5 ms·

Care to elaborate? I tried to research why Usenet was superior to more recent communication channels, but my Google fu fails me every time.

• agilebyte 13y ago
  It has binaries?
  • riquito 13y ago
    Yes, in the form of base64
    • agilebyte 13y ago
      Thought it was uuencode or yenc.
• 4ad 13y ago
  Usenet was superior because the average IQ was higher and people more knowledgeable. A normal consequence of access being technologically limited to academia and very tech-savvy people.
  • dsr_ 13y ago
    Usenet is superior because it evolved to handle large scale discussions properly. These include: - user agents that thread properly - long expiration times for local caches (spools) - cultural norms (that differed from group to group) about replies, new posts, quoting, and FAQs - groups are folders: the participant needs to make a decision to subscribe to a group, and then each time to read one group at a time, rather than trying to handle a dozen different groups in date-received order - and for a mixed blessing, search over the current spool was reasonably easy but general search was hard or impossible.
    • hengheng 13y ago
      ... all of which reddit (and to a lesser extent, slashdot and disqus) do just as well.
      • 4ad 13y ago
        Comparing Usenet or even mailing list cultural posting norms with Reddit is asinine. I still don't know how I can pipe a reddit comment into patch(1) or git(1). I can do that easily with mbox files (which can come from SMTP or nntp-to-mbox.pl(1) or something).
        • voltagex_ 13y ago
          I don't think I've seen a patch as a Reddit comment, but grab a command line json parser, add a json extension to the URL and away you go
        • voltagex_ 13y ago
          I don't think I've seen a patch as a Reddit comment, but grab a command line json parser, add a json extension to the URL and away you go
        • voltagex_ 13y ago
          I don't think I've seen a patch as a Reddit comment, but grab a command line json parser, add a json extension to the URL and away you go
• simias 13y ago
  I'm not necessarily talking about Usenet in particular but rather the "Network News Transfer Protocol" versus SMTP. When you subscribe to a mailing list you cannot easily fetch older emails to get some context, you usually have to use some web interface. If you want to manage your subscriptions you have to use an other web interface, you can't usually do it easily from your mail client. There is no standard way to subscribe to a mailing list either, you have to hunt for the subscription form. That being said, in this day and age using dedicated protocols is not really "in" anymore so I don't expect NNTP to make a comeback. I still think that a good web forum would still be a massive improvement over most mailing lists. That's what google groups could have been by the way, if Google had cared enough to make it worthwhile. Maybe a HN-style discussion "tree" with no upvotes/downvotes or external links but the possibility to add attachements (and maybe gateway interfaces with SMTP and/or NNTP) would be the killer of mailing lists.
  • 4ad 13y ago
    > If you want to manage your subscriptions you have to use an other web interface, you can't usually do it easily from your mail client. This is not true. I haven't seen any mailing list for which I can't manage my subscription with SMTP. They might exists, but almost everyone use mailman which works fine. > There is no standard way to subscribe to a mailing list either, you have to hunt for the subscription form. Just send an email to list-join@fqdn or list+subscribe@fqdn. It's really a pity google groups is inferior even to mailman, but I guess you can't have nice things. Yes, nothing is standardized, but it works well enough with extremely little infrastructure, both on server side, and especially on client side. NNTP requires more infrastructure on both sides.
    • simias 13y ago
      > This is not true. I haven't seen any mailing list for which I can't manage my subscription with SMTP. They might exists, but almost everyone use mailman which works fine. You're right, but as you point out that's not standard. It's not usually directly integrated in your mail client. It's just a hack. NNTP clients have all that baked in. > Yes, nothing is standardized, but it works well enough with extremely little infrastructure, both on server side, and especially on client side. NNTP requires more infrastructure on both sides. I don't think NNTP requires more infrastructure on the server side (installing mailman vs. installing a NNTP daemon) but you're right that it does require installing a client on the client side (since everybody already has a mail client anyway. That's why I said I would be fine with a well designed web app to replace mailing lists.
• hollerith 13y ago
  I hope you realize that the mailing list is older than Usenet!
  • simias 13y ago
    I did not actually, for some reason I always thought NNTP predated SMTP but wikipedia tells me it was created as an alternative to SMTP for newsgroups[1]. The more you know. So my first wording was actually correct: "newsgroups are mailing lists done right" :) [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Network_News_Transfer_Protocol https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Network_News_Transfer_Protocol