3 ms·
(Background: I'm a Usenet user from the late 80's to early naughties, did outsourcing at netaxs as newsread.com, then ran readnews.com from 2004-1024). Usenet
by avifreedman 11y ago
(Background: I'm a Usenet user from the late 80's to early naughties, did outsourcing at netaxs as newsread.com, then ran readnews.com from 2004-1024).
Usenet is still around but mostly for binaries. The market's of pretty stable size, dominated by a few large wholesale players.
My take on what happened with text groups is that the S/N ratio just went to hell. In the 90s the problem was spam, but in the 2000s the problem was too many loudmouths who wanted to hear themselves talk drowning out the useful experts.
Like some of the other folks commenting, I've been pissed as hell at the PHPBB/vbulleting monstrosities. My original plan with readnews was to try to build a great web UI for discussion, but we got distracted by wholesale customers wanting service - and front-end is not my area of expertise.
For folks looking for something modern with promise, the news is good with discourse and a few others coming up. Would love to see something distributed, but if really distributed I suspect we'd see binaries and/or commercial spam and/or people with nothing interesting to say dominate - just like Usenet...
- spiritplumber 11y ago> ran readnews.com from 2004-1024). Not sure if typo or integer overflow there :)
- avifreedman 11y agoSorry, ran out of bits. At least I didn't go signed.
- BillyParadise 11y agoA thread on USENET, and a post from Avi Freedman? Wow. Time warp!
- codinghorror 11y agoWow a shout out for our Discourse project from Avi. This made my day, thank you! And yeah, distributed discussions are moon-shot hard, unfortunately.
- avifreedman 11y agoWe'll loop detect to end the mutual admiration society, but thanks from you makes my day :) I just tweeted a pointer to "Doing Terrible Things" and suggested people read all of the "Falsehoods Programmers Believe". I want "Falsehoods as a Service" - outsourced paranoia. And yes, distributed discussions that preserve free speech and allow eliminating crap is definitely moon-shot hard.
- PopeOfNope 11y agodistributed discussions that preserve free speech and allow eliminating crap is definitely moon-shot hard. The way you just defined the problem, it's not moon shot hard; it's a logical impossibility. "Free speech" and "eliminating crap" are complete opposites. You can't have one with the other. If you want a high quality of discussions, some people are going to have to be deprived of their voice to make that happen, either through moderation or selective membership.
- wcummings 11y ago>we'd see binaries and/or commercial spam and/or people with nothing interesting to say dominate Sounds like reddit