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That paired messaging protocol we used was called email. Filtering was pretty sophisticated using scorefiles and killfiles. You didn't have rich media because t

That paired messaging protocol we used was called email. Filtering was pretty sophisticated using scorefiles and killfiles. You didn't have rich media because the Usenet was about exchange of thoughts and knowledge, but people were pretty opinionated about formatting to make reading your posts pleasant for everyone.

jfb 13y ago
I miss Usenet too, but let's not gloss over the fact that it was most definitely a technical constraint that prevented rich media; not being able to do anything much more than ASCII text did lead to a lot of useful convention, and a disputative, textual culture, but if we could've put GIFs of IRIX machines booting (and, inevitably, crashing) faster than our VMS clusters could negotiate quorum, believe me, we would've.
hengheng 13y ago
Also the only alternative for formatting content was HTML, which invited people to use weird fonts in funny sizes. I think something like markdown would have benefited the ecosystem.
dredmorbius 13y ago
Oh, I was there, and I'm aware of this. The rich media thing: it's useful. A minimal markup (such as markdown) would likely be sufficient. The ability to be able to emphasize and strongly emphasize text, create bullets and numbered lists, indicate (multiple levels) of quotes, hyperlinks. There's not much that Markdown itself doesn't provide. A small amount of chrome for the masses would be nice. For the most part my feeling is that existing HTML markup goes too far, generally in the direction of unusability for far too many websites. Another feature which is quite useful is indicating followups and actions. Here I find Reddit has one of the best models around, though the UI/UX lightweight nature of G+'s Notifications widget is also nice (the absolute uselessness of most of the actual notifications, and the inability to filter / set precedence / classify types of notifications is a major failure of the site). G+ also suffers from one of the largest DOMs I've seen in any major website -- I've backed off using it pretty much at all, and find my browser memory footprint is vastly more bearable.
- riffraff 13y ago
  haven't newsreaders supported highlights of stuff like _underline_ /italics/, bold, multiple level of quoted stuff, bullet points etc since about forever? I remember forté agent and thunderbird doing it about ten years ago, and I recall being annoyed that markdown differed :)
  - dredmorbius 13y ago
    There were conventions, and a lot of (graphical) newsreaders did support automatically presenting text according to those, but ... implementations varied. Formalizing a basic level such as markdown would be a big win.
tomphoolery 13y ago
> You didn't have rich media because the Usenet was about exchange of thoughts and knowledge Also most (American, anyway...) clients couldn't support such large messages, since the choice of speed for most of us was 16.6, 28.8 and 56k modems at the time.

jfb 13y ago

I miss Usenet too, but let's not gloss over the fact that it was most definitely a technical constraint that prevented rich media; not being able to do anything much more than ASCII text did lead to a lot of useful convention, and a disputative, textual culture, but if we could've put GIFs of IRIX machines booting (and, inevitably, crashing) faster than our VMS clusters could negotiate quorum, believe me, we would've.

hengheng 13y ago

Also the only alternative for formatting content was HTML, which invited people to use weird fonts in funny sizes. I think something like markdown would have benefited the ecosystem.

dredmorbius 13y ago

Oh, I was there, and I'm aware of this. The rich media thing: it's useful. A minimal markup (such as markdown) would likely be sufficient. The ability to be able to emphasize and strongly emphasize text, create bullets and numbered lists, indicate (multiple levels) of quotes, hyperlinks. There's not much that Markdown itself doesn't provide. A small amount of chrome for the masses would be nice. For the most part my feeling is that existing HTML markup goes too far, generally in the direction of unusability for far too many websites. Another feature which is quite useful is indicating followups and actions. Here I find Reddit has one of the best models around, though the UI/UX lightweight nature of G+'s Notifications widget is also nice (the absolute uselessness of most of the actual notifications, and the inability to filter / set precedence / classify types of notifications is a major failure of the site). G+ also suffers from one of the largest DOMs I've seen in any major website -- I've backed off using it pretty much at all, and find my browser memory footprint is vastly more bearable.

riffraff 13y ago
haven't newsreaders supported highlights of stuff like _underline_ /italics/, bold, multiple level of quoted stuff, bullet points etc since about forever? I remember forté agent and thunderbird doing it about ten years ago, and I recall being annoyed that markdown differed :)
- dredmorbius 13y ago
  There were conventions, and a lot of (graphical) newsreaders did support automatically presenting text according to those, but ... implementations varied. Formalizing a basic level such as markdown would be a big win.

tomphoolery 13y ago

> You didn't have rich media because the Usenet was about exchange of thoughts and knowledge Also most (American, anyway...) clients couldn't support such large messages, since the choice of speed for most of us was 16.6, 28.8 and 56k modems at the time.