8 ms·

We are holding this discussion on a classic, centralized, web1.0 forum which - from my vantage point - is one of the most valuable and enriching forums currentl

by rsync 3y ago

We are holding this discussion on a classic, centralized, web1.0 forum which - from my vantage point - is one of the most valuable and enriching forums currently online. What's wrong with HN ? What's wrong with metafilter ? What's wrong with letsrun or doom9 ? The problem is the mistaken notion that these can be big businesses. If you can let go of the economics there is no technical - or usability - hurdle. We know this because we're already doing it right here.

Miraste 3y ago
There's nothing wrong with them, but reddit's size lets it gather a lot of extremely specific knowledge that, were all subreddits separate forums, would be lost. Sure, many of these communities are strong enough to run their own infrastructure, but more of them are not.
- PrimeMcFly 3y ago
  Before Reddit, almost immediately before, that's what Usenet was for. Google kind of ruined it by hijacking it with Groups, then Reddit took over. Weed need a decentralized equivalent to Usenet.
  - jjav 3y ago
    > Weed need a decentralized equivalent to Usenet. That is ... Usenet. That's exactly what Usenet is (not was, because it's still there, even if not many people use it. I still read it on many days.)
    - PrimeMcFly 3y ago
      It's not decentralized in the modern sense, and doesn't offer the functionality I would want from a modern decentralized solution.
      - jjav 3y ago
        What are those "modern" characteristics you seek? I'll note that everyone who has claimed to build a better email or better Usenet for the last 4 decades has invariably failed. So there's that. In the short term, it's very easy to build a more sleek and fancy communications platforms. Hundreds have been built and they can be nice for a while. All of them eventually fail due to the inherent limitation of proprietary profit-seeking closed systems. Of course I'm not claiming NNTP and Usenet are perfect. Sure we could tweak them for this and that improvements. But the fundamental principle of decentralized peer to peer distribution is the core strength. Without that, any solution will ultimately fail in the long run.
  - bsder 3y ago
    Usenet was decentralized, and Google (amazingly) didn't ruin it. Dejanews was the last man standing and they were going bankrupt. Nobody wanted to pony up. It's that simple. Nowadays, a bunch of people have gigabit to their house. Colo is $400/mo for a cabinet and gigabit. 3U servers are under $500 and probably under $200 if you dig. I can go on. You could resurrect Usenet easily, but nobody is doing it. Why? Because it's a pain in the ass. People forget that a lot of the early internet stuff relied on a bunch of people providing free labor (generally at universities) to keep it all afloat.
    - PrimeMcFly 3y ago
      Huh, I thought Groups was after Dejanews. Usenet was decentralized, but not in the current sense of the term IMO. When I think of 'decentralized', and what I meant, was something offering anonymity and resistance to takedown orders, which are things it didn't have real protection against. I think the free labor issue could be circumvented by users having their own killfiles, and a fediverse approach of only syncing with 'good' servers.
      - bsder 3y ago
        > Huh, I thought Groups was after Dejanews. Groups was contemporaneous with Dejanews. But Dejanews was basically going under when Google bought them. If it hadn't been for Google, Dejanews would have gone poof and we wouldn't have had any archiving of Usenet stuff at all.
  - janoc 3y ago
    Usenet was literally decentralized before this was even a buzzword.
    - PrimeMcFly 3y ago
      You're right. When I think of 'decentralized', and what I meant, was something offering anonymity and resistance to takedown orders, which are things it didn't have real protection against.
      - ilyt 3y ago
        And a way to fight spam. You don't want users to be too anonymous, else someone can just post bullshit with zero ways to fight it.
        PrimeMcFly 3y ago
        Well, we just need a way to have reputation, basically. It shouldn't be karma, but it needs to be something that doesn't require linking to a real life identity.
      - shagie 3y ago
        Anonymity isn't necessary desirable for the people running the servers - it means extra work for people attempting to moderate the content on their instance. There are numerous other discussions about why a lack of moderation is often a bad thing for people running the servers. Take down orders are resisted by having it sufficiently decentralized. It may be possible to take down one server, but taking down every server (even trying to take down every NNTP server in today's world) is a significant effort. Usenet is a perfectly acceptable decentralized system for sending messages to each other and the world. Stand one up with the groups that I'm interested in and I'll point my copy of trn at it.
        PrimeMcFly 3y ago
        Anonymity is key in the sense that it shouldn't require linking to a real life identity. The same way now I can sign up for reddit 'anonymously' for example. There should be some reputation, some kind of check the person is human, maybe other things, but there needs to be the freedom to post separate from a real life persona, without fear of being doxxed. For so many different reasons. Usenet, I think, has a strong hierarchy structure rather than just being a 'web', although it is that as well. So if the takedown order is directed at a server in high enough position, it is essentially removes it from all of Usenet - and it's not just takedown orders, but actors with the ability to remove content unilaterally. Usenet really isn't sufficient simply because of how old it is. We can do much better, and I believe there are already numerous superior systems that exist but simply have not been adopted yet, likely due to ease of use and/or lack of need, the former can be improved, and the latter will happen naturally.
  - bigbillheck 3y ago
    > almost immediately before Reddit didn't come along until 2005, and the way I remember it is by then usenet--binary groups aside--was was pretty much dead.
    - PrimeMcFly 3y ago
      I was definitely still using it in 2004, I'd be surprised if it were still entirely dead in 2005.
endisneigh 3y ago
You’re having this discussion on a marketing forum.
- shagie 3y ago
  From the ending of "A Group Is Its Own Worst Enemy" (discussed most recently at https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35855988 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35855988 ) > The people using your software, even if you own it and pay for it, have rights and will behave as if they have rights. And if you abrogate those rights, you’ll hear about it very quickly. > That’s part of the problem that the John Hegel theory of community—“community leads to content, which leads to commerce”—never worked. Because lo and behold, no matter who came onto the Clairol chat boards, they sometimes wanted to talk about things that weren’t Clairol products. > “But we paid for this! This is the Clairol site!” say the sponsors. Doesn’t matter. The users are there for one another. They may be there on hardware and software paid for by you, but the users are there for one another.
  - pessimizer 3y ago
    I don't understand what this is for. The result of the forum not serving its purpose for Clairol is that Clairol destroys the community, deletes every conversation ever had on it, and the people who participated on it never speak to each other again. Forum members only have "rights" under some definition of rights where they grant you absolutely nothing.
- krapp 3y ago
  It's wild how many things Hacker News is the exception to, just because it has that quirky 90's charm.
CPLX 3y ago
HN would not fit into any definition of centralized discussion forums I would use. To my mind HN is in that classic genre of single focus communities with a deep history of being the place to go to discuss topic X. It fits in next to sites like flyertalk, woodweb, bodybuilding.com and a million more. I think the web was definitely better when every topic had its own little community and if Reddit imploded tomorrow and that happened again I would be thrilled.
- kevin_thibedeau 3y ago
  HN is centralized. It all sits on one server run without a declared public mandate of openness like Wikipedia. A decentralized fora would be Usenet which is designed as a federation of independent servers storing and exchanging data.
  - CPLX 3y ago
    I understand the technical point being made but it seems to be missing the point. Why isn’t it good enough to have a whole bunch of idiosyncratic privately run discussion forum communities spread across many different websites and servers and so on? We had that before Reddit and many examples still exist, it seems like it was closer to the ideal than Usenet ever was.
    - kevin_thibedeau 3y ago
      Because such systems are brittle. Bespoke forums disappear and their archival status may be incomplete or hard to search. We have nearly all of Usenet preserved in multiple places.
  - gman83 3y ago
    I think something like Wikipedia could potentially be a decent model for an centralized but open version of reddit. Have donation drives to keep the servers running once a year, and have something like the five pillars & an open license to ensure the project won't be rug pulled from the community. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Five_pillars https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Five_pillars
nkozyra 3y ago
Well a decentralized forum network doesn't preclude people participating solely in their favorite nodes. Hard to let go of concepts like FIDONet from decades ago. There was merit there, just not enough technology to do it right then. If it's more of a protocol like IRC or Usenet, it could work very well for both small and large communities. I think mastodons biggest mistake is pigeonholing a Twitter replacement.
justsomehnguy 3y ago
> What's wrong with HN Can't buy ads for a hot... single AI farms in your area.
edgyquant 3y ago
Hacker News is in the same camp as any of the big platforms-it’s entirely subsidized by a billionaire VC or it would not exist the way it does.
- jjav 3y ago
  > Hacker News is in the same camp as any of the big platforms-it’s entirely subsidized by a billionaire VC or it would not exist the way it does. Do you know the operating costs of HN? How can you judge it takes a billionaire to subsidize it?
  - edgyquant 3y ago
    It’s literally a pet project of Paul Graham, a billionaire. That was my point.
    - jjav 3y ago
      That's not really relevant. The question is how much are the operating costs to run it? I know it doesn't take a billionaire. I can't find it right now but I remember some of the infrastructure details have been posted in the past and it was quite minimal. It doesn't take much to run an efficient site like this one.
      - edgyquant 3y ago
        That was your question and not related to the point though. They don’t matter, HN is what it is because a well connected rich person pays for it out of pocket and associates his giant seed fund with it.
      - deleted 3y ago
        [deleted]
      - jazzyjackson 3y ago
        Operating cost is nothing compared to bootstrapping cost. Paul had to go and create a whole VC firm just to bring everyone here together ;-P
pessimizer 3y ago
> The problem is the mistaken notion that these can be big businesses. HN isn't a business at all. It only loses money, and in return generates some sort of goodwill or authenticity for its owners, who are extraordinarily wealthy. All problems can be ignored if we can always rely on rich people to give us what we want.
- notatoad 3y ago
  and in this case, rich people who have become rich by driving exactly the sort of inexorable growth and commercialization that leads companies down the path reddit has taken.
- pcthrowaway 3y ago
  Respectfully, I think YCombinator is well aware that the benefit to them is greater than the cost of running Hacker News. In addition to Hacker News making them the most well known startup accelerator in the world, who people will apply to from all over the world, it also provides benefits for their incubees, as they get free advertising on Hacker News, and presumably this makes their investments more likely to succeed (although I'd love to see a comparison of the historic portfolios of various startup accelerators)
hayst4ck 3y ago
Hacker news is a platform ultimately subsidized by a billionaire. A billionaire is choosing to be a responsible owner/patron of this platform, but ultimately this platform answers to him. HN is a "good king" platform, our king has invested in public works that we benefit from and we appreciate it. Hacker news is good insofar as it accomplishes our kings goals which align with our own, but we still have a king, even if he is a benevolent one.
- jjav 3y ago
  > Hacker news is a platform ultimately subsidized by a billionaire. It doesn't take a billionaire, even if it happens to be the case. It would be fascinating if they wished to publish the operating costs, but even without that, IIRC the hardware was quite minimal.
  - zztop44 3y ago
    There are two full time moderators, who, as I understand it, have professional backgrounds and are paid accordingly. And I’d say HN was exceedingly lucky find these excellent moderators. Not sure you could replicate that success no matter how much cash you had to burn.
    - Gud 3y ago
      Many similar forums back in the day were all volunteer efforts. What is preventing HN from being run by a volunteer staff? Don’t get me wrong, I think HN is great the way it is, I just don’t think paid moderation is a requirement
      - elondaits 3y ago
        It doesn’t have to be volunteers. The organization running a forum can be a non-profit, and charge users for the maintenance costs. In the age of people paying to belong to a community via Patreon, Discord, Twitch, etc. it shouldn’t be hard. There’s a lot of road ahead in terms of learning how to develop transparent and Democratic online communities… but as the shitification of the internet becomes critical, it’s a necessity.
ilyt 3y ago
Well, there are fundamentally 2 problems here: * someone needs to pay for it * whoever is doing and managing that can turn bad and want more. How do you solve that to be immune to the reddit/stackoverflow disruption ? Even if it could be covered by donations it there is still problem of any inevitable management of it deciding to push it in direction different than community wishes. > We are holding this discussion on a classic, centralized, web1.0 forum which - from my vantage point - is one of the most valuable and enriching forums currently online. Not web 1.0. Usenet and mailing lists(mostly) died for that, as did many "traditional" forums. > We know this because we're already doing it right here. Ok, now look up who is paying for that.
- jjav 3y ago
  > someone needs to pay for it This is centralized thinking. In a decentralized open protocol system, everyone pays for their own way, but it's very cheap at an individual level. There's no central "it". > Not web 1.0. Usenet and mailing lists(mostly) died for that, as did many "traditional" forums. I'm on several email groups where I've been a participant since the very early 90s. Every so often there's the "oh have you seen this new shiny thing, let's move to that!" Every single one of those new shinies have disappeared, but the email group lives on. Why? Because email is 100% decentralized, nobody owns it, there's nothing to own. It's an open protocol. So it lives on forever. Also, I still read Usenet on most days, just like I've been doing since the late 80s. It's alive (if not very active) because nobody owns it. I wish we could collectively learn these lessons. Centralized systems cannot exist for very long.
  - ilyt 3y ago
    > This is centralized thinking. In a decentralized open protocol system, everyone pays for their own way, but it's very cheap at an individual level. There's no central "it" It is if you want to have central page for people to visit. Someone needs to pay for hosting that else you will have no users if everyone needs to host their bit > I'm on several email groups where I've been a participant since the very early 90s. Every so often there's the "oh have you seen this new shiny thing, let's move to that!" ...do you know how mailing lists work ? It's a central server that distributes it to the members. Pretty light one, sure, but it is still something someone have to host and manage. There is no "distributed mailing list" > Also, I still read Usenet on most days, just like I've been doing since the late 80s. It's alive (if not very active) because nobody owns it. Central servers managed by people again. Yeah they are federated but still rely on a bunch of institutions to throw some servers at it.
jjav 3y ago
> The problem is the mistaken notion that these can be big businesses. Exactly that. A community communicating can't be the huge profit center that a corporation needs it to be, without it being ruined. > We know this because we're already doing it right here. Exactly.
notatoad 3y ago
I’d argue that HN is the opposite of a centralized forum. This is what well-functioning decentralization looks like. HN is HN. It’s decentralized to the most extreme level: there are no blockchains or fediverse or protocols because there is no link at all to any other larger network of forums, other than hyperlinks. And there doesn’t need to be. Decentralize by making small, simple, isolated things. Not by making complicated interlinked things and trying to form a larger network. The larger network doesn’t necessarily have value.

by rsync 3y ago

Miraste 3y ago

There's nothing wrong with them, but reddit's size lets it gather a lot of extremely specific knowledge that, were all subreddits separate forums, would be lost. Sure, many of these communities are strong enough to run their own infrastructure, but more of them are not.

PrimeMcFly 3y ago
Before Reddit, almost immediately before, that's what Usenet was for. Google kind of ruined it by hijacking it with Groups, then Reddit took over. Weed need a decentralized equivalent to Usenet.
- jjav 3y ago
  > Weed need a decentralized equivalent to Usenet. That is ... Usenet. That's exactly what Usenet is (not was, because it's still there, even if not many people use it. I still read it on many days.)
  - PrimeMcFly 3y ago
    It's not decentralized in the modern sense, and doesn't offer the functionality I would want from a modern decentralized solution.
    - jjav 3y ago
      What are those "modern" characteristics you seek? I'll note that everyone who has claimed to build a better email or better Usenet for the last 4 decades has invariably failed. So there's that. In the short term, it's very easy to build a more sleek and fancy communications platforms. Hundreds have been built and they can be nice for a while. All of them eventually fail due to the inherent limitation of proprietary profit-seeking closed systems. Of course I'm not claiming NNTP and Usenet are perfect. Sure we could tweak them for this and that improvements. But the fundamental principle of decentralized peer to peer distribution is the core strength. Without that, any solution will ultimately fail in the long run.
- bsder 3y ago
  Usenet was decentralized, and Google (amazingly) didn't ruin it. Dejanews was the last man standing and they were going bankrupt. Nobody wanted to pony up. It's that simple. Nowadays, a bunch of people have gigabit to their house. Colo is $400/mo for a cabinet and gigabit. 3U servers are under $500 and probably under $200 if you dig. I can go on. You could resurrect Usenet easily, but nobody is doing it. Why? Because it's a pain in the ass. People forget that a lot of the early internet stuff relied on a bunch of people providing free labor (generally at universities) to keep it all afloat.
  - PrimeMcFly 3y ago
    Huh, I thought Groups was after Dejanews. Usenet was decentralized, but not in the current sense of the term IMO. When I think of 'decentralized', and what I meant, was something offering anonymity and resistance to takedown orders, which are things it didn't have real protection against. I think the free labor issue could be circumvented by users having their own killfiles, and a fediverse approach of only syncing with 'good' servers.
    - bsder 3y ago
      > Huh, I thought Groups was after Dejanews. Groups was contemporaneous with Dejanews. But Dejanews was basically going under when Google bought them. If it hadn't been for Google, Dejanews would have gone poof and we wouldn't have had any archiving of Usenet stuff at all.
- janoc 3y ago
  Usenet was literally decentralized before this was even a buzzword.
  - PrimeMcFly 3y ago
    You're right. When I think of 'decentralized', and what I meant, was something offering anonymity and resistance to takedown orders, which are things it didn't have real protection against.
    - ilyt 3y ago
      And a way to fight spam. You don't want users to be too anonymous, else someone can just post bullshit with zero ways to fight it.
      - PrimeMcFly 3y ago
        Well, we just need a way to have reputation, basically. It shouldn't be karma, but it needs to be something that doesn't require linking to a real life identity.
    - shagie 3y ago
      Anonymity isn't necessary desirable for the people running the servers - it means extra work for people attempting to moderate the content on their instance. There are numerous other discussions about why a lack of moderation is often a bad thing for people running the servers. Take down orders are resisted by having it sufficiently decentralized. It may be possible to take down one server, but taking down every server (even trying to take down every NNTP server in today's world) is a significant effort. Usenet is a perfectly acceptable decentralized system for sending messages to each other and the world. Stand one up with the groups that I'm interested in and I'll point my copy of trn at it.
      - PrimeMcFly 3y ago
        Anonymity is key in the sense that it shouldn't require linking to a real life identity. The same way now I can sign up for reddit 'anonymously' for example. There should be some reputation, some kind of check the person is human, maybe other things, but there needs to be the freedom to post separate from a real life persona, without fear of being doxxed. For so many different reasons. Usenet, I think, has a strong hierarchy structure rather than just being a 'web', although it is that as well. So if the takedown order is directed at a server in high enough position, it is essentially removes it from all of Usenet - and it's not just takedown orders, but actors with the ability to remove content unilaterally. Usenet really isn't sufficient simply because of how old it is. We can do much better, and I believe there are already numerous superior systems that exist but simply have not been adopted yet, likely due to ease of use and/or lack of need, the former can be improved, and the latter will happen naturally.
- bigbillheck 3y ago
  > almost immediately before Reddit didn't come along until 2005, and the way I remember it is by then usenet--binary groups aside--was was pretty much dead.
  - PrimeMcFly 3y ago
    I was definitely still using it in 2004, I'd be surprised if it were still entirely dead in 2005.

endisneigh 3y ago

You’re having this discussion on a marketing forum.

shagie 3y ago
From the ending of "A Group Is Its Own Worst Enemy" (discussed most recently at https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35855988 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35855988 ) > The people using your software, even if you own it and pay for it, have rights and will behave as if they have rights. And if you abrogate those rights, you’ll hear about it very quickly. > That’s part of the problem that the John Hegel theory of community—“community leads to content, which leads to commerce”—never worked. Because lo and behold, no matter who came onto the Clairol chat boards, they sometimes wanted to talk about things that weren’t Clairol products. > “But we paid for this! This is the Clairol site!” say the sponsors. Doesn’t matter. The users are there for one another. They may be there on hardware and software paid for by you, but the users are there for one another.
- pessimizer 3y ago
  I don't understand what this is for. The result of the forum not serving its purpose for Clairol is that Clairol destroys the community, deletes every conversation ever had on it, and the people who participated on it never speak to each other again. Forum members only have "rights" under some definition of rights where they grant you absolutely nothing.
krapp 3y ago
It's wild how many things Hacker News is the exception to, just because it has that quirky 90's charm.

CPLX 3y ago

HN would not fit into any definition of centralized discussion forums I would use. To my mind HN is in that classic genre of single focus communities with a deep history of being the place to go to discuss topic X. It fits in next to sites like flyertalk, woodweb, bodybuilding.com and a million more. I think the web was definitely better when every topic had its own little community and if Reddit imploded tomorrow and that happened again I would be thrilled.

kevin_thibedeau 3y ago
HN is centralized. It all sits on one server run without a declared public mandate of openness like Wikipedia. A decentralized fora would be Usenet which is designed as a federation of independent servers storing and exchanging data.
- CPLX 3y ago
  I understand the technical point being made but it seems to be missing the point. Why isn’t it good enough to have a whole bunch of idiosyncratic privately run discussion forum communities spread across many different websites and servers and so on? We had that before Reddit and many examples still exist, it seems like it was closer to the ideal than Usenet ever was.
  - kevin_thibedeau 3y ago
    Because such systems are brittle. Bespoke forums disappear and their archival status may be incomplete or hard to search. We have nearly all of Usenet preserved in multiple places.
- gman83 3y ago
  I think something like Wikipedia could potentially be a decent model for an centralized but open version of reddit. Have donation drives to keep the servers running once a year, and have something like the five pillars & an open license to ensure the project won't be rug pulled from the community. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Five_pillars https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Five_pillars

nkozyra 3y ago

Well a decentralized forum network doesn't preclude people participating solely in their favorite nodes. Hard to let go of concepts like FIDONet from decades ago. There was merit there, just not enough technology to do it right then. If it's more of a protocol like IRC or Usenet, it could work very well for both small and large communities. I think mastodons biggest mistake is pigeonholing a Twitter replacement.

justsomehnguy 3y ago

> What's wrong with HN Can't buy ads for a hot... single AI farms in your area.

edgyquant 3y ago

Hacker News is in the same camp as any of the big platforms-it’s entirely subsidized by a billionaire VC or it would not exist the way it does.

jjav 3y ago
> Hacker News is in the same camp as any of the big platforms-it’s entirely subsidized by a billionaire VC or it would not exist the way it does. Do you know the operating costs of HN? How can you judge it takes a billionaire to subsidize it?
- edgyquant 3y ago
  It’s literally a pet project of Paul Graham, a billionaire. That was my point.
  - jjav 3y ago
    That's not really relevant. The question is how much are the operating costs to run it? I know it doesn't take a billionaire. I can't find it right now but I remember some of the infrastructure details have been posted in the past and it was quite minimal. It doesn't take much to run an efficient site like this one.
    - edgyquant 3y ago
      That was your question and not related to the point though. They don’t matter, HN is what it is because a well connected rich person pays for it out of pocket and associates his giant seed fund with it.
    - deleted 3y ago
      [deleted]
    - jazzyjackson 3y ago
      Operating cost is nothing compared to bootstrapping cost. Paul had to go and create a whole VC firm just to bring everyone here together ;-P

pessimizer 3y ago

> The problem is the mistaken notion that these can be big businesses. HN isn't a business at all. It only loses money, and in return generates some sort of goodwill or authenticity for its owners, who are extraordinarily wealthy. All problems can be ignored if we can always rely on rich people to give us what we want.

notatoad 3y ago
and in this case, rich people who have become rich by driving exactly the sort of inexorable growth and commercialization that leads companies down the path reddit has taken.
pcthrowaway 3y ago
Respectfully, I think YCombinator is well aware that the benefit to them is greater than the cost of running Hacker News. In addition to Hacker News making them the most well known startup accelerator in the world, who people will apply to from all over the world, it also provides benefits for their incubees, as they get free advertising on Hacker News, and presumably this makes their investments more likely to succeed (although I'd love to see a comparison of the historic portfolios of various startup accelerators)

hayst4ck 3y ago

Hacker news is a platform ultimately subsidized by a billionaire. A billionaire is choosing to be a responsible owner/patron of this platform, but ultimately this platform answers to him. HN is a "good king" platform, our king has invested in public works that we benefit from and we appreciate it. Hacker news is good insofar as it accomplishes our kings goals which align with our own, but we still have a king, even if he is a benevolent one.

jjav 3y ago
> Hacker news is a platform ultimately subsidized by a billionaire. It doesn't take a billionaire, even if it happens to be the case. It would be fascinating if they wished to publish the operating costs, but even without that, IIRC the hardware was quite minimal.
- zztop44 3y ago
  There are two full time moderators, who, as I understand it, have professional backgrounds and are paid accordingly. And I’d say HN was exceedingly lucky find these excellent moderators. Not sure you could replicate that success no matter how much cash you had to burn.
  - Gud 3y ago
    Many similar forums back in the day were all volunteer efforts. What is preventing HN from being run by a volunteer staff? Don’t get me wrong, I think HN is great the way it is, I just don’t think paid moderation is a requirement
    - elondaits 3y ago
      It doesn’t have to be volunteers. The organization running a forum can be a non-profit, and charge users for the maintenance costs. In the age of people paying to belong to a community via Patreon, Discord, Twitch, etc. it shouldn’t be hard. There’s a lot of road ahead in terms of learning how to develop transparent and Democratic online communities… but as the shitification of the internet becomes critical, it’s a necessity.

ilyt 3y ago

Well, there are fundamentally 2 problems here: * someone needs to pay for it * whoever is doing and managing that can turn bad and want more. How do you solve that to be immune to the reddit/stackoverflow disruption ? Even if it could be covered by donations it there is still problem of any inevitable management of it deciding to push it in direction different than community wishes. > We are holding this discussion on a classic, centralized, web1.0 forum which - from my vantage point - is one of the most valuable and enriching forums currently online. Not web 1.0. Usenet and mailing lists(mostly) died for that, as did many "traditional" forums. > We know this because we're already doing it right here. Ok, now look up who is paying for that.

jjav 3y ago
> someone needs to pay for it This is centralized thinking. In a decentralized open protocol system, everyone pays for their own way, but it's very cheap at an individual level. There's no central "it". > Not web 1.0. Usenet and mailing lists(mostly) died for that, as did many "traditional" forums. I'm on several email groups where I've been a participant since the very early 90s. Every so often there's the "oh have you seen this new shiny thing, let's move to that!" Every single one of those new shinies have disappeared, but the email group lives on. Why? Because email is 100% decentralized, nobody owns it, there's nothing to own. It's an open protocol. So it lives on forever. Also, I still read Usenet on most days, just like I've been doing since the late 80s. It's alive (if not very active) because nobody owns it. I wish we could collectively learn these lessons. Centralized systems cannot exist for very long.
- ilyt 3y ago
  > This is centralized thinking. In a decentralized open protocol system, everyone pays for their own way, but it's very cheap at an individual level. There's no central "it" It is if you want to have central page for people to visit. Someone needs to pay for hosting that else you will have no users if everyone needs to host their bit > I'm on several email groups where I've been a participant since the very early 90s. Every so often there's the "oh have you seen this new shiny thing, let's move to that!" ...do you know how mailing lists work ? It's a central server that distributes it to the members. Pretty light one, sure, but it is still something someone have to host and manage. There is no "distributed mailing list" > Also, I still read Usenet on most days, just like I've been doing since the late 80s. It's alive (if not very active) because nobody owns it. Central servers managed by people again. Yeah they are federated but still rely on a bunch of institutions to throw some servers at it.

jjav 3y ago

> The problem is the mistaken notion that these can be big businesses. Exactly that. A community communicating can't be the huge profit center that a corporation needs it to be, without it being ruined. > We know this because we're already doing it right here. Exactly.

notatoad 3y ago

I’d argue that HN is the opposite of a centralized forum. This is what well-functioning decentralization looks like. HN is HN. It’s decentralized to the most extreme level: there are no blockchains or fediverse or protocols because there is no link at all to any other larger network of forums, other than hyperlinks. And there doesn’t need to be. Decentralize by making small, simple, isolated things. Not by making complicated interlinked things and trying to form a larger network. The larger network doesn’t necessarily have value.