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> When I read comments like this, I assume the person writing it didn't spend much time in conversations on Usenet. You should not assume, does not lead to goo

by jjav 3y ago

> When I read comments like this, I assume the person writing it didn't spend much time in conversations on Usenet. You should not assume, does not lead to good conversation. I've been nonstop on usenet since the late 80s, still am. I used to run a site for my university. I was a heavy poster and reader through the 90s. My usage volume has decreased, but still sometimes post. Read daily. Usenet rocks. Wish it had more participation, as it used to have. It is so much better than anything else we've come up with. > you had only Gmail's interface and Gmail threading Ugh, no, gmail threading is abysmally terrible. Something like trn is far superior. Tell me how you can do any of these things in a so-called modern forum/chat app: - Say I want to killfile tptacek? Ok, some apps allow blocking people, HN doesn't. - Say I want to upscore posts from tptacek that mention crypto but downscore anything that doesn't. Impossible on any "modern" app that I know of. - Say I want to pipe every post through my custom bayesian scoring filter. Impossible on any "modern" app that I know of. - Say I want to pipe every post through a custom app that scans for key phrases I want to be alerted on, send those to my email. I could go on and on. The sites and apps we are forced to use today are lacking 99% of the functionality that was trivially possible back in the 90s.

tptacek 3y ago
These are all things you can do with HN, which has one of the simplest and most limited interfaces of all the Internet message boards. Just like with NNTP, you have to write software to do it, but it's straightforwardly doable. People have done several of them!
- jjav 3y ago
  I disagree that you can do these things in HN. I guess you're thinking that one could curl down the text and then process it locally as much as one wishes, feed it to some custom reader and consume it that way. Which you're right, is possible, but not exactly within HN at that point. And HN is the simplest use case. Tell me how I do any of the above things with messages people insist on sending via whatsapp or facebook or any such walled gardens that go out of their way to prevent interoperability? Give me SMTP and NNTP, open standards with infinite flexibility where I own and control the experience.

by jjav 3y ago

tptacek 3y ago

These are all things you can do with HN, which has one of the simplest and most limited interfaces of all the Internet message boards. Just like with NNTP, you have to write software to do it, but it's straightforwardly doable. People have done several of them!

jjav 3y ago
I disagree that you can do these things in HN. I guess you're thinking that one could curl down the text and then process it locally as much as one wishes, feed it to some custom reader and consume it that way. Which you're right, is possible, but not exactly within HN at that point. And HN is the simplest use case. Tell me how I do any of the above things with messages people insist on sending via whatsapp or facebook or any such walled gardens that go out of their way to prevent interoperability? Give me SMTP and NNTP, open standards with infinite flexibility where I own and control the experience.