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Usenet thrived in a time where most of us trusted each other, traffic was an order of magnitude lighter, trolls were few, spam was unheard of, and moderation -

Usenet thrived in a time where most of us trusted each other, traffic was an order of magnitude lighter, trolls were few, spam was unheard of, and moderation - if any - was cheap and painless. I honestly believe those times are past us. And I say that as someone that loved Usenet back in the day. What you're asking for, for free, isn't possible.

b33j0r 3y ago
I fear you might be right. But somehow, HN is a counter-example? I rarely even see a bad joke, because we’re a self-selected sample of people who care about the edges of professional computing. So I say, why not?
- skrause 3y ago
  HN has a lot more powerful and strict moderation than Usenet ever had.
  - BSEdlMMldESB 3y ago
    HN has shadowbanning, sockpuppets, etc... all the goodies that have been privately demonstrated to work, and work well; and most of those work even better when combined with a pretense of 'not having that here'
    - Hyolobrika 3y ago
      That is disgusting.
- cmpalmer52 3y ago
  The average person has no idea what 90% of the headlines on HN are even referring to, giving it a degree of self-moderation.
  - _x14i 3y ago
    And the average person also doesn't know the website exists. You have a few layers of public knowledge: Twitter, Facebook, etc - everyone knows them. Reddit, Discord HN, presumably other domain-specific forums, IRC Fediverse (though less so as of late), lobste.rs, presumably many that I don't know about!
    - dylan604 3y ago
      >And the average person also doesn't know the website exists. Taking the larger number of people outside of the US that only use mobile devices and only use apps like FB, WhatsApp, or others I'm not familiar with, I'd go so far as saying that the average person doesn't know websites exist. If it's not present to them via an app, could they find an actual website (or at least would they even attempt to)?
    - sumedh 3y ago
      How do I get an invite to lobste.rs
      - deleted 3y ago
        [deleted]
- joezydeco 3y ago
  IMO the key adavantage HN/Reddit has over Usenet is the upvoting/downvoting, which is a clever form of self-moderation. Doesn't work in all cases but the less useful comments and posts never rise to the top.
dragontamer 3y ago
Except Reddit moderators deal with these spam issues all the time. Hacker News is run by herculean efforts by the moderation team here, and I appreciate it. I'm ignorant of what their tools are, but I don't think that scales either. Its good for our community, but Hacker News will never be Reddit or Twitter scale. Reddit's model is that moderators basically complain to the Admins that tools are insufficient, then admins mostly ignore those complaints. Moderators write bots that automatically surf traffic and try to automate... then the Admins come back and increase the price of API-access by 1000%, and then change the API and overall become hostile to this behavior. This cannot work either. ---------- At least in Usenet days, we could run our own programs in an open source model for these moderation issues. I don't think Usenet would work. We need a way to rewind time (Usenet: once you post or once something passes moderation, it is forever more sent to everyone else's inbox). USENET was POP model, to put into email terms... while Reddit is IMAP/JMAP model, where the true state of the information is centralized to the server. So yes, I agree with you that USENET will fail today. But the nuances of why it will fail are important to understand. In particular: Reddit was never very good about these moderation issues. But with enough work and grit, the community came together anyway. That's good enough. I expect that USENET's moderation model is sufficient, albeit decades old. Its all the other USENET crap that won't work today (being a "POP"-like message distribution platform without any "takebacks", so no editing posts, no deleting porn that got past the spam filter, etc. etc.) ---------- Or maybe... USENET works with regards to API access. The *ARCHIVE* (ie: Google Groups, or Deja News if you're old enough to remember that) is where takebacks / edits can live instead. So maybe Usenet can work, but with changes to our workflow to be more akin to 2023-level of features. By separating concerns over USENET (ie: how messages are distributed among a decentralized list of servers), and "The Archive" (which needs to be run by a trusted set of administrators), and a system where moderators will have access to "The Archive" for their own moderation purposes, we can rebuild Reddit through USENET?? Hmmm... it could work. Though I'm curious if it has much benefits over Mastodon or other solutions available today.
- indus 3y ago
  Basic tech needs to be redone. Assuming moderation can be automated using the recent advancements in AI
deleted 3y ago
[deleted]
hunter2_ 3y ago
I think a major component of the difference between contributing then and contributing now is friction/skill/interest. Back then, you had to be specifically interested in learning how to get connected, which was a niche endeavor, while the masses were oblivious or too cool for school. Now, you can simply join almost any online community using baseline skills that an enormous fraction of Earth's population already has. Artificially constructing a similar level of friction/gatekeeping would have major downsides that might not be worth it, but it could theoretically achieve a community that behaves as that past one did, if that's the goal. Sort of a CAPTCHA to prove you're not just a human, but a leet one. As others have said, HN achieves this in a way. Perhaps non-tech communities can do a similar thing. But educational materials to slowly penetrate the barrier must exist.
- ghaff 3y ago
  Yeah, it's not a technical thing. It's that the unwashed didn't have access/weren't even aware. Sure, you can do the same thing today given explicit gatekeeping and moderation.
  - hunter2_ 3y ago
    > weren't even aware I guess that aspect can't really be replicated anymore. Back when information moved slowly (in person, telephone, print) and broadcasts only included things with mass appeal (TV/radio ads, etc.) knowledge of a small but high quality community would remain tight for a long time, growing slowly. But the cat's out of the bag now: even the most obscure thing only needs to be posted in some place with tons of eyeballs (which simply could not occur at scale back in the day), if it's good it's upvoted to the top, and immediately it's no longer obscure.
- mirkules 3y ago
  I love this idea, but at the same time I think it is not feasible. Back then, there were no economic or even political benefits of being able to join an online community. These days, economic and political reasons are major driving factors of either controlling or infiltrating communities, so there will always be a cat-and-mouse game between insincere actors and moderators. This would be especially true on non-technical communities, although I have seen some pop up over Signal through word of mouth. On the technical side, it’s probably a lot easier to gatekeep, but even HN has degraded significantly since its early days. Lobster.rs is the only truly technical one that has kept that spirit (to this day I am still not a member, which kind of proves its gatekeeping abilities hah). p.s. love the username!
nvy 3y ago
>traffic was an order of magnitude lighter I think this is the elephant in the room that most "resurrect usenet" proposals ignore. Usenet hosting has coalesced around huge providers because the volume of binaries traffic presents a significant challenge, namely that you need beefy, expensive server infra to manage the traffic and retention. The "next big thing" after Reddit won't be a plain text-only service. HN and Tildes already serve this niche. So any proposal for USENET 2.0 must provide a treatment of the bandwidth/data retention issue.
- inferiorhuman 3y ago
  Perhaps, but HN only satiates the desire for a text-only forum for a pretty niche community. There are plenty of subreddits that don't really touch on anything tech related. Insofar as binary content goes, Supernews is still around and charges about $12/mo (they're currently running a half off promo). Sonic's ditched their NNTP servers as they move from being an ISP to a web provider, but back in the day they provided their own NNTP servers and included a Supernews subscription.
  - dylan604 3y ago
    I've been trying to remember Supernews all day since talking about it in another thread, but too busy to stop to look it up. Honestly, I'm shocked they have remained a thing.
- dylan604 3y ago
  Do the new-internet from Pied Piper. Everyone that uses the app "donates" space to the network with IPFS or something
  - nvy 3y ago
    What's my incentive to host someone's 5TB of pirated Community episodes?
    - dylan604 3y ago
dheera 3y ago
> where most of us trusted each other I think the "trust" back then was really just because only people with a certain amount of money could afford a computer and internet access. Most people on the internet at that time were middle class folk with proper day jobs, or in my case, a child of the aforementioned.
- indus 3y ago
  Data storage would be a big question and a design goal for something new and decentralized. Back then it was mostly text and files were much smaller. Now average image floating around is the size of a cheap USB stick.
  - meltedcapacitor 3y ago
    A "usenet 2.0" that only does (short) text and links/embeddings for media (to youtube etc) would already be a very useful thing, notwithstanding the risk of take-down of controversial media (freeloading on Big Tech infra for the 99.9% that isn't).
    - rainonmoon 3y ago
      Is this not just the existing decentralised social networks etc?
e40 3y ago
There was spam, for sure. There were also "kill files" for readers, which were immensely helpful in removing trolls from your stream. And there were some epic trolls, back in the day. Xah Lee comes to mind. He actually has an interesting website ( http://xahlee.info/ http://xahlee.info/ ), which I found recently when searching for a solution to an elisp problem. Yes, he was a troll on comp.lang.lisp.
- JohnFen 3y ago
  Killfiles were a wonderful (if imperfect) thing. They basically let everyone be their own personal moderator.
- dn3500 3y ago
  Usenet started in 1980 and the first spam didn't appear until 1994.
  - kristopolous 3y ago
    Right when the commercialization of the internet was permitted. The fact that we did that in the heydays of neoliberalism so we fumbled the ball into this current trainwreck will probably be part of the history in books written 200 years from now
    - Hyolobrika 3y ago
      How would you forbid it?
      - dsr_ 3y ago
        You make it socially unacceptable to run a server that emits spam. You make it socially unacceptable to work for a company that emits spam. At an interview: "OK, I see you worked for an oil company, right, and then a porn company, fine -- oh, you worked for a spammer. Sorry, we're done. I don't know how this happened, I'll need to talk to HR about their filters."
myself248 3y ago
The costs of transporting Usenet weren't zero, they were simply borne by your ISP because it was understood as a necessary part of internet access. I think that's what we're missing here. If we simply paid for this stuff as part of our regular internet bill again, we could solve a lot of the "nothing works for free" problems.
- SllX 3y ago
  Then we would be subject to the moderation policy’s of our ISPs. No thanks. It is way easier for me to create and delete an account at any number of websites than it is for me to change ISPs; and I don’t need any bill on my internet bill when I can just Apple Pay for whatever.
  - u801e 3y ago
    > Then we would be subject to the moderation policy’s of our ISPs. ISPs are a common carrier and never really moderated the content of newsgroups on usenet. > I don’t need any bill on my internet bill I'm billed monthly for internet access and have had this arrangement with multiple companies over the last 30 years. That bill used to include a ISP email account and usenet access. Now it doesn't.
    - SllX 3y ago
      > ISPs are a common carrier and never really moderated the content of newsgroups on usenet. Strictly speaking that’s not entirely true. 1. They could choose which newsgroups to provide access to as part of their USENET access service. 2. USENET or a modern-day like-service as a separate billable item would not necessarily be subject to the same common carrier provisions that broadband service providers were subject to when they were regulated under Title II of the 1934 Communications Act. 3. This rule was also repealed under the Trump administration and broadband service providers are once again regulated under Title I, which is to say they are not classified as common carriers. Even if it hadn’t been or if they were to be reclassified under Title II, see point 2. I did try to see if this did change under the Biden administration but I have not heard of such a change nor could I find one. 4. ISPs previously did not have the same incentive structure, and were dealing with a different market and legal environment prior to 2002. The truth is, USENET at the scale of Reddit could not exist without good moderation. It would be untenable for all the reasons unmoderated forums are untenable, and also too unappealing to develop a Reddit-sized mass. The mods, for all the issues with Reddit’s mod community, are what make Reddit possible to continue to exist. You would need similar for any Internet social forum of a similar size, scope and user base and if that’s not the goal, plenty of niche forums already exist that you don’t need to get through your ISP. > I'm billed monthly for internet access and have had this arrangement with multiple companies over the last 30 years. That bill used to include a ISP email account and usenet access. Now it doesn't. Perhaps you misunderstood me. I don’t have an issue with the billing arrangements I have with my ISP. I have an issue with the idea of getting billed for non-internet access services (read: content) through my ISP as a means of paying for them. In an age of pervasive payment tech like Apple Pay, I want a direct billing relationship with my service providers, not a stack of line items on my internet bill. Put another way, I’m saying it is simply an unappealing arrangement when there are superior alternatives. I do still have the ISP-provided email address though, completely unused for the last 15 years and if they ever billed me separately for it, it would be terminated instantly.
A4ET8a8uTh0 3y ago
I think I agree. There has to be a cost. I cuts down spam and raises a cost for mildly the mildly annoying. What if, and this is based on the principle of making it cost something, crypto got incorporated into the idea effectively forcing one to pay to send a message on a given forum. Hardly perfect, but with one of the anonymous coins it might not be a bad balance ( assuming we can get past the current slew of news that battered crypto ).
- elwebmaster 3y ago
  I am not a crypto fanboy but I fully agree that crypto is as close a solution as we have today. Some degree of elitism is needed to keep the community safe and self-moderating. How about a crypto platform where you pay to post but also pay to subscribe? The economics of it need to be worked out but it can’t really be a one way street or only advertisers will send messages. If my post helps you then you should pay me, but if my post wants you to help me then I should pay you.
  - A4ET8a8uTh0 3y ago
    I wonder. In a sense, it would be a replication of the current follower system, but with money following it more directly ( the bigger the forum, the more admin would be paid; and each member would have some skin in the game and a cost associated with each post likely reducing unnecessary behavior ). Like you said, the economic details need to be hammered out, but maybe it does not sound as ridiculous as it did not that long ago.
routerl 3y ago
Even within Usenet, this was readily acknowledged [0]. The forums and social media that followed were, in part, trying to solve exactly these problems. I genuinely think that the current inheritors of Usenet are private group chats; trust based, relatively small groups. [0] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eternal_September https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eternal_September
tannhaeuser 3y ago
> spam was unheard of Eh, not exactly ;) There was (and probably still is where needed) an elaborate system of killfiles being exchanged among trusted nntp servers. Also, you might want to look up the origin of the word spam: > The first time that the word ‘spam’ was used in this sense actually arose from an innocent-enough affair. In 1993, Usenet administrator Richard Depew was responding to a discussion group, but he accidentally posted 200 duplicate responses to the board. (from https://www.mailcleaner.net/blog/spam-world-news/whats-the-origin-of-the-word-spam/ https://www.mailcleaner.net/blog/spam-world-news/whats-the-o...)
- birdyrooster 3y ago
  your winking smiley face is condescending and annoying edit: this psa brought to you by drinking half a beer
- riceart 3y ago
  Eh, I think the person you’re replying to would assert that Usenet thrived prior to 1993. We don’t need a lesson about eternal September either.
- mgerdts 3y ago
  Before 1994 usenet had trolls but what we recognize as spam today was all but unheard of. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_email_spam https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_email_spam In my .edu world the most annoying part of email was “chain mail” in which each recipient was threatened with bad luck or similar if they didn’t forward it on to three others. Email loops caused by .forward files were fun too.
B1FF_PSUVM 3y ago
> spam was unheard of Spam started on Usenet: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Laurence_Canter_and_Martha_Siegel https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Laurence_Canter_and_Martha_Sie... There's always these bright eyed and bushy tailed asses who can spot a clean pond to shit in. Make a buck making everyone else's life worse, tough shit. What are you going to do about it?
throwaway81523 3y ago
Usenet had moderation schemes that weren't widely used, but that worked well in the groups that used them. I remember a system called STUMP though I don't remember what it stood for. Basically posts had to be approved by moderators using PGP signatures, and I think there might have been a CA-like scheme for moderators to delegate moderation authority. It seemed well designed and generalizeable, but it was near the tail end of Usenet's heyday, so it didn't catch on much. Added: to expand, Usenet was and is mostly unmoderated. There were a few groups that wanted or needed moderation, and for those, workable methods came into existence. Mostly, anonymity is good: https://wakaba.c3.cx/shii/shiichan https://wakaba.c3.cx/shii/shiichan
ozr 3y ago
Enable blocking users and don't surface random content. That's all you really need. Everything else is either a waste of time or infantile moralizing.
seanhunter 3y ago
This. I loved usenet, but when the spam started, that was the harbinger of doom. Maintaining communities costs time and effort as well as servers and bandwidth. Given the thankless task of fighting the onslaught of spam, trolls, raids, organized information ops etc it's not viable as a volunteer exercise in general. It can be done by mutual cooperation and self-policing on a small scale in isolated groups of like-minded folks but en mass the incentive to ruin the commons for everyone else will always be too strong for some folks.
tomjen3 3y ago
I think it can be possible, but only as a closed community of people who have all been vetted first and who, most importantly, can be can be banned for bad behaviour. Setting up such a network might be profitabel (lots of people spend quite a bit of money networking), but it is also going to be very expensive and you are going to get a lot of negative press from people whom you didn't accept and from people who will point out that you are discriminating against certain groups because your user demographics over or underrepresents certain groups. It is never a nice job to be the one who has to man the walls, and it is not glamorous, but no Constantinople without the Theodosian Walls.
- devilbunny 3y ago
  Usenet worked fairly well when you could really only get there by knowing someone. No commercial ISPs, so if you got banned, you really could face penalties at your university (I know because I was a witness at a student trial involving doing things they shouldn't on the Internet - not Usenet specifically - and while it was in no way criminal, the students were sanctioned). And you couldn't just open up a new email account with a new provider and ISP five minutes later.
ulfw 3y ago
You haven't used Usenet mate if you think "spam was unheard of". Honestly.
- joezydeco 3y ago
  The Green Card spam was considered the start of Usenet spam, and that was 1994. I was on Usenet for a good 7-8 years before that. Things were different back then.
crabbone 3y ago
> for free Wasn't that sort of included in your Internet subscription? Even if not, why not use the same model as Internet subscription, where the payment comes from the fee you pay to your ISP? This would also make it easy for governments / donors to sponsor participation in such groups as they wouldn't have to hunt down individuals to provide them with a tiny amount of money, rather they could compensate ISPs directly. A lot of ISPs are trying to make some extra $ by selling all sorts of junk, like anti-virus or w/e. Sure they wouldn't be opposed to sell an extra service, should it become popular enough.
thumbuddy 3y ago
The internet is a lot like our planet. Humans are actively working to destroy it for their own short term gains. The only way to defend against that kind of behaviour requires energy, time, and inevitably the abstraction that represents those things - money.
nborwankar 3y ago
Nothing was ever free. Even Usenet. Universities and Internet savvy corporations ran Usenet servers. That’s why it was free to the rest of us. I tried running a Usenet node in 1995 or so on a 486/33 getting a feed from UC Berkeley. Had to learn quickly about expiring posts and groups. Could not buy enough disk to keep up but it was fun and exciting in a stressful way for the few months it lasted. Server<->Server communication requires technical chops to manage attacks at different levels of the protocol stack. So very few or no individuals today can run “news” servers. But organizations - that is entirely still possible. Most likely universities and companies that you might see represented at IETF meetings and protocol working groups. Other than recreating the old Usenet, there is also the possibility of localized wireless (including LoRaWAN) communications networks. These could optional gateway to a global backbone even a UUCP-like store and forward one. IMHO, the challenges are at least two fold - how to marshal the resources to sustain such a network and how to make it resilient against hostile attacks/deliberate blockage by gatekeeping

b33j0r 3y ago

I fear you might be right. But somehow, HN is a counter-example? I rarely even see a bad joke, because we’re a self-selected sample of people who care about the edges of professional computing. So I say, why not?

skrause 3y ago
HN has a lot more powerful and strict moderation than Usenet ever had.
- BSEdlMMldESB 3y ago
  HN has shadowbanning, sockpuppets, etc... all the goodies that have been privately demonstrated to work, and work well; and most of those work even better when combined with a pretense of 'not having that here'
  - Hyolobrika 3y ago
    That is disgusting.
cmpalmer52 3y ago
The average person has no idea what 90% of the headlines on HN are even referring to, giving it a degree of self-moderation.
- _x14i 3y ago
  And the average person also doesn't know the website exists. You have a few layers of public knowledge: Twitter, Facebook, etc - everyone knows them. Reddit, Discord HN, presumably other domain-specific forums, IRC Fediverse (though less so as of late), lobste.rs, presumably many that I don't know about!
  - dylan604 3y ago
    >And the average person also doesn't know the website exists. Taking the larger number of people outside of the US that only use mobile devices and only use apps like FB, WhatsApp, or others I'm not familiar with, I'd go so far as saying that the average person doesn't know websites exist. If it's not present to them via an app, could they find an actual website (or at least would they even attempt to)?
  - sumedh 3y ago
    How do I get an invite to lobste.rs
    - deleted 3y ago
      [deleted]
joezydeco 3y ago
IMO the key adavantage HN/Reddit has over Usenet is the upvoting/downvoting, which is a clever form of self-moderation. Doesn't work in all cases but the less useful comments and posts never rise to the top.

dragontamer 3y ago

Except Reddit moderators deal with these spam issues all the time. Hacker News is run by herculean efforts by the moderation team here, and I appreciate it. I'm ignorant of what their tools are, but I don't think that scales either. Its good for our community, but Hacker News will never be Reddit or Twitter scale. Reddit's model is that moderators basically complain to the Admins that tools are insufficient, then admins mostly ignore those complaints. Moderators write bots that automatically surf traffic and try to automate... then the Admins come back and increase the price of API-access by 1000%, and then change the API and overall become hostile to this behavior. This cannot work either. ---------- At least in Usenet days, we could run our own programs in an open source model for these moderation issues. I don't think Usenet would work. We need a way to rewind time (Usenet: once you post or once something passes moderation, it is forever more sent to everyone else's inbox). USENET was POP model, to put into email terms... while Reddit is IMAP/JMAP model, where the true state of the information is centralized to the server. So yes, I agree with you that USENET will fail today. But the nuances of why it will fail are important to understand. In particular: Reddit was never very good about these moderation issues. But with enough work and grit, the community came together anyway. That's good enough. I expect that USENET's moderation model is sufficient, albeit decades old. Its all the other USENET crap that won't work today (being a "POP"-like message distribution platform without any "takebacks", so no editing posts, no deleting porn that got past the spam filter, etc. etc.) ---------- Or maybe... USENET works with regards to API access. The *ARCHIVE* (ie: Google Groups, or Deja News if you're old enough to remember that) is where takebacks / edits can live instead. So maybe Usenet can work, but with changes to our workflow to be more akin to 2023-level of features. By separating concerns over USENET (ie: how messages are distributed among a decentralized list of servers), and "The Archive" (which needs to be run by a trusted set of administrators), and a system where moderators will have access to "The Archive" for their own moderation purposes, we can rebuild Reddit through USENET?? Hmmm... it could work. Though I'm curious if it has much benefits over Mastodon or other solutions available today.

indus 3y ago
Basic tech needs to be redone. Assuming moderation can be automated using the recent advancements in AI

deleted 3y ago

[deleted]

hunter2_ 3y ago

I think a major component of the difference between contributing then and contributing now is friction/skill/interest. Back then, you had to be specifically interested in learning how to get connected, which was a niche endeavor, while the masses were oblivious or too cool for school. Now, you can simply join almost any online community using baseline skills that an enormous fraction of Earth's population already has. Artificially constructing a similar level of friction/gatekeeping would have major downsides that might not be worth it, but it could theoretically achieve a community that behaves as that past one did, if that's the goal. Sort of a CAPTCHA to prove you're not just a human, but a leet one. As others have said, HN achieves this in a way. Perhaps non-tech communities can do a similar thing. But educational materials to slowly penetrate the barrier must exist.

ghaff 3y ago
Yeah, it's not a technical thing. It's that the unwashed didn't have access/weren't even aware. Sure, you can do the same thing today given explicit gatekeeping and moderation.
- hunter2_ 3y ago
  > weren't even aware I guess that aspect can't really be replicated anymore. Back when information moved slowly (in person, telephone, print) and broadcasts only included things with mass appeal (TV/radio ads, etc.) knowledge of a small but high quality community would remain tight for a long time, growing slowly. But the cat's out of the bag now: even the most obscure thing only needs to be posted in some place with tons of eyeballs (which simply could not occur at scale back in the day), if it's good it's upvoted to the top, and immediately it's no longer obscure.
mirkules 3y ago
I love this idea, but at the same time I think it is not feasible. Back then, there were no economic or even political benefits of being able to join an online community. These days, economic and political reasons are major driving factors of either controlling or infiltrating communities, so there will always be a cat-and-mouse game between insincere actors and moderators. This would be especially true on non-technical communities, although I have seen some pop up over Signal through word of mouth. On the technical side, it’s probably a lot easier to gatekeep, but even HN has degraded significantly since its early days. Lobster.rs is the only truly technical one that has kept that spirit (to this day I am still not a member, which kind of proves its gatekeeping abilities hah). p.s. love the username!

nvy 3y ago

>traffic was an order of magnitude lighter I think this is the elephant in the room that most "resurrect usenet" proposals ignore. Usenet hosting has coalesced around huge providers because the volume of binaries traffic presents a significant challenge, namely that you need beefy, expensive server infra to manage the traffic and retention. The "next big thing" after Reddit won't be a plain text-only service. HN and Tildes already serve this niche. So any proposal for USENET 2.0 must provide a treatment of the bandwidth/data retention issue.

inferiorhuman 3y ago
Perhaps, but HN only satiates the desire for a text-only forum for a pretty niche community. There are plenty of subreddits that don't really touch on anything tech related. Insofar as binary content goes, Supernews is still around and charges about $12/mo (they're currently running a half off promo). Sonic's ditched their NNTP servers as they move from being an ISP to a web provider, but back in the day they provided their own NNTP servers and included a Supernews subscription.
- dylan604 3y ago
  I've been trying to remember Supernews all day since talking about it in another thread, but too busy to stop to look it up. Honestly, I'm shocked they have remained a thing.
dylan604 3y ago
Do the new-internet from Pied Piper. Everyone that uses the app "donates" space to the network with IPFS or something
- nvy 3y ago
  What's my incentive to host someone's 5TB of pirated Community episodes?
  - dylan604 3y ago

dheera 3y ago

> where most of us trusted each other I think the "trust" back then was really just because only people with a certain amount of money could afford a computer and internet access. Most people on the internet at that time were middle class folk with proper day jobs, or in my case, a child of the aforementioned.

indus 3y ago
Data storage would be a big question and a design goal for something new and decentralized. Back then it was mostly text and files were much smaller. Now average image floating around is the size of a cheap USB stick.
- meltedcapacitor 3y ago
  A "usenet 2.0" that only does (short) text and links/embeddings for media (to youtube etc) would already be a very useful thing, notwithstanding the risk of take-down of controversial media (freeloading on Big Tech infra for the 99.9% that isn't).
  - rainonmoon 3y ago
    Is this not just the existing decentralised social networks etc?

e40 3y ago

There was spam, for sure. There were also "kill files" for readers, which were immensely helpful in removing trolls from your stream. And there were some epic trolls, back in the day. Xah Lee comes to mind. He actually has an interesting website ( http://xahlee.info/ http://xahlee.info/ ), which I found recently when searching for a solution to an elisp problem. Yes, he was a troll on comp.lang.lisp.

JohnFen 3y ago
Killfiles were a wonderful (if imperfect) thing. They basically let everyone be their own personal moderator.
dn3500 3y ago
Usenet started in 1980 and the first spam didn't appear until 1994.
- kristopolous 3y ago
  Right when the commercialization of the internet was permitted. The fact that we did that in the heydays of neoliberalism so we fumbled the ball into this current trainwreck will probably be part of the history in books written 200 years from now
  - Hyolobrika 3y ago
    How would you forbid it?
    - dsr_ 3y ago
      You make it socially unacceptable to run a server that emits spam. You make it socially unacceptable to work for a company that emits spam. At an interview: "OK, I see you worked for an oil company, right, and then a porn company, fine -- oh, you worked for a spammer. Sorry, we're done. I don't know how this happened, I'll need to talk to HR about their filters."

myself248 3y ago

The costs of transporting Usenet weren't zero, they were simply borne by your ISP because it was understood as a necessary part of internet access. I think that's what we're missing here. If we simply paid for this stuff as part of our regular internet bill again, we could solve a lot of the "nothing works for free" problems.

SllX 3y ago
Then we would be subject to the moderation policy’s of our ISPs. No thanks. It is way easier for me to create and delete an account at any number of websites than it is for me to change ISPs; and I don’t need any bill on my internet bill when I can just Apple Pay for whatever.
- u801e 3y ago
  > Then we would be subject to the moderation policy’s of our ISPs. ISPs are a common carrier and never really moderated the content of newsgroups on usenet. > I don’t need any bill on my internet bill I'm billed monthly for internet access and have had this arrangement with multiple companies over the last 30 years. That bill used to include a ISP email account and usenet access. Now it doesn't.
  - SllX 3y ago
    > ISPs are a common carrier and never really moderated the content of newsgroups on usenet. Strictly speaking that’s not entirely true. 1. They could choose which newsgroups to provide access to as part of their USENET access service. 2. USENET or a modern-day like-service as a separate billable item would not necessarily be subject to the same common carrier provisions that broadband service providers were subject to when they were regulated under Title II of the 1934 Communications Act. 3. This rule was also repealed under the Trump administration and broadband service providers are once again regulated under Title I, which is to say they are not classified as common carriers. Even if it hadn’t been or if they were to be reclassified under Title II, see point 2. I did try to see if this did change under the Biden administration but I have not heard of such a change nor could I find one. 4. ISPs previously did not have the same incentive structure, and were dealing with a different market and legal environment prior to 2002. The truth is, USENET at the scale of Reddit could not exist without good moderation. It would be untenable for all the reasons unmoderated forums are untenable, and also too unappealing to develop a Reddit-sized mass. The mods, for all the issues with Reddit’s mod community, are what make Reddit possible to continue to exist. You would need similar for any Internet social forum of a similar size, scope and user base and if that’s not the goal, plenty of niche forums already exist that you don’t need to get through your ISP. > I'm billed monthly for internet access and have had this arrangement with multiple companies over the last 30 years. That bill used to include a ISP email account and usenet access. Now it doesn't. Perhaps you misunderstood me. I don’t have an issue with the billing arrangements I have with my ISP. I have an issue with the idea of getting billed for non-internet access services (read: content) through my ISP as a means of paying for them. In an age of pervasive payment tech like Apple Pay, I want a direct billing relationship with my service providers, not a stack of line items on my internet bill. Put another way, I’m saying it is simply an unappealing arrangement when there are superior alternatives. I do still have the ISP-provided email address though, completely unused for the last 15 years and if they ever billed me separately for it, it would be terminated instantly.

A4ET8a8uTh0 3y ago

I think I agree. There has to be a cost. I cuts down spam and raises a cost for mildly the mildly annoying. What if, and this is based on the principle of making it cost something, crypto got incorporated into the idea effectively forcing one to pay to send a message on a given forum. Hardly perfect, but with one of the anonymous coins it might not be a bad balance ( assuming we can get past the current slew of news that battered crypto ).

elwebmaster 3y ago
I am not a crypto fanboy but I fully agree that crypto is as close a solution as we have today. Some degree of elitism is needed to keep the community safe and self-moderating. How about a crypto platform where you pay to post but also pay to subscribe? The economics of it need to be worked out but it can’t really be a one way street or only advertisers will send messages. If my post helps you then you should pay me, but if my post wants you to help me then I should pay you.
- A4ET8a8uTh0 3y ago
  I wonder. In a sense, it would be a replication of the current follower system, but with money following it more directly ( the bigger the forum, the more admin would be paid; and each member would have some skin in the game and a cost associated with each post likely reducing unnecessary behavior ). Like you said, the economic details need to be hammered out, but maybe it does not sound as ridiculous as it did not that long ago.

routerl 3y ago

Even within Usenet, this was readily acknowledged [0]. The forums and social media that followed were, in part, trying to solve exactly these problems. I genuinely think that the current inheritors of Usenet are private group chats; trust based, relatively small groups. [0] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eternal_September https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eternal_September

tannhaeuser 3y ago

> spam was unheard of Eh, not exactly ;) There was (and probably still is where needed) an elaborate system of killfiles being exchanged among trusted nntp servers. Also, you might want to look up the origin of the word spam: > The first time that the word ‘spam’ was used in this sense actually arose from an innocent-enough affair. In 1993, Usenet administrator Richard Depew was responding to a discussion group, but he accidentally posted 200 duplicate responses to the board. (from https://www.mailcleaner.net/blog/spam-world-news/whats-the-origin-of-the-word-spam/ https://www.mailcleaner.net/blog/spam-world-news/whats-the-o...)

birdyrooster 3y ago
your winking smiley face is condescending and annoying edit: this psa brought to you by drinking half a beer
riceart 3y ago
Eh, I think the person you’re replying to would assert that Usenet thrived prior to 1993. We don’t need a lesson about eternal September either.
mgerdts 3y ago
Before 1994 usenet had trolls but what we recognize as spam today was all but unheard of. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_email_spam https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_email_spam In my .edu world the most annoying part of email was “chain mail” in which each recipient was threatened with bad luck or similar if they didn’t forward it on to three others. Email loops caused by .forward files were fun too.

B1FF_PSUVM 3y ago

> spam was unheard of Spam started on Usenet: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Laurence_Canter_and_Martha_Siegel https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Laurence_Canter_and_Martha_Sie... There's always these bright eyed and bushy tailed asses who can spot a clean pond to shit in. Make a buck making everyone else's life worse, tough shit. What are you going to do about it?

throwaway81523 3y ago

Usenet had moderation schemes that weren't widely used, but that worked well in the groups that used them. I remember a system called STUMP though I don't remember what it stood for. Basically posts had to be approved by moderators using PGP signatures, and I think there might have been a CA-like scheme for moderators to delegate moderation authority. It seemed well designed and generalizeable, but it was near the tail end of Usenet's heyday, so it didn't catch on much. Added: to expand, Usenet was and is mostly unmoderated. There were a few groups that wanted or needed moderation, and for those, workable methods came into existence. Mostly, anonymity is good: https://wakaba.c3.cx/shii/shiichan https://wakaba.c3.cx/shii/shiichan

ozr 3y ago

Enable blocking users and don't surface random content. That's all you really need. Everything else is either a waste of time or infantile moralizing.

seanhunter 3y ago

This. I loved usenet, but when the spam started, that was the harbinger of doom. Maintaining communities costs time and effort as well as servers and bandwidth. Given the thankless task of fighting the onslaught of spam, trolls, raids, organized information ops etc it's not viable as a volunteer exercise in general. It can be done by mutual cooperation and self-policing on a small scale in isolated groups of like-minded folks but en mass the incentive to ruin the commons for everyone else will always be too strong for some folks.

tomjen3 3y ago

I think it can be possible, but only as a closed community of people who have all been vetted first and who, most importantly, can be can be banned for bad behaviour. Setting up such a network might be profitabel (lots of people spend quite a bit of money networking), but it is also going to be very expensive and you are going to get a lot of negative press from people whom you didn't accept and from people who will point out that you are discriminating against certain groups because your user demographics over or underrepresents certain groups. It is never a nice job to be the one who has to man the walls, and it is not glamorous, but no Constantinople without the Theodosian Walls.

devilbunny 3y ago
Usenet worked fairly well when you could really only get there by knowing someone. No commercial ISPs, so if you got banned, you really could face penalties at your university (I know because I was a witness at a student trial involving doing things they shouldn't on the Internet - not Usenet specifically - and while it was in no way criminal, the students were sanctioned). And you couldn't just open up a new email account with a new provider and ISP five minutes later.

ulfw 3y ago

You haven't used Usenet mate if you think "spam was unheard of". Honestly.

joezydeco 3y ago
The Green Card spam was considered the start of Usenet spam, and that was 1994. I was on Usenet for a good 7-8 years before that. Things were different back then.

crabbone 3y ago

> for free Wasn't that sort of included in your Internet subscription? Even if not, why not use the same model as Internet subscription, where the payment comes from the fee you pay to your ISP? This would also make it easy for governments / donors to sponsor participation in such groups as they wouldn't have to hunt down individuals to provide them with a tiny amount of money, rather they could compensate ISPs directly. A lot of ISPs are trying to make some extra $ by selling all sorts of junk, like anti-virus or w/e. Sure they wouldn't be opposed to sell an extra service, should it become popular enough.

thumbuddy 3y ago

The internet is a lot like our planet. Humans are actively working to destroy it for their own short term gains. The only way to defend against that kind of behaviour requires energy, time, and inevitably the abstraction that represents those things - money.

nborwankar 3y ago

Nothing was ever free. Even Usenet. Universities and Internet savvy corporations ran Usenet servers. That’s why it was free to the rest of us. I tried running a Usenet node in 1995 or so on a 486/33 getting a feed from UC Berkeley. Had to learn quickly about expiring posts and groups. Could not buy enough disk to keep up but it was fun and exciting in a stressful way for the few months it lasted. Server<->Server communication requires technical chops to manage attacks at different levels of the protocol stack. So very few or no individuals today can run “news” servers. But organizations - that is entirely still possible. Most likely universities and companies that you might see represented at IETF meetings and protocol working groups. Other than recreating the old Usenet, there is also the possibility of localized wireless (including LoRaWAN) communications networks. These could optional gateway to a global backbone even a UUCP-like store and forward one. IMHO, the challenges are at least two fold - how to marshal the resources to sustain such a network and how to make it resilient against hostile attacks/deliberate blockage by gatekeeping