newt Minow's classic phrase applied. As for Usenet, it's a cautionary tale that open protocols and federated control are no guarantee of either effectiveness or continuity. /me side-eyes Mastodon and the Fediverse.
LinuxBender 3y ago
Could Usenet get “revived”, to replace the soon to be unusable Reddit? Technically yes. Become widely adopted, maybe if... There are free Usenet providers for the text groups. People would have to agree on methods to ignore the spam bots, maybe a signed message header/footer that a UI recognizes. There are forums and chat systems that already leverage Usenet as the transport/storage but they all need some tender loving care. In my opinion for that to be widely adopted people would need a low friction way to access Usenet and it would need to provide them a UI/UX they are familiar with. Perhaps Usenet would be entirely transparent to them. Perhaps it would be a simple nginx web front-end so that anyone could run a node and it would use Usenet on the backend for storage and transport, ideally the sites that implemented NNTPS (TLS). Just nginx+python, or nginx+golang or an nginx module and super-lightweight with secure safe defaults. There would need to be a group set up where all the front-end nodes ingest group keys, identities, etc... and maybe a git repo that bootstraps all of this. Traditional methods like using a Usenet reader such as Thunderbird? Probably not. Probably very small technical circles. I think this would be akin to convincing people to switch from Discord back to IRCD or using Mumble/Murmur for voice.
pwg 3y ago
USENET still exists, and some groups are still active, just not at their peak from yesteryear -- so why not go join and see if anything is happening in your old haunts. Free access to text only groups: http://www.eternal-september.org/ http://www.eternal-september.org/ Pick a newsreader: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Usenet_newsreaders https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Usenet_newsreaders and go take a look.
- readyplayernull 3y ago
  It would be interesting to know from a USENETer perspective how it feels to see the hordes of Redditors flooding their platform in an Eternal September once again [1]. [1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eternal_September https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eternal_September
- xtracto 3y ago
  I feel that the Usenet protocol in hand with today's technologies should be amazing. It should be possible to make a very powerful client that summarizes groups discussions say, by day/week; filters spam pretty aggressively and sorts or "mutes" known trolls or bad users. The one thing I also wish would be better is discoverability... Just the other day I logged in into an irc server (LiberaChat?) but just didn't know where to go from there.. I got into my country's room, but it was very quiet.
  - Parodper 3y ago
    > The one thing I also wish would be better is discoverability... Just the other day I logged in into an irc server (LiberaChat?) but just didn't know where to go from there.. I got into my country's room, but it was very quiet. Check out netsplit.de. It has a list of channels sorted by popularity.
- grep_name 3y ago
  Any chance you have a recommendation of newsreader for android?
evgen 3y ago
Betteridge's law of headlines strikes again. Easier to build something new than to tack on more cruft to the broken usenet model. At this point usenet has little remaining use other than being a low-profile warez distribution channel. It was great in the late 80s and early 90s but does not scale well as a communications medium and we already know better ways to manage the distributed data sharing layer.
- brodouevencode 3y ago
  > broken usenet model That's a bold assessment. It was slowly abandoned because it lacked fun graphics and emojis and all the other frilly parts that casual users love, but I wouldn't call it a broken model. It had (and has) a place.
  - JohnFen 3y ago
    That's not my memory. My memory is that Google basically bought it (by buying Deja News) and turned it into Google Groups, removing most of what made it great. That was when people really left in droves. But that was a long time ago. I could be misremembering.
    - jghn 3y ago
      Google bought an archive & a mechanism to post/read. It's not possible to buy usenet, by nature it's a distributed platform.
      - JohnFen 3y ago
        Right, that's why I said "essentially". My memory is hazy, of course, but I remember that a whole lot of people stopped using usenet after that purchase. Some because they felt sold out to Google, and some because they saw it as a sign that Usenet was going to get absorbed into the borg. A system being decentralized does not make it immune from being that sort of thing. Look at what gmail did to email. Whether or not that was most people, I don't know. But it was more than a few.
JohnFen 3y ago
That would be incredible. The passing of Usenet was a huge loss to the internet, and nothing has come even close to being able to replace it.
Gordonjcp 3y ago
How exactly is reddit going to be "unusable"? I mean, apart from the general low quality of posts in a lot of subs?
- kalupa 3y ago
  I think this is out of the complaints about API access costs and those using third-party clients will "just stop using reddit" which I'm not sure is actually going to happen as broadly as folks may believe
  - JohnFen 3y ago
    But it might. I have a bias here, though... I got fed up with Reddit and quit it entirely a couple of years ago, so I can easily see why others would bail on it without a great deal of prodding.
  - Gordonjcp 3y ago
    I suspect it'll be like a lot of things, where everyone says they're ditching it, and they are not ditching it. I don't really understand why people use an "app" anyway, when browsers exist.
    - vdqtp3 3y ago
      > I don't really understand why people use an "app" anyway, when browsers exist. Reddit from a mobile browser is one of the most unfriendly sites I've ever found.
      - hxugufjfjf 3y ago
        It also consistently insists, breaks functionality and nags you to try and get you to use the app instead of the browser. Its barely useable from a mobile browser.
        BitwiseFool 3y ago
Ekaros 3y ago
It doesn't combat spam very well. So I doubt it will come back at least in substantial way. Other thing is that you would need some agreed standard to make it "rich" as in user experience.
- agiacalone 3y ago
  Killfiles are the generally accepted way of combating spam on Usenet. With only a few lines, I see very little of it even on the wider Usenet groups. Generally blocking public services (like Google Groups) is enough to block 90%+ spam
  - Ekaros 3y ago
    I wonder how truly effective those would be if the spammers really started to combat and circumvent them actively. And blocking public servers would kill the network effects. Thus keeping it only to small communities.
    - agiacalone 3y ago
      It just means that services that allow bad actors get blocked. Like Google Groups. I have and enjoy using “public” Usenet servers like eternal-september and SDF which disallow spam and hold users accountable for their actions.
  - jandrese 3y ago
    I feel like it's easy to avoid spam on Usenet at the moment because few spammers give a crap about Usenet. If it became popular again this would change, just like the first time it became popular. That said, one of the things I really liked about Usenet is that the client was entirely in your hands. Some of the Usenet readers were incredibly sophisticated and no internet forum software has ever come close to offering an equivalent level of utility. I would jump on a "Usenet, but with moderation/spam control baked in" in a heartbeat. In fact this is pretty much what Reddit is, which makes me sad that they're trying so hard to Digg it.
sigstoat 3y ago
somebody was asking in a thread the other day about some open protocol for forums/subreddits/whatever that different people could host, that could be fronted by independent clients. well, there you go, NNTP still exists. write some ios/android NNTP clients that can handle multiple servers w/credentials, and run some NNTP servers. no need to distribute the posts to other servers.
- chongli 3y ago
  How do you deal with spam and moderation? What about the sidebar and pinned posts? Upvoting/downvoting? There’s a lot of quality-of-life features in modern forums like Reddit and HN that you don’t have with these old technologies.
  - sigstoat 3y ago
    "extensions to the protocol" do you need the whole thing designed in a comment? the original context was to decompose subreddits into their own decentralized and separately hosted things. so: dump spam into some hidden pseudo-group that only mods can see. let them post replies to the posts which are interpreted by the server to release/delete the spam add additional headers on posts to mark that they're pinned or sidebarred. clients will have to know how to interpret that, but you'll remain backwards compatible with everything that already exists again if you really want upvoting/downvoting, have specially formatted reply posts which the server uses to increment/decrement the vote counter, which is presented as a special header on the posts. special clients can display it like reddit, and even old clients can probably make use of it for filtering purposes. now, i did the design work, so you go implement it.
    - chongli 3y ago
      I don't see the advantage of doing this vs. doing a new federated protocol from scratch, with all of the modern features built-in, and accessible from a web browser rather than a separate news reader.
  - AdamH12113 3y ago
agiacalone 3y ago
Small newsgroup services that use NNTP, like Usenet, still exist as well—not to mention the “big” services. Tilde operates one, as does SDF, the two *nix communities that I belong to. https://tilde.wiki/wiki/NNTP https://tilde.wiki/wiki/NNTP (SDF is member only access)
paulpauper 3y ago
How about Reddit minus the overzealous censorship by admins and sub moderators. I think this is easier than recreating facebook or youtube. Reddit can be fixed by changing how mods are appointed. The major problem with Reddit is that there is no way to remove bad or corrupt mods. This has been a major problem with popular subs.
- commandlinefan 3y ago
  > I think this is easier Yeah, a lot of people (voat, ruqqus, parler) have thought the same, and found otherwise...
dark-star 3y ago
What will happen to Reddit to make it unusable? I feel a bit out of the loop here...
- aaronax 3y ago
  Pricing out of third party clients via API fees > only official website and clients are available > they get worse with monetization attempts > smart people who don't want to put up with less-useful UIs leave > site becomes devoid of "good" content.
  - Diederich 3y ago
    I exclusively use old.reddit.com and it seems pretty good.
    - breakingcups 3y ago
      How long you think until they dare take that away too? For all intents and purposes, old.reddit.com is just like any third-party client. Vastly preferred by its users, harder to monetize or exert control over.
      - Diederich 3y ago
        I'm somewhat anxious about old.reddit.com going away, no doubt. > harder to monetize Honest question: how is old.reddit.com harder to monetize than 'new.reddit.com'? I've been seeing ads creep in over the past couple of years I think. (Not that I necessarily have any beef about that..)
        neurostimulant 3y ago
        Old reddit doesn't have many of those newer features in the main reddit ui that's geared to steer users to pay for premium. For example, old reddit users don't see avatars, which can be customized with premium stuff in the main reddit ui. Awards are also less pronounced. As an old reddit user, I'm sure you have no desire to spend money buy avatar gears and more awards. Users of the new UI got exposed to those stuff more often and thus more familiar and more likely to buy them.
Moto7451 3y ago
For some needed context, Reddit clients will be charged for API access. https://www.reddit.com/r/apolloapp/comments/13ws4w3/had_a_call_with_reddit_to_discuss_pricing_bad/ https://www.reddit.com/r/apolloapp/comments/13ws4w3/had_a_ca...
- freediverx 3y ago
  Not just charged. Charged an exorbitant and unrealistic amount meant to kill off third party apps.
cameronfraser 3y ago
I don't think most reddit users care about reddit politics so no
uhtred 3y ago
Why would you want Usenet to be like reddit? Reddit is awful. 99% of posts are a desperate grab for attention. Every comment is one of: - a smug, know it all response by someone who thinks they are an expert in some field rather than a loser who spends their day on reddit - an attempt to be witty - some reddit saying that gets repeated over and over ("man got that dawg in him" and so on)
- EGreg 3y ago
  It is also a bunch of teenagers just saying one liners
- jandrese 3y ago
  And this differs from Usenet how? I guess you can argue that the Karma system is counterproductive and leads to Karma farming, even though Karma is explicitly worthless. But I think attention seeking is going to happen no matter what the platform is.
- slothtrop 3y ago
  This was part of the forum and usenet experience long before reddit.
EGreg 3y ago
At Qbix.com we will be launching something soon to compete with Twitter and Reddit. It is described at https://rational.app https://rational.app
- jrflowers 3y ago
  What is this? This page is a lot of words about the media and negativity and debate with very little information about… whatever this is (or will be?)
  - EGreg 3y ago
    I guess it has had the intended effect :-)
    - jrflowers 3y ago
      Confusion and then immediately moving on?
      - AA-BA-94-2A-56 3y ago
        Rational reminds me of rationalist, which implies reactionary politics.
      - EGreg 3y ago
        Yes! Perfect :) We A/B optimized for that
more_corn 3y ago
Just do what slack did with irc. “Reinvent” it with a modern interface and some fixes. The mercurial masses will flock to the hot new platform, VC will shower you with adoration and cash, we’ll tell stories about how you don’t eat breakfast and only ever wear one sock. Everyone will emulate you and then you can come back around as a wealthy guru investor. Duh. Have you learned nothing of the tech cycle?
- contingencies 3y ago
  Fear not. Your wisdom is preserved at https://github.com/globalcitizen/taoup https://github.com/globalcitizen/taoup
TheIronMark 3y ago
The pricing model is hot garbage, but most Reddit users will continue to use it (myself included). That said, I'd be happy to move to an alternative, even usenet. Reddit has so much weird baggage associated with it (powermods, admin shenanigans, a surprisingly high number of racists/sexists) that I'd love to find a place for more nuanced and interesting discussions.
- mnky9800n 3y ago
  why do you use reddit? I'm not being argumentative, I'm just wondering. I stopped because I found that looking at reddit would negatively alter my perceptions of reality. Hacker news doesn't seem to do that. I also found that conversations on reddit were not very engaging but rather formulaic. It wasn't about having a discussion, just towing a party line (whatever the party for the particular subreddit might be).
  - themadturk 3y ago
    I use it because domain-specific subreddits are usually gems of advice and discussion. r/ObsidianMD, r/YNAB, etc. are often as useful, of not moreso, than product forums. Also, there are many subreddits that are simply fun... r/BitchImATrain, for instance, or even the great, highly moderated r/AskHistorians. The bigger, more general subreddits may be burning trash heaps, but there's good stuff if you dig.
- kagevf 3y ago
  > I'd love to find a place for more nuanced and interesting discussions. ... what about here?
  - BudaDude 3y ago
    Hacker News is great for Tech news. But it's not so great at niche hobbies like reddit is.
    - kagevf 3y ago
notacoward 3y ago
Seems more likely that "the fediverse" will take up the slack. Perhaps not Mastodon (the best known implementation) which is more of a Twitter alternative, but Lemmy seems to fit this niche pretty well. OTOH, a revival/update of Usenet would not be unwelcome either. NNTP > ActivityPub, after all.
andyjohnson0 3y ago
Tangential, but what happened to the various usenet archives that google obtained and mashed into google groups? Do they exist anywhere else in a more reliable [1] home? Edit: To clarify, I'm wondering how extensive the non-google archives are. [1] As in not google
- UberFly 3y ago
  There are archives out there, such as https://www.usenetarchives.com https://www.usenetarchives.com
  - andyjohnson0 3y ago
    Yeah, but its hard to get a feel for how comprehenive they are or how far back in time they extend. I seem to remember that the archive that google bought from dejanews goes back to the mid/early eighties - much earlier than the IA's archive.
wccrawford 3y ago
I don't see anyone talk about search discoverability. Many, many people add "site:reddit.com" when searching for product reviews and other information to weed out the garbage, and so far as I know, it currently isn't possible to search usenet with Google, Bing, etc. I think it'd basically mean there was an easy way to access usenet text groups via the browser, and thus also an easy way for the average Joe to access usenet. Some have already mentioned spam and moderation, and I think this will be a huge factor. Without the ability to moderate, bad actors quickly ruin any potentially-popular social media outlet. Most comments are happy about the lack of moderation so far, but that's actually a problem IMO.
- adamzochowski 3y ago
  Unfortunately you can't do site:old.reddit.com , It is a tragedy as old version loads more comments and has better UI.
  - ipaddr 3y ago
    Why can't you?
    - tylerag 3y ago
      It just isn't indexed nearly as well.
      - Freedom2 3y ago
        But you can still do it, right?
- opportune 3y ago
  When I first read this comment, my initial thought was that it would be neat if there were a forum-provider that made it easy for nontechnical users to create and run forums on their platform. That way if you wanted to do a site:forumprovider.com search you’d search across all forum instances. Then I realized that’s exactly how Reddit was originally designed and used! Anyway, the forums of the aughts were discoverable through search and anecdotally used to be more highly ranked in search queries until they mysteriously started getting derailed by Google I think around 2016 or so. They solve the moderation and spam problem by have forum moderators just like Reddit - unlike Reddit these were usually real people from the forum + owners, and not powermods. Power mods I think do all kinds of shady stuff to monetize their control, with forums that’s less necessary as you can just put up banner ads, sponsored content, etc without running afoul to Reddit policies. And unlike with Reddit, there is no huge incumbency/landgrab advantage from controlling a common term like “politics” because you’re not running on a single site. I was surprised not to see it mentioned more here or on the current top Reddit post also discussing this, I guess most Reddit users are too young to have had exposure to them, but besides Digg it’s actually what Reddit replaced as it grew in the early 2010s.
VikingCoder 3y ago
I want something new. I want a client that looks basically how reddit looks today. An aggregator. And maybe that aggregator has a back-end that runs on a VM somewhere that I control, or I can pay someone to run an aggregator for me, or whatever. But I want each subreddit to be federated. Run on its own server, with its own moderators. I want to be able to make as many Reddit accounts as I want to (dozens, maybe not hundreds), and pick which ones I use on which subreddits. Some decentralized authorization / authentication scheme? Or maybe some centralized server? Or using OAuth or something? I don't really care. I want to SUBSCRIBE to a list of Admins. If an Admin shadowbans a user, I don't see their posts. I find this incredibly useful. Other people will disagree with me about which users, which actions, should result in shadowbanning. I think that about wraps it up. What am I missing?
- opportune 3y ago
  Way back in the day, Reddit was marketed as a way to create a forum without any technical setup, and then to view content across all the communities you were a “member” of in one place. You can still see glimpses of that, I think when you signup or register a subreddit it suggests making one for your dnd clan or something like that. I don’t think Reddit realized how smart this strategy would end up becoming, because over time what happened is that existing Reddit users would just join the subreddit for some topic they were interested in (like a band) instead of seeking out forums for it on the web. Eventually enough people started doing that, that subreddits for a topic would absolutely dwarf any single traditional forum in activity. Because reddit is a single site they could also do a bunch of SEO optimizations due to having larger scale than independent forums. The result is a massive network effect and controllling the top-of-funnel for online discussions on the web. Anyway, what fucked up Reddit was that after 2010 or so they started turning it into more of a consumption platform than a discussion platform, plus various issues with moderation (the emergence of powermods who are all secretly monetizing their subs to help advertisers, implementing platform-wide moderation policies), turning it more into a centralized service with less focus on discussion. Honestly, combining the web with forums provides like 90% of what you want, it just doesn’t do aggregation, nor does it let you directly ban a mod (but you can always switch sites). But it does decentralize auth, moderation, servers, and allow more freedom in how a subreddit-equivalent gets run while also allowing moderators to directly monetize their sites rather than having to resort to secretive scheming. Maybe we simply need some kind of protocol or common API + FOSS client that lets you automatically grab and sort top posts from a list of forums that implement the protocol.
Gualdrapo 3y ago
I feel like the HN hivemind likes to bash Reddit for some reason, but for me it has not been that bad. I've got small work gigs on there, discovered places where I've got to learn about stuff that I like, being updated about what's going on in the FOSS world, discover new music, etcetera. Yes, some people in there would like to drag you into absurd and nonsensical arguments, but even in here where I do not participate that much have fell into that situation. I went into Reddit after 6 years of using Facebook which was much, much worse. Reddit made me ditch Facebook once and for all. Not that I agree even in the slightiest about the changes they are about to make, but I'm yet to find an alternative where I could find all of the aforementioned but with a more sane support. I don't see how usenet can bring all of that all of a sudden, nor see myself using something like Mastodon and become a social media addict.
- stronglikedan 3y ago
  I use reddit almost daily for niche subjects, and I only use it in the browser. Granted, I use old.reddit, but still, I have no idea what people are on about when they say they need a 3rd party solution to use it. It's practically zero effort. To me, it takes more time to complain about it than to actually use it.
  - skyyler 3y ago
    They're not complaining about old.reddit, that's for sure. The mobile site pushes you to use their official app, which is horrible in quality compared to the many third party apps. I'd stop using reddit entirely before I switched to their official app or new site design.
- opportune 3y ago
  Some problems with Reddit (like it having a lowest-common-denominator general user base due to its size) are avoidable by going on smaller subreddits. The real problem with Reddit is that even small subreddits tend towards beginner or introductory content because that reflects the level of understanding of most users. Having separable, more focused forums can allow for discussions at a much higher level of knowledge and expertise than Reddit. You can see plenty of examples of this today with HN having better content and discussion in its niche than anywhere on Reddit, and plenty of complicated high-skill-ceiling discussion topics like vehicle maintenance or travel hacks still being discussed at high quality on oldschool forums. I don’t see a benefit for Usenet because it wasn’t obsoleted by Reddit, it was made obsolete by forums. Honestly I just wish those would make a resurgence. They allow for so much more customization than Reddit, Usenet, or Facebook and don’t have centralized policies constantly messing with them. And I really don’t think there is a need for a one-stop-shop site or tech stack for focused discussion. Reddit and FB may have replaced forums in most cases for most people from 2010 to now, but as they’ve become more commercialized with more rules, maybe we can switch back
tgv 3y ago
Usenet won't be as effective, since it lacks "karma." People love up and down voting, and usenet simply does not provide that. That, and the the whole question of who's going to pay for a large amount of usenet traffic. Think of all those images traveling uuencoded and being stored at every hub...
- notacoward 3y ago
  > Think of all those images traveling uuencoded and being stored at every hub. Yes, the text-only bias of Usenet (really NNTP) is a bit of a problem, but otherwise it's a pretty good starting point. Better IMO than ActivityPub, which is insane wrt consistency - e.g. everyone viewing a post from different servers is likely to see a different set of responses - and is actively cache-hostile. Fix the text bias, or add a side protocol for images like IRC did, and it would be pretty close to what you'd want for a decentralized Reddit (or HN) replacement.
kkfx 3y ago
I'm ready. I'm here. But I've essentially abandoned usenet just because most groups I was in are now dead or spammed... So... Well... Not much faith in mass of people...
ChrisArchitect 3y ago
Ask HN:
tetrisgm 3y ago
What exactly do you think the Venn diagram of: users who are annoyed with the API change + users who are willing to put up with Usenet? Look at migrations to Mastodon and Matrix. It's still niche. It's great for that niche, but it's not something the average user will understand. Users care about UX, quality of life. This argument isn't grounded in that.
tomjen3 3y ago
The best sub reddits are heavily modded, but Usenets support for moderation is very small, which means it will only be great if you can preselect by limiting who gets access to the groups.
rcarmo 3y ago
I remember alt.religion.emacs - quite vividly, in fact. NNTP was a massive quasi-distributed forum (I wasn’t the newsmaster at the ISPs I worked at, but frequently dealt with the servers and setups) and a pretty big overhead resource and management-wise, but pretty interesting to deal with until it was overwhelmed by binaries groups and all sorts of weirdness. I do miss the quirky sense of humor and the community - somewhat like Mastodon, for those who are leaving Twitter - but I don’t miss the drama, the flooding and the flame wars.
brudgers 3y ago
Spam killed Usenet so probably not. Unless someone moderates. Then you have Reddit, ie the need to fund moderation. Or a corner case where there are volunteers. And besides users will want tags and private messages and the ability to follow personalities and avatars and such. None of which addresses zero latency for the first child porn. Remember how common it was for ISP’s to block everything starting with “alt” ? Yes it was fun while it lasted but it wasn’t AOL that killed it. It was ubiquitous bandwidth improvements worldwide.
deleted 3y ago
[deleted]
kiwidrew 3y ago
Are there any alternative (open source) implementations of the _server_ side of the Reddit API? Then you could just point Teddit, Aurora, etc. at the alternative server. The only required work would be implementing the database backend which seems... feasible.
- 7373737373 3y ago
  A Reddit/HN-like site is relatively simple to implement, but the main problems are moderation, spam protection and network growth
Havoc 3y ago
There is also lemmy - think mastodon but Reddit style
throw9away6 3y ago
Usenet has no moderation so no. People could use spam it to death
aaron695 3y ago
[dead]
tmaly 3y ago
I wish we could download all the data on Reddit in subreddits like we could on Usenet.
toadi 3y ago
I have a feeling good things get "improved" upon but I never really saw what it brought. What I do like about reddit. It is still one place where you just use an email address and nick name. So you can be anonymous. Or reasonable anonymous. No one looking back 10 years back into your posts to cancel you for something you said that in that time maybe was not an issue. I was so reluctant making a Facebook account back in the day because they wanted your REAL identity. Man I was a nickname on irc or on the internet in general. That was what I loved about it. Usenet was the same you could just use throw away email account and just say whatever. Ask whatever without being scared. Reddit is the only place where you still can do that.
gnuarch 3y ago
Rocksolid Light (rslight) is a web based Usenet client. https://github.com/novabbs/rocksolid-light https://github.com/novabbs/rocksolid-light
psyfi 3y ago
Usenet would be perfect Thunderbird still supports NNTP.
ChrisArchitect 3y ago
Anyone in here claiming to use "old.reddit.com" -- so you're a non-logged-in lurker? and have a weird sense of entitlement for how the site should serve you? The old UI is great yes. But if you can't be bothered to log in as a normal user of the site (and set your preferences to the old UI) your opinion loses alot of steam. Log in -> set preferences -> surf reddits with www. urls like normal.
kensanata 3y ago
I set up a net news server, created two groups, hooked up to another net news server, we started peering… It sure is possible! And with peering, newsgroups are federated. They will survive individual servers going down. I also wrote a minimal web frontend. Example: https://campaignwiki.org/news https://campaignwiki.org/news Source: https://metacpan.org/dist/App-news https://metacpan.org/dist/App-news
than3 3y ago
The main issue with Usenet was it lacked any form of content moderation.

182 points by netfortius 3y ago

I recall the comp., sci., and soc.culture., from just before AOL opened the flood gates (access), and even soon thereafter, as they used to be so fun...

dredmorbius 3y ago

I wrote a few years ago of my understanding of why Usenet died to some positive reception. There are four principle failings: <https://old.reddit.com/r/dredmorbius/comments/3c3xyu/why_usenet_died/ https://old.reddit.com/r/dredmorbius/comments/3c3xyu/why_use...> 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. All of those are significant, but I would (and did) argue that points 3 & 4 were the final nails in the coffin. Anti-spam measures and tightly-curated / moderated newsgroups could survive despite the spam, but with firms willing to brave the very real legal and financial risks, and without any other viable financial support, Usenet fell to a mix of mailing lists and early online blogging / forum software (phpBB, Slashdot, and others). There've been several attempts to revise or update Usnet (most noteably Usenet II),. Those ... have also failed to take hold. (Though in fairness: social media is extremely fickle, many apparently well-structured, and occasionally well-capitalised, attempts have similarly foundered, and the limelite often moves on with time.) Gaining traction and viability is a mix of luck, timing, and execution (mostly getting out of your own way). Reddit can be seen as a response to points 1, 3, and 4. Reddit offers reasonably good spam defences, it has evolved protections against legally-problematic content (with some large bumps along the way), and it's attempting to develop advertising as a business angle. And has had some success at all of these. Reddit's has still fallen flat on the second point, and fails further in many people's view (my own included) in that it simply isn't a very good discussion forum. There are small and limited spaces that work, sometimes. But even moderately large subreddits are a hot mess, and the very largest could have the late Newt Minow's classic phrase applied. As for Usenet, it's a cautionary tale that open protocols and federated control are no guarantee of either effectiveness or continuity. /me side-eyes Mastodon and the Fediverse.

LinuxBender 3y ago

Could Usenet get “revived”, to replace the soon to be unusable Reddit? Technically yes. Become widely adopted, maybe if... There are free Usenet providers for the text groups. People would have to agree on methods to ignore the spam bots, maybe a signed message header/footer that a UI recognizes. There are forums and chat systems that already leverage Usenet as the transport/storage but they all need some tender loving care. In my opinion for that to be widely adopted people would need a low friction way to access Usenet and it would need to provide them a UI/UX they are familiar with. Perhaps Usenet would be entirely transparent to them. Perhaps it would be a simple nginx web front-end so that anyone could run a node and it would use Usenet on the backend for storage and transport, ideally the sites that implemented NNTPS (TLS). Just nginx+python, or nginx+golang or an nginx module and super-lightweight with secure safe defaults. There would need to be a group set up where all the front-end nodes ingest group keys, identities, etc... and maybe a git repo that bootstraps all of this. Traditional methods like using a Usenet reader such as Thunderbird? Probably not. Probably very small technical circles. I think this would be akin to convincing people to switch from Discord back to IRCD or using Mumble/Murmur for voice.

pwg 3y ago

USENET still exists, and some groups are still active, just not at their peak from yesteryear -- so why not go join and see if anything is happening in your old haunts. Free access to text only groups: http://www.eternal-september.org/ http://www.eternal-september.org/ Pick a newsreader: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Usenet_newsreaders https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Usenet_newsreaders and go take a look.

readyplayernull 3y ago
It would be interesting to know from a USENETer perspective how it feels to see the hordes of Redditors flooding their platform in an Eternal September once again [1]. [1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eternal_September https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eternal_September
xtracto 3y ago
I feel that the Usenet protocol in hand with today's technologies should be amazing. It should be possible to make a very powerful client that summarizes groups discussions say, by day/week; filters spam pretty aggressively and sorts or "mutes" known trolls or bad users. The one thing I also wish would be better is discoverability... Just the other day I logged in into an irc server (LiberaChat?) but just didn't know where to go from there.. I got into my country's room, but it was very quiet.
- Parodper 3y ago
  > The one thing I also wish would be better is discoverability... Just the other day I logged in into an irc server (LiberaChat?) but just didn't know where to go from there.. I got into my country's room, but it was very quiet. Check out netsplit.de. It has a list of channels sorted by popularity.
grep_name 3y ago
Any chance you have a recommendation of newsreader for android?

evgen 3y ago

Betteridge's law of headlines strikes again. Easier to build something new than to tack on more cruft to the broken usenet model. At this point usenet has little remaining use other than being a low-profile warez distribution channel. It was great in the late 80s and early 90s but does not scale well as a communications medium and we already know better ways to manage the distributed data sharing layer.

brodouevencode 3y ago
> broken usenet model That's a bold assessment. It was slowly abandoned because it lacked fun graphics and emojis and all the other frilly parts that casual users love, but I wouldn't call it a broken model. It had (and has) a place.
- JohnFen 3y ago
  That's not my memory. My memory is that Google basically bought it (by buying Deja News) and turned it into Google Groups, removing most of what made it great. That was when people really left in droves. But that was a long time ago. I could be misremembering.
  - jghn 3y ago
    Google bought an archive & a mechanism to post/read. It's not possible to buy usenet, by nature it's a distributed platform.
    - JohnFen 3y ago
      Right, that's why I said "essentially". My memory is hazy, of course, but I remember that a whole lot of people stopped using usenet after that purchase. Some because they felt sold out to Google, and some because they saw it as a sign that Usenet was going to get absorbed into the borg. A system being decentralized does not make it immune from being that sort of thing. Look at what gmail did to email. Whether or not that was most people, I don't know. But it was more than a few.

JohnFen 3y ago

That would be incredible. The passing of Usenet was a huge loss to the internet, and nothing has come even close to being able to replace it.

Gordonjcp 3y ago

How exactly is reddit going to be "unusable"? I mean, apart from the general low quality of posts in a lot of subs?

kalupa 3y ago
I think this is out of the complaints about API access costs and those using third-party clients will "just stop using reddit" which I'm not sure is actually going to happen as broadly as folks may believe
- JohnFen 3y ago
  But it might. I have a bias here, though... I got fed up with Reddit and quit it entirely a couple of years ago, so I can easily see why others would bail on it without a great deal of prodding.
- Gordonjcp 3y ago
  I suspect it'll be like a lot of things, where everyone says they're ditching it, and they are not ditching it. I don't really understand why people use an "app" anyway, when browsers exist.
  - vdqtp3 3y ago
    > I don't really understand why people use an "app" anyway, when browsers exist. Reddit from a mobile browser is one of the most unfriendly sites I've ever found.
    - hxugufjfjf 3y ago
      It also consistently insists, breaks functionality and nags you to try and get you to use the app instead of the browser. Its barely useable from a mobile browser.
      - BitwiseFool 3y ago

Ekaros 3y ago

It doesn't combat spam very well. So I doubt it will come back at least in substantial way. Other thing is that you would need some agreed standard to make it "rich" as in user experience.

agiacalone 3y ago
Killfiles are the generally accepted way of combating spam on Usenet. With only a few lines, I see very little of it even on the wider Usenet groups. Generally blocking public services (like Google Groups) is enough to block 90%+ spam
- Ekaros 3y ago
  I wonder how truly effective those would be if the spammers really started to combat and circumvent them actively. And blocking public servers would kill the network effects. Thus keeping it only to small communities.
  - agiacalone 3y ago
    It just means that services that allow bad actors get blocked. Like Google Groups. I have and enjoy using “public” Usenet servers like eternal-september and SDF which disallow spam and hold users accountable for their actions.
- jandrese 3y ago
  I feel like it's easy to avoid spam on Usenet at the moment because few spammers give a crap about Usenet. If it became popular again this would change, just like the first time it became popular. That said, one of the things I really liked about Usenet is that the client was entirely in your hands. Some of the Usenet readers were incredibly sophisticated and no internet forum software has ever come close to offering an equivalent level of utility. I would jump on a "Usenet, but with moderation/spam control baked in" in a heartbeat. In fact this is pretty much what Reddit is, which makes me sad that they're trying so hard to Digg it.

sigstoat 3y ago

somebody was asking in a thread the other day about some open protocol for forums/subreddits/whatever that different people could host, that could be fronted by independent clients. well, there you go, NNTP still exists. write some ios/android NNTP clients that can handle multiple servers w/credentials, and run some NNTP servers. no need to distribute the posts to other servers.

chongli 3y ago
How do you deal with spam and moderation? What about the sidebar and pinned posts? Upvoting/downvoting? There’s a lot of quality-of-life features in modern forums like Reddit and HN that you don’t have with these old technologies.
- sigstoat 3y ago
  "extensions to the protocol" do you need the whole thing designed in a comment? the original context was to decompose subreddits into their own decentralized and separately hosted things. so: dump spam into some hidden pseudo-group that only mods can see. let them post replies to the posts which are interpreted by the server to release/delete the spam add additional headers on posts to mark that they're pinned or sidebarred. clients will have to know how to interpret that, but you'll remain backwards compatible with everything that already exists again if you really want upvoting/downvoting, have specially formatted reply posts which the server uses to increment/decrement the vote counter, which is presented as a special header on the posts. special clients can display it like reddit, and even old clients can probably make use of it for filtering purposes. now, i did the design work, so you go implement it.
  - chongli 3y ago
    I don't see the advantage of doing this vs. doing a new federated protocol from scratch, with all of the modern features built-in, and accessible from a web browser rather than a separate news reader.
- AdamH12113 3y ago

agiacalone 3y ago

Small newsgroup services that use NNTP, like Usenet, still exist as well—not to mention the “big” services. Tilde operates one, as does SDF, the two *nix communities that I belong to. https://tilde.wiki/wiki/NNTP https://tilde.wiki/wiki/NNTP (SDF is member only access)

paulpauper 3y ago

How about Reddit minus the overzealous censorship by admins and sub moderators. I think this is easier than recreating facebook or youtube. Reddit can be fixed by changing how mods are appointed. The major problem with Reddit is that there is no way to remove bad or corrupt mods. This has been a major problem with popular subs.

commandlinefan 3y ago
> I think this is easier Yeah, a lot of people (voat, ruqqus, parler) have thought the same, and found otherwise...

dark-star 3y ago

What will happen to Reddit to make it unusable? I feel a bit out of the loop here...

aaronax 3y ago
Pricing out of third party clients via API fees > only official website and clients are available > they get worse with monetization attempts > smart people who don't want to put up with less-useful UIs leave > site becomes devoid of "good" content.
- Diederich 3y ago
  I exclusively use old.reddit.com and it seems pretty good.
  - breakingcups 3y ago
    How long you think until they dare take that away too? For all intents and purposes, old.reddit.com is just like any third-party client. Vastly preferred by its users, harder to monetize or exert control over.
    - Diederich 3y ago
      I'm somewhat anxious about old.reddit.com going away, no doubt. > harder to monetize Honest question: how is old.reddit.com harder to monetize than 'new.reddit.com'? I've been seeing ads creep in over the past couple of years I think. (Not that I necessarily have any beef about that..)
      - neurostimulant 3y ago
        Old reddit doesn't have many of those newer features in the main reddit ui that's geared to steer users to pay for premium. For example, old reddit users don't see avatars, which can be customized with premium stuff in the main reddit ui. Awards are also less pronounced. As an old reddit user, I'm sure you have no desire to spend money buy avatar gears and more awards. Users of the new UI got exposed to those stuff more often and thus more familiar and more likely to buy them.

Moto7451 3y ago

For some needed context, Reddit clients will be charged for API access. https://www.reddit.com/r/apolloapp/comments/13ws4w3/had_a_call_with_reddit_to_discuss_pricing_bad/ https://www.reddit.com/r/apolloapp/comments/13ws4w3/had_a_ca...

freediverx 3y ago
Not just charged. Charged an exorbitant and unrealistic amount meant to kill off third party apps.

cameronfraser 3y ago

I don't think most reddit users care about reddit politics so no

uhtred 3y ago

Why would you want Usenet to be like reddit? Reddit is awful. 99% of posts are a desperate grab for attention. Every comment is one of: - a smug, know it all response by someone who thinks they are an expert in some field rather than a loser who spends their day on reddit - an attempt to be witty - some reddit saying that gets repeated over and over ("man got that dawg in him" and so on)

EGreg 3y ago
It is also a bunch of teenagers just saying one liners
jandrese 3y ago
And this differs from Usenet how? I guess you can argue that the Karma system is counterproductive and leads to Karma farming, even though Karma is explicitly worthless. But I think attention seeking is going to happen no matter what the platform is.
slothtrop 3y ago
This was part of the forum and usenet experience long before reddit.

EGreg 3y ago

At Qbix.com we will be launching something soon to compete with Twitter and Reddit. It is described at https://rational.app https://rational.app

jrflowers 3y ago
What is this? This page is a lot of words about the media and negativity and debate with very little information about… whatever this is (or will be?)
- EGreg 3y ago
  I guess it has had the intended effect :-)
  - jrflowers 3y ago
    Confusion and then immediately moving on?
    - AA-BA-94-2A-56 3y ago
      Rational reminds me of rationalist, which implies reactionary politics.
    - EGreg 3y ago
      Yes! Perfect :) We A/B optimized for that

more_corn 3y ago

Just do what slack did with irc. “Reinvent” it with a modern interface and some fixes. The mercurial masses will flock to the hot new platform, VC will shower you with adoration and cash, we’ll tell stories about how you don’t eat breakfast and only ever wear one sock. Everyone will emulate you and then you can come back around as a wealthy guru investor. Duh. Have you learned nothing of the tech cycle?

contingencies 3y ago
Fear not. Your wisdom is preserved at https://github.com/globalcitizen/taoup https://github.com/globalcitizen/taoup

TheIronMark 3y ago

The pricing model is hot garbage, but most Reddit users will continue to use it (myself included). That said, I'd be happy to move to an alternative, even usenet. Reddit has so much weird baggage associated with it (powermods, admin shenanigans, a surprisingly high number of racists/sexists) that I'd love to find a place for more nuanced and interesting discussions.

mnky9800n 3y ago
why do you use reddit? I'm not being argumentative, I'm just wondering. I stopped because I found that looking at reddit would negatively alter my perceptions of reality. Hacker news doesn't seem to do that. I also found that conversations on reddit were not very engaging but rather formulaic. It wasn't about having a discussion, just towing a party line (whatever the party for the particular subreddit might be).
- themadturk 3y ago
  I use it because domain-specific subreddits are usually gems of advice and discussion. r/ObsidianMD, r/YNAB, etc. are often as useful, of not moreso, than product forums. Also, there are many subreddits that are simply fun... r/BitchImATrain, for instance, or even the great, highly moderated r/AskHistorians. The bigger, more general subreddits may be burning trash heaps, but there's good stuff if you dig.
kagevf 3y ago
> I'd love to find a place for more nuanced and interesting discussions. ... what about here?
- BudaDude 3y ago
  Hacker News is great for Tech news. But it's not so great at niche hobbies like reddit is.
  - kagevf 3y ago

notacoward 3y ago

Seems more likely that "the fediverse" will take up the slack. Perhaps not Mastodon (the best known implementation) which is more of a Twitter alternative, but Lemmy seems to fit this niche pretty well. OTOH, a revival/update of Usenet would not be unwelcome either. NNTP > ActivityPub, after all.

andyjohnson0 3y ago

Tangential, but what happened to the various usenet archives that google obtained and mashed into google groups? Do they exist anywhere else in a more reliable [1] home? Edit: To clarify, I'm wondering how extensive the non-google archives are. [1] As in not google

UberFly 3y ago
There are archives out there, such as https://www.usenetarchives.com https://www.usenetarchives.com
- andyjohnson0 3y ago
  Yeah, but its hard to get a feel for how comprehenive they are or how far back in time they extend. I seem to remember that the archive that google bought from dejanews goes back to the mid/early eighties - much earlier than the IA's archive.

wccrawford 3y ago

I don't see anyone talk about search discoverability. Many, many people add "site:reddit.com" when searching for product reviews and other information to weed out the garbage, and so far as I know, it currently isn't possible to search usenet with Google, Bing, etc. I think it'd basically mean there was an easy way to access usenet text groups via the browser, and thus also an easy way for the average Joe to access usenet. Some have already mentioned spam and moderation, and I think this will be a huge factor. Without the ability to moderate, bad actors quickly ruin any potentially-popular social media outlet. Most comments are happy about the lack of moderation so far, but that's actually a problem IMO.

adamzochowski 3y ago
Unfortunately you can't do site:old.reddit.com , It is a tragedy as old version loads more comments and has better UI.
- ipaddr 3y ago
  Why can't you?
  - tylerag 3y ago
    It just isn't indexed nearly as well.
    - Freedom2 3y ago
      But you can still do it, right?
opportune 3y ago
When I first read this comment, my initial thought was that it would be neat if there were a forum-provider that made it easy for nontechnical users to create and run forums on their platform. That way if you wanted to do a site:forumprovider.com search you’d search across all forum instances. Then I realized that’s exactly how Reddit was originally designed and used! Anyway, the forums of the aughts were discoverable through search and anecdotally used to be more highly ranked in search queries until they mysteriously started getting derailed by Google I think around 2016 or so. They solve the moderation and spam problem by have forum moderators just like Reddit - unlike Reddit these were usually real people from the forum + owners, and not powermods. Power mods I think do all kinds of shady stuff to monetize their control, with forums that’s less necessary as you can just put up banner ads, sponsored content, etc without running afoul to Reddit policies. And unlike with Reddit, there is no huge incumbency/landgrab advantage from controlling a common term like “politics” because you’re not running on a single site. I was surprised not to see it mentioned more here or on the current top Reddit post also discussing this, I guess most Reddit users are too young to have had exposure to them, but besides Digg it’s actually what Reddit replaced as it grew in the early 2010s.

VikingCoder 3y ago

I want something new. I want a client that looks basically how reddit looks today. An aggregator. And maybe that aggregator has a back-end that runs on a VM somewhere that I control, or I can pay someone to run an aggregator for me, or whatever. But I want each subreddit to be federated. Run on its own server, with its own moderators. I want to be able to make as many Reddit accounts as I want to (dozens, maybe not hundreds), and pick which ones I use on which subreddits. Some decentralized authorization / authentication scheme? Or maybe some centralized server? Or using OAuth or something? I don't really care. I want to SUBSCRIBE to a list of Admins. If an Admin shadowbans a user, I don't see their posts. I find this incredibly useful. Other people will disagree with me about which users, which actions, should result in shadowbanning. I think that about wraps it up. What am I missing?

opportune 3y ago
Way back in the day, Reddit was marketed as a way to create a forum without any technical setup, and then to view content across all the communities you were a “member” of in one place. You can still see glimpses of that, I think when you signup or register a subreddit it suggests making one for your dnd clan or something like that. I don’t think Reddit realized how smart this strategy would end up becoming, because over time what happened is that existing Reddit users would just join the subreddit for some topic they were interested in (like a band) instead of seeking out forums for it on the web. Eventually enough people started doing that, that subreddits for a topic would absolutely dwarf any single traditional forum in activity. Because reddit is a single site they could also do a bunch of SEO optimizations due to having larger scale than independent forums. The result is a massive network effect and controllling the top-of-funnel for online discussions on the web. Anyway, what fucked up Reddit was that after 2010 or so they started turning it into more of a consumption platform than a discussion platform, plus various issues with moderation (the emergence of powermods who are all secretly monetizing their subs to help advertisers, implementing platform-wide moderation policies), turning it more into a centralized service with less focus on discussion. Honestly, combining the web with forums provides like 90% of what you want, it just doesn’t do aggregation, nor does it let you directly ban a mod (but you can always switch sites). But it does decentralize auth, moderation, servers, and allow more freedom in how a subreddit-equivalent gets run while also allowing moderators to directly monetize their sites rather than having to resort to secretive scheming. Maybe we simply need some kind of protocol or common API + FOSS client that lets you automatically grab and sort top posts from a list of forums that implement the protocol.

Gualdrapo 3y ago

I feel like the HN hivemind likes to bash Reddit for some reason, but for me it has not been that bad. I've got small work gigs on there, discovered places where I've got to learn about stuff that I like, being updated about what's going on in the FOSS world, discover new music, etcetera. Yes, some people in there would like to drag you into absurd and nonsensical arguments, but even in here where I do not participate that much have fell into that situation. I went into Reddit after 6 years of using Facebook which was much, much worse. Reddit made me ditch Facebook once and for all. Not that I agree even in the slightiest about the changes they are about to make, but I'm yet to find an alternative where I could find all of the aforementioned but with a more sane support. I don't see how usenet can bring all of that all of a sudden, nor see myself using something like Mastodon and become a social media addict.

stronglikedan 3y ago
I use reddit almost daily for niche subjects, and I only use it in the browser. Granted, I use old.reddit, but still, I have no idea what people are on about when they say they need a 3rd party solution to use it. It's practically zero effort. To me, it takes more time to complain about it than to actually use it.
- skyyler 3y ago
  They're not complaining about old.reddit, that's for sure. The mobile site pushes you to use their official app, which is horrible in quality compared to the many third party apps. I'd stop using reddit entirely before I switched to their official app or new site design.
opportune 3y ago
Some problems with Reddit (like it having a lowest-common-denominator general user base due to its size) are avoidable by going on smaller subreddits. The real problem with Reddit is that even small subreddits tend towards beginner or introductory content because that reflects the level of understanding of most users. Having separable, more focused forums can allow for discussions at a much higher level of knowledge and expertise than Reddit. You can see plenty of examples of this today with HN having better content and discussion in its niche than anywhere on Reddit, and plenty of complicated high-skill-ceiling discussion topics like vehicle maintenance or travel hacks still being discussed at high quality on oldschool forums. I don’t see a benefit for Usenet because it wasn’t obsoleted by Reddit, it was made obsolete by forums. Honestly I just wish those would make a resurgence. They allow for so much more customization than Reddit, Usenet, or Facebook and don’t have centralized policies constantly messing with them. And I really don’t think there is a need for a one-stop-shop site or tech stack for focused discussion. Reddit and FB may have replaced forums in most cases for most people from 2010 to now, but as they’ve become more commercialized with more rules, maybe we can switch back

tgv 3y ago

Usenet won't be as effective, since it lacks "karma." People love up and down voting, and usenet simply does not provide that. That, and the the whole question of who's going to pay for a large amount of usenet traffic. Think of all those images traveling uuencoded and being stored at every hub...

notacoward 3y ago
> Think of all those images traveling uuencoded and being stored at every hub. Yes, the text-only bias of Usenet (really NNTP) is a bit of a problem, but otherwise it's a pretty good starting point. Better IMO than ActivityPub, which is insane wrt consistency - e.g. everyone viewing a post from different servers is likely to see a different set of responses - and is actively cache-hostile. Fix the text bias, or add a side protocol for images like IRC did, and it would be pretty close to what you'd want for a decentralized Reddit (or HN) replacement.

kkfx 3y ago

I'm ready. I'm here. But I've essentially abandoned usenet just because most groups I was in are now dead or spammed... So... Well... Not much faith in mass of people...

ChrisArchitect 3y ago

Ask HN:

tetrisgm 3y ago

What exactly do you think the Venn diagram of: users who are annoyed with the API change + users who are willing to put up with Usenet? Look at migrations to Mastodon and Matrix. It's still niche. It's great for that niche, but it's not something the average user will understand. Users care about UX, quality of life. This argument isn't grounded in that.

tomjen3 3y ago

The best sub reddits are heavily modded, but Usenets support for moderation is very small, which means it will only be great if you can preselect by limiting who gets access to the groups.

rcarmo 3y ago

I remember alt.religion.emacs - quite vividly, in fact. NNTP was a massive quasi-distributed forum (I wasn’t the newsmaster at the ISPs I worked at, but frequently dealt with the servers and setups) and a pretty big overhead resource and management-wise, but pretty interesting to deal with until it was overwhelmed by binaries groups and all sorts of weirdness. I do miss the quirky sense of humor and the community - somewhat like Mastodon, for those who are leaving Twitter - but I don’t miss the drama, the flooding and the flame wars.

brudgers 3y ago

Spam killed Usenet so probably not. Unless someone moderates. Then you have Reddit, ie the need to fund moderation. Or a corner case where there are volunteers. And besides users will want tags and private messages and the ability to follow personalities and avatars and such. None of which addresses zero latency for the first child porn. Remember how common it was for ISP’s to block everything starting with “alt” ? Yes it was fun while it lasted but it wasn’t AOL that killed it. It was ubiquitous bandwidth improvements worldwide.

deleted 3y ago

[deleted]

kiwidrew 3y ago

Are there any alternative (open source) implementations of the _server_ side of the Reddit API? Then you could just point Teddit, Aurora, etc. at the alternative server. The only required work would be implementing the database backend which seems... feasible.

7373737373 3y ago
A Reddit/HN-like site is relatively simple to implement, but the main problems are moderation, spam protection and network growth

Havoc 3y ago

There is also lemmy - think mastodon but Reddit style

throw9away6 3y ago

Usenet has no moderation so no. People could use spam it to death

aaron695 3y ago

[dead]

tmaly 3y ago

I wish we could download all the data on Reddit in subreddits like we could on Usenet.

toadi 3y ago

I have a feeling good things get "improved" upon but I never really saw what it brought. What I do like about reddit. It is still one place where you just use an email address and nick name. So you can be anonymous. Or reasonable anonymous. No one looking back 10 years back into your posts to cancel you for something you said that in that time maybe was not an issue. I was so reluctant making a Facebook account back in the day because they wanted your REAL identity. Man I was a nickname on irc or on the internet in general. That was what I loved about it. Usenet was the same you could just use throw away email account and just say whatever. Ask whatever without being scared. Reddit is the only place where you still can do that.

gnuarch 3y ago

Rocksolid Light (rslight) is a web based Usenet client. https://github.com/novabbs/rocksolid-light https://github.com/novabbs/rocksolid-light

psyfi 3y ago

Usenet would be perfect Thunderbird still supports NNTP.

ChrisArchitect 3y ago

Anyone in here claiming to use "old.reddit.com" -- so you're a non-logged-in lurker? and have a weird sense of entitlement for how the site should serve you? The old UI is great yes. But if you can't be bothered to log in as a normal user of the site (and set your preferences to the old UI) your opinion loses alot of steam. Log in -> set preferences -> surf reddits with www. urls like normal.

kensanata 3y ago

I set up a net news server, created two groups, hooked up to another net news server, we started peering… It sure is possible! And with peering, newsgroups are federated. They will survive individual servers going down. I also wrote a minimal web frontend. Example: https://campaignwiki.org/news https://campaignwiki.org/news Source: https://metacpan.org/dist/App-news https://metacpan.org/dist/App-news

than3 3y ago

The main issue with Usenet was it lacked any form of content moderation.