Ask HN: Could Usenet get revived, to replace the soon to be unusable Reddit?

I feel like the HN hivemind likes to bash Reddit for some reason, but for me it has not been that bad. I&#x27;ve got small work gigs on there, discovered places where I&#x27;ve got to learn about stuff that I like, being updated about what&#x27;s going on in the FOSS world, discover new music, etcetera.<p>Yes, some people in there would like to drag you into absurd and nonsensical arguments, but even in here where I do not participate that much have fell into that situation. I went into Reddit after 6 years of using Facebook which was much, much worse. Reddit made me ditch Facebook once and for all.<p>Not that I agree even in the slightiest about the changes they are about to make, but I&#x27;m yet to find an alternative where I could find all of the aforementioned but with a more sane support. I don&#x27;t see how usenet can bring all of that all of a sudden, nor see myself using something like Mastodon and become a social media addict.

For some needed context, Reddit clients will be charged for API access.<p><a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.reddit.com&#x2F;r&#x2F;apolloapp&#x2F;comments&#x2F;13ws4w3&#x2F;had_a_call_with_reddit_to_discuss_pricing_bad&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.reddit.com&#x2F;r&#x2F;apolloapp&#x2F;comments&#x2F;13ws4w3&#x2F;had_a_ca...</a>

USENET still exists, and some groups are still active, just not at their peak from yesteryear -- so why not go join and see if anything is happening in your old haunts.<p>Free access to text only groups: <a href="http:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.eternal-september.org&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">http:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.eternal-september.org&#x2F;</a><p>Pick a newsreader: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;en.wikipedia.org&#x2F;wiki&#x2F;List_of_Usenet_newsreaders" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;en.wikipedia.org&#x2F;wiki&#x2F;List_of_Usenet_newsreaders</a> and go take a look.

<i>Could Usenet get “revived”, to replace the soon to be unusable Reddit?</i><p>Technically yes. Become widely adopted, <i>maybe if...</i><p>There are free Usenet providers for the text groups. People would have to agree on methods to ignore the spam bots, maybe a signed message header&#x2F;footer that a UI recognizes. There are forums and chat systems that already leverage Usenet as the transport&#x2F;storage but they all need some tender loving care.<p>In my opinion for that to be widely adopted people would need a low friction way to access Usenet and it would need to provide them a UI&#x2F;UX they are familiar with. Perhaps Usenet would be entirely transparent to them. Perhaps it would be a simple nginx web front-end so that anyone could run a node and it would use Usenet on the backend for storage and transport, ideally the sites that implemented NNTPS (TLS). Just nginx+python, or nginx+golang or an nginx module and super-lightweight with secure safe defaults. There would need to be a group set up where all the front-end nodes ingest group keys, identities, etc... and maybe a git repo that bootstraps all of this.<p>Traditional methods like using a Usenet reader such as Thunderbird? Probably not. Probably very small technical circles. I think this would be akin to convincing people to switch from Discord back to IRCD or using Mumble&#x2F;Murmur for voice.

I want something new.<p>I want a client that looks basically how reddit looks today. An aggregator.<p>And maybe that aggregator has a back-end that runs on a VM somewhere that I control, or I can pay someone to run an aggregator for me, or whatever.<p>But I want each subreddit to be federated. Run on its own server, with its own moderators.<p>I want to be able to make as many Reddit accounts as I want to (dozens, maybe not hundreds), and pick which ones I use on which subreddits. Some decentralized authorization &#x2F; authentication scheme? Or maybe some centralized server? Or using OAuth or something? I don&#x27;t really care.<p>I want to SUBSCRIBE to a list of Admins. If an Admin shadowbans a user, I don&#x27;t see their posts. I find this incredibly useful. Other people will disagree with me about which users, which actions, should result in shadowbanning.<p>I think that about wraps it up. What am I missing?

I don&#x27;t see anyone talk about search discoverability. Many, many people add &quot;site:reddit.com&quot; when searching for product reviews and other information to weed out the garbage, and so far as I know, it currently isn&#x27;t possible to search usenet with Google, Bing, etc.<p>I think it&#x27;d basically mean there was an easy way to access usenet text groups via the browser, and thus also an easy way for the average Joe to access usenet.<p>Some have already mentioned spam and moderation, and I think this will be a huge factor. Without the ability to moderate, bad actors quickly ruin any potentially-popular social media outlet. Most comments are happy about the lack of moderation so far, but that&#x27;s actually a problem IMO.

It doesn&#x27;t combat spam very well. So I doubt it will come back at least in substantial way. Other thing is that you would need some agreed standard to make it &quot;rich&quot; as in user experience.

Seems more likely that &quot;the fediverse&quot; will take up the slack. Perhaps not Mastodon (the best known implementation) which is more of a Twitter alternative, but Lemmy seems to fit this niche pretty well. OTOH, a revival&#x2F;update of Usenet would not be unwelcome either. NNTP &gt; ActivityPub, after all.

Spam killed Usenet so probably not.<p>Unless someone moderates.<p>Then you have Reddit, ie the need to fund moderation.<p>Or a corner case where there are volunteers.<p>And besides users will want tags and private messages and the ability to follow personalities and avatars and such.<p>None of which addresses zero latency for the first child porn. Remember how common it was for ISP’s to block everything starting with “alt” ?<p>Yes it was fun while it lasted but it wasn’t AOL that killed it. It was ubiquitous bandwidth improvements worldwide.

The pricing model is hot garbage, but <i>most</i> Reddit users will continue to use it (myself included). That said, I&#x27;d be happy to move to an alternative, even usenet. Reddit has so much weird baggage associated with it (powermods, admin shenanigans, a surprisingly high number of racists&#x2F;sexists) that I&#x27;d love to find a place for more nuanced and interesting discussions.

Small newsgroup services that use NNTP, like Usenet, still exist as well—not to mention the “big” services.<p>Tilde operates one, as does SDF, the two *nix communities that I belong to.<p><a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;tilde.wiki&#x2F;wiki&#x2F;NNTP" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;tilde.wiki&#x2F;wiki&#x2F;NNTP</a><p>(SDF is member only access)

That would be incredible. The passing of Usenet was a huge loss to the internet, and nothing has come even close to being able to replace it.

Just do what slack did with irc. “Reinvent” it with a modern interface and some fixes. The mercurial masses will flock to the hot new platform, VC will shower you with adoration and cash, we’ll tell stories about how you don’t eat breakfast and only ever wear one sock. Everyone will emulate you and then you can come back around as a wealthy guru investor.<p>Duh. Have you learned nothing of the tech cycle?

How exactly is reddit going to be &quot;unusable&quot;? I mean, apart from the general low quality of posts in a lot of subs?

Usenet won&#x27;t be as effective, since it lacks &quot;karma.&quot; People love up and down voting, and usenet simply does not provide that.<p>That, and the the whole question of who&#x27;s going to pay for a large amount of usenet traffic. Think of all those images traveling uuencoded and being stored at every hub...

Are there any alternative (open source) implementations of the _server_ side of the Reddit API? Then you could just point Teddit, Aurora, etc. at the alternative server. The only required work would be implementing the database backend which seems... feasible.

What will happen to Reddit to make it unusable? I feel a bit out of the loop here...

The best sub reddits are heavily modded, but Usenets support for moderation is very small, which means it will only be great if you can preselect by limiting who gets access to the groups.

I remember alt.religion.emacs - quite vividly, in fact.<p>NNTP was a massive quasi-distributed forum (I wasn’t the newsmaster at the ISPs I worked at, but frequently dealt with the servers and setups) and a pretty big overhead resource and management-wise, but pretty interesting to deal with until it was overwhelmed by binaries groups and all sorts of weirdness.<p>I do miss the quirky sense of humor and the community - somewhat like Mastodon, for those who are leaving Twitter - but I don’t miss the drama, the flooding and the flame wars.

Anyone in here claiming to use &quot;old.reddit.com&quot; -- so you&#x27;re a non-logged-in lurker? and have a weird sense of entitlement for how the site should serve you? The old UI is great yes. But if you can&#x27;t be bothered to log in as a normal user of the site (and set your preferences to the old UI) your opinion loses alot of steam.<p>Log in -&gt; set preferences -&gt; surf reddits with www. urls like normal.

What exactly do you think the Venn diagram of: users who are annoyed with the API change + users who are willing to put up with Usenet?<p>Look at migrations to Mastodon and Matrix. It&#x27;s still niche. It&#x27;s great for that niche, but it&#x27;s not something the average user will understand.<p>Users care about UX, quality of life. This argument isn&#x27;t grounded in that.

I have a feeling good things get &quot;improved&quot; upon but I never really saw what it brought.<p>What I do like about reddit. It is still one place where you just use an email address and nick name. So you can be anonymous. Or reasonable anonymous. No one looking back 10 years back into your posts to cancel you for something you said that in that time maybe was not an issue.<p>I was so reluctant making a Facebook account back in the day because they wanted your REAL identity. Man I was a nickname on irc or on the internet in general. That was what I loved about it.<p>Usenet was the same you could just use throw away email account and just say whatever. Ask whatever without being scared.<p>Reddit is the only place where you still can do that.

I set up a net news server, created two groups, hooked up to another net news server, we started peering… It sure is possible! And with peering, newsgroups are federated. They will survive individual servers going down.<p>I also wrote a minimal web frontend.<p>Example: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;campaignwiki.org&#x2F;news" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;campaignwiki.org&#x2F;news</a> Source: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;metacpan.org&#x2F;dist&#x2F;App-news" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;metacpan.org&#x2F;dist&#x2F;App-news</a>

somebody was asking in a thread the other day about some open protocol for forums&#x2F;subreddits&#x2F;whatever that different people could host, that could be fronted by independent clients.<p>well, there you go, NNTP still exists.<p>write some ios&#x2F;android NNTP clients that can handle multiple servers w&#x2F;credentials, and run some NNTP servers. no need to distribute the posts to other servers.

Why would you want Usenet to be like reddit? Reddit is awful.<p>99% of posts are a desperate grab for attention. Every comment is one of:<p>- a smug, know it all response by someone who thinks they are an expert in some field rather than a loser who spends their day on reddit<p>- an attempt to be witty<p>- some reddit saying that gets repeated over and over (&quot;man got that dawg in him&quot; and so on)

I wrote a few years ago of my understanding of why Usenet died to some positive reception. There are four principle failings:<p>&lt;<a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;old.reddit.com&#x2F;r&#x2F;dredmorbius&#x2F;comments&#x2F;3c3xyu&#x2F;why_usenet_died&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;old.reddit.com&#x2F;r&#x2F;dredmorbius&#x2F;comments&#x2F;3c3xyu&#x2F;why_use...</a>&gt;<p>1. It got spammed to death.<p>2. It lost control over its culture, and that culture was crucial to its functioning.<p>3. It was too problematic for ISPs (or others) to provide ready access to it: spam, harassment, child pornography, and copyright violations all posed massive concerns.<p>4. There was no viable business model for providing the service.<p>All of those are significant, but I would (and did) argue that points 3 &amp; 4 were the final nails in the coffin. Anti-spam measures and tightly-curated &#x2F; moderated newsgroups could survive despite the spam, but with firms willing to brave the very real legal and financial risks, and without any other viable financial support, Usenet fell to a mix of mailing lists and early online blogging &#x2F; forum software (phpBB, Slashdot, and others).<p>There&#x27;ve been several attempts to revise or update Usnet (most noteably Usenet II),. Those ... have also failed to take hold. (Though in fairness: social media is <i>extremely</i> fickle, many apparently well-structured, and occasionally well-capitalised, attempts have similarly foundered, and the limelite often moves on with time.) Gaining traction and viability is a mix of luck, timing, and execution (mostly getting out of your own way).<p>Reddit can be seen as a response to points 1, 3, and 4. Reddit offers reasonably good spam defences, it has evolved protections against legally-problematic content (with some large bumps along the way), and it&#x27;s attempting to develop advertising as a business angle. And has had some success at all of these.<p>Reddit&#x27;s has still fallen flat on the second point, and fails further in many people&#x27;s view (my own included) in that <i>it simply isn&#x27;t a very good discussion forum</i>. There are <i>small</i> and <i>limited</i> spaces that work, sometimes. But even moderately large subreddits are a hot mess, and the very largest could have the late Newt Minow&#x27;s classic phrase applied.<p>As for Usenet, it&#x27;s a cautionary tale that open protocols and federated control are no guarantee of either effectiveness or continuity.<p>&#x2F;me side-eyes Mastodon and the Fediverse.

Tangential, but what happened to the various usenet archives that google obtained and mashed into google groups? Do they exist anywhere else in a more reliable [1] home?<p>Edit: To clarify, I&#x27;m wondering how extensive the non-google archives are.<p>[1] As in not google

Rocksolid Light (rslight) is a web based Usenet client. <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;github.com&#x2F;novabbs&#x2F;rocksolid-light">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;github.com&#x2F;novabbs&#x2F;rocksolid-light</a>

I&#x27;m ready. I&#x27;m here. But I&#x27;ve essentially abandoned usenet just because most groups I was in are now dead or spammed... So... Well... Not much faith in mass of people...

At Qbix.com we will be launching something soon to compete with Twitter and Reddit.<p>It is described at <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;rational.app" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;rational.app</a>

There is also lemmy - think mastodon but Reddit style

I wish we could download all the data on Reddit in subreddits like we could on Usenet.

The main issue with Usenet was it lacked any form of content moderation.

Betteridge&#x27;s law of headlines strikes again.<p>Easier to build something new than to tack on more cruft to the broken usenet model. At this point usenet has little remaining use other than being a low-profile warez distribution channel. It was great in the late 80s and early 90s but does not scale well as a communications medium and we already know better ways to manage the distributed data sharing layer.

I don&#x27;t think most reddit users care about reddit politics so no

Usenet has no moderation so no. People could use spam it to death

Usenet would be perfect<p>Thunderbird still supports NNTP.

Ask HN:

How about Reddit minus the overzealous censorship by admins and sub moderators. I think this is easier than recreating facebook or youtube. Reddit can be fixed by changing how mods are appointed. The major problem with Reddit is that there is no way to remove bad or corrupt mods. This has been a major problem with popular subs.