Usenet – Let's Return to Public Spaces

I&#x27;m too young to have been a part of Usenet, but it seems to me that there&#x27;s no good way to recreate the space described in the article without keeping most people out. My understanding is that the &quot;Golden Age&quot; of Usenet was possible mainly because only the people with the proper resources, knowledge, interest, and opportunity could even get to it in the first place. When you select a group of people from the general population with those traits and assets, of course you&#x27;ll end up with a group that&#x27;s more or less self-policing; the population will be small and largely homogeneous. It&#x27;s hard to have conflict when your neighbors are almost identical to you, at least on a large scale.<p>In my estimation, the larger and broader a group is, the more it&#x27;ll approximate human culture and interaction as a whole. It shouldn&#x27;t be a surprise when the negative parts of those things (e.g. war, strife, hatred) emerge, just as much as the positive things (peace, fellowship, love).

People miss the quality of discussions on Usenet, but don&#x27;t ever think about why the discussions were better.<p>Biggest factor I think that made the discussions better is that folks were not connected all the time so discussions would span days or weeks. You had time think between posts. Folks would log on once or twice a day. Obviously there were exceptions. Today a reddit thread has about a 24 hour shelf life because of its global nature, and then it dies. Furthermore the most intense discussions will happen in bursts and then flame out. People aren&#x27;t engaging in discussion they are shouting their opinion into the ether and moving on.<p>Second factor obviously is the tremendously larger and more diverse population on the internet. More people mean more new topics posted and less time to discuss topics. The actors are less technical overall than those who had internet in the 90s and early 00s.

It really annoys me that increasingly its required to join slack &#x2F; discord &#x2F; telegram channel in order to connect with developers of projects I&#x27;m interested in.<p>I understand spam is a problem, but its such step backwards from just subscribing to alt.whatever.<p>The glory days when NNTP was built-in to most email clients, so mornings were spent with a cup of coffee answering emails and keeping up with project conversations.<p>The future of our world looks to be hyper-siloed with incessant privacy leaking and no one actually seems to mind.

Keeping a decent Usenet spool running was <i>no joke</i>. I&#x27;d say the primary reason Usenet died is ISPs and schools stopped hosting their own news feeds. You had to go commercial, by around &#x27;96; and by &#x27;98 that&#x27;d pretty well killed it off. It was harder to put stuff up on Usenet than the web, and once you had it was gone in day or weeks.<p>I don&#x27;t know what &quot;store and forward&quot; publication would look like today; the &quot;common carrier&quot; concerns about being responsible for something someone else posted to your spool seem to be larger and murkier today then they were back then.

As usual I am obliged to point out that what killed Usenet was software piracy. The amount of work it took to run a competitive news server with reliable binaries was unbelievable, easily the most expensive and fussy hardware we had at the ISP, and if your service fell behind or dropped any binaries, users would absolutely lose their shit: Usenet was an all-or-none proposition, so if you weren&#x27;t going to buy a rack full of NetApp filers to run binaries you might as well not run Usenet at all. The protocol centralized before web interfaces made centralization palatable to users, and then died.

I think reddit is a superior product to Usenet.<p>I used to use Usenet in the early 90s, I was even a sysadmin at the time and helped my university install it. NNTP, huge hard drives, constant network stream, it was a big deal but so excited to manage and read it.<p>But I quickly felt the need to have some kind of upvoting system in order to wade through the noise. At the time, I used jwz&#x27; genius &quot;BBDB&quot; emacs extension, which allowed you to weigh posts based on authors and subjects. The potentially most interesting articles would magically bubble at the top of the discussion group and this would tremendously speed up my consumption of all the groups.<p>But obviously, this is not as effective as the crowdsource voting system that reddit uses. The combination of reddit&#x27;s voting system (for the voting) and RES (for the customized author tagging) makes the reading a lot more efficient than Usenet ever was.<p>I personally don&#x27;t have a problem with the fact that reddit is proprietary. The amount of knowledge and entertainment that I gain from reddit way outweighs my slight philosophical discomfort from the proprietary aspect.<p>And if one day, reddit fails to meet that criterion, another site will replace it. Digg has shown us that these sites are a lot less permanent than they seem.

I think the secret to reviving Usenet is to make it harder to use. The hassle of using irc is like a proof of work that doesn’t keep out all idiots, but helps.<p>I haven’t used Usenet in years and the only people I know who still use it, use it for movies and music and stuff.<p>I spent a lot of time on alt.food.tacobell and alt.destroytheearth and alt.music and places like that.<p>They worked for the same reason bbs boards on fidonet worked. I think because there wasn’t anything better and they were hard to set up and use. So only people with enough time or passion or smarts to overcome the setup and management were involved.<p>I expect that once people stop trying to pyramid scheme crypto, we will eventually get some sort of “pay a penny per message with tips and escalating costs for violations” that is protocol based so can be run by volunteers rather than “core developers.”<p>It needs to be just confusing enough to keep out people, but useful enough to keep in enough people.

I remember Usenet and the science newsgroups. The author of the parent article mentioned the problem with trolls. There was one who was especially infuriating and unforgettable. He was from Dartmouth and used the screen name &quot;Archimedes Plutonium&quot;. People would be discussing some topic on the science newsgroups and he would post off topic rants proclaiming the plutonium atom was god. Of course people took the bait. Dartmouth decided that was part of free speech. I think this was the origin of the advice &quot;Don&#x27;t feed the trolls&quot;.

<i>&gt;Decentralized &#x2F; Shared Ownership - a genuinely public space no one “owned”<p>&gt;IMO, this last aspect is what made Usenet truly special.<p>&gt;The idea that no one was bigger than any given (news)group was baked directly into the software. Everyone held the keys to the castle. [...] Sadly, it seems we’ve given up on the idea of online communities as shared spaces — but studying Usenet is a great way to be reminded of what’s possible. </i><p>I took the opposite lesson from USENET history: shared spaces where _everyone_ has equal say and power is _impossible_.<p>(Much of my thinking in the following paragraphs is influenced by Clay Shirky but his essay seems to be deleted from the internet.[1])<p>Any digital shared space that <i>needs to function for the long term</i> will always create a formal (or informal) power structure where a subset have disproportionate influence. Therefore, any idealism of a shared space where everyone has equal say or power will <i>devolve into unequal power</i>. This has happened with all &quot;digital shared spaces&quot; of any significance outside of USENET such as <i>Bitcoin</i> (democratic home computers --&gt; China ASIC miners), or <i>Ethereum</i> (a few influential developers choose to reverse the DAO hack), or <i>Wikipedia</i> (super editors with special powers to reverse edits). The repetition of that human history across many digital domains shows that <i>only a subset</i> will hold the keys to the castle.<p>I was an avid user of USENET in the 1980s. I learned C Language by asking questions in USENET (comp.lang.c). I also had my first long discussions on economics on USENET. I have a fondness for nostalgia but that doesn&#x27;t change the fact that reddit&#x2F;Stackoverflow&#x2F;HN are far more useful to me than USENET ever was. I think that private ownership of those entities <i>improves baseline quality</i> of discussion. Sure, Mastodon is decentralized but the discussions there are not as interesting to me as the front page of HN. We techies don&#x27;t like to admit that decentralization makes shared spaces <i>worse</i> on many dimensions which is why I abandoned USENET because it wasted too much of my reading time.<p>[1]<a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.google.com&#x2F;search?q=clay+shirky+group+worst+enemy" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.google.com&#x2F;search?q=clay+shirky+group+worst+enem...</a>

Getting a home Internet connection in 1997 I was still lucky enough to enjoy Usenet. Back then I spent the bulk of my time answering emails and Usenet posts, rather than surfing the web or gopher space. The almost identical interface shared by email and Usenet was what truly captivated me.<p>Usenet was also great due to it&#x27;s subscription model with a pull paradigm. Instead of getting all emails in a mailing list pushed to you, you could pull only a selection of newsgroups and messages to read, depending on your mood. I loved this way of interacting with people in the nineties.<p>Like already mentioned, Usenet promoted thoughtful answers, as opposed to quick superficial answers like on IRC. I spent a lot of time on the latter, nevertheless Usenet was where I learnt critical thinking and massively improved my English. Thank you for that, rec.autos.sport.f1, a newsgroup which is still active by the way.<p>Having gone through a reasonable amount of Internet eras, IMHO the main roadblock to a perfect community, no matter which protocol is used, will always be an elevated number of users. Thus, a possible solution is to have more communities with less users.

&gt; Missing a business model<p>In the late 90&#x27;s my main access to it was via my ISP. It was one more reason to sign up.<p>&gt; Surpassed in ease-of-use by browser-based forums (didn’t need to be installed)<p>At that time browsers came with NNTP clients. Both Netscape and Internet Explorer (in the form of Microsoft News and Mail, later Outlook Express, later Windows Mail). While the experience was better with a dedicated NNTP client, using the system didn&#x27;t require installing anything the user wouldn&#x27;t already have.<p>As a side note, I twice set up NNTP servers to replace e-mail discussions in two companies with reasonable success. Public discussions were so much neater in that format.

&gt; [...] how to build better online communities by studying internet history.<p>I love that part already, even without reading the full article. Yesterday, I had an interesting experience (yes, storytime):<p>I started using a fountain pen again a while ago, and wanted to research why I&#x27;ve some pain in my wrist after using it[1]. So I stumbled upon an old thread, which basically asked how to develop a &quot;well-refined handwriting&quot;[2]. This thread was from 2004, so just short after when I started to use &quot;the internet&quot;. The conversation was all in all very polite, respectful, with some tips from other members, and often some kind of &quot;well, you could try it like this and that&quot; or &quot;I found something here, where xyz showed you could do it like this&quot;, &quot;I prefer to do it like this, but ymmv.&quot;, and etc.<p>The thread spans 19 pages, and, interestingly, is still active almost 15 years later.<p>What stroke me the most was the change of tone towards the end. There was a lot more &quot;you HAVE to do it like that&quot;, &quot;THIS is how it WORKS!&quot; and there like. Also, they started discussing what &quot;well-refined&quot; means at all. 15 years later. There was a lot of, let&#x27;s say, &quot;whining&quot; towards the end of this thread (that school nowadays needs a lot of parental involvment, nothing works, and everything is bad).<p>I am left confused. Something has changed in the last 15 years, and I&#x27;m not sure what the reason is.<p>[1]: You guessed it: It has to do with the way I&#x27;m holding it. Now, back to topic!<p>[2]: &#x2F;&#x2F;edited upon request, german page though: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.penexchange.de&#x2F;forum_neu&#x2F;viewtopic.php?f=17&amp;t=378" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.penexchange.de&#x2F;forum_neu&#x2F;viewtopic.php?f=17&amp;t=37...</a>

Key part: Usenet was effectively a public space. Nobody had their hand on the OFF switch.<p>Much less important part: Usenet was full of horrible behavior for many years before people started complaining about &quot;Endless September.&quot; If there was a golden age it was before my time (1985).

<i>&gt; Interface - UI made it easy to scan many posts quickly</i><p>This is the thing I really miss. The NNTP client I used in the late 90 &#x2F; early 00s had a far better UX for dealing with large groups and complex nested threads (such as those seen in groups I used to frequent like comp.language.* and alt.fan.pratchett) than <i>anything</i> I&#x27;ve seen implemented via HTTP+HTML since.<p>Part of that is due to bandwidth constraints no doubt: the client was working from a local database of content that the UI was pulling data from for display so achieving everything it did on &quot;old web&quot; tech could impose a massive bandwidth cost on the provider and UI latency cost on the user, but with modern UAs this could be largely replicated with the various client-side storage options. There would still be an issue for users who moved between different browser instances regularly, a bunch of &quot;read&#x2F;purged&#x2F;etc&quot; data would need to be synced between clients via the service which increases the design complexity, but something noticeably better than most (all) web based forums offer should be eminently possible.

For dealing with &quot;bad actors&quot;, the problem is anonymity. Systems such as moderation, adding people to an ignore list, etc are all defeated because bad actors can get unlimited anonymous identities. Ways of combating that (such as a signup form checking IP address, or other patterns) remove some anonymity which isn&#x27;t really that great either.<p>What I&#x27;d like to see is the ability to get a personal identity SSL cert with tooling (browser plugins, for example) to make it easy to use on signup pages. This personal cert could have several fields, depending on how much information the user revealed to the certificate authority.<p>The primary field would be how much they paid for the certificate. That way people can be as anonymous as they want, and can get new IDs if they need, but they have to pay for each one. Then forums could require new users to have a certificate that cost at least a minimum amount, whatever is required to keep trolls away (that is, trolls who constantly sign up with new IDs). I&#x27;m thinking that $5.00 should be enough for most purposes. (There would be a minimal cost to cover the CA&#x27;s expenses, however anything above that can be specified by the user depending on if they want a bronze level or platinum level certificate)<p>There could be additional fields that the CA verified, such as name, address, etc. These could also be marked as &quot;Supplied to &#x2F; verified by CA&quot;, but not included in the cert (so only the CA knows that info, and can have a policy of destroying their records shortly after verification). Or if needed (such as for financial transactions), name and address could be part of the cert.<p>The whole idea here is that forums could better control when troll users register multiple accounts -- yes, with the &quot;completely anonymous&quot; version of the cert the troll could keep buying new ones, but that is still a higher bar they have to cross than they do now.

random observation: Usenet was a direct inspiration for creating Matrix.org, in terms of providing replicated conversation history with open (well, semi-open, in usenet’s case) federation. Usenet’s collapse under spam, alt.binaries, google groups and eventually reddit&#x2F;fb&#x2F;stack overflow left a massive hole on the open internet for open communications.<p>The problem that remains is still one of solving the abuse&#x2F;spam&#x2F;reputation problem, but there’s enough progress that hopefully this time things won’t collapse again :)

I am sorry to say this (not really, I was young) but I was a USENET troll back in middle school. I remember coming home from school and running up to my computer, turning it on and connecting to the internet, downloading new messages to see what mayhem our (my friend and I shared a handle) latest provocations had caused. We eventually had an entire forum revolving around our posts, about 50% of messages were from or related to us. It became tiresome in time &amp; we stopped.<p>One anachronism that sounds almost unbelievable to younger internet users was this: another user threatened to (and did) take down my ISP and report me to my ISP &quot;for abuse.&quot; It sounds so incredibly quaint in the 21st century, but time was you were expected to behave yourself online, potentially on penalty of your provider cutting you off. How times have changed.

I still use Usenet (although I would like to find more newsgroups that I may be interested in), and actually only started using it in late 2019 (and read another article posted to Usenet by someone who also did). Usenet is still in use (although maybe not so much compared to before). (Note: I don&#x27;t use binary newsgroups, and the service I use doesn&#x27;t include them anyways. That is OK, because it is the text newsgroups that I am interested in.)<p>The flaws they list I think are often not as bad as the alternatives. Additionally, there are mitigations for them, such as kill files, alternative interfaces, etc.<p>I also think that you should continue to use NNTP, both Usenet and otherwise (when making your own newsgroups which are not part of Usenet, I suggest Unusenet to avoid namespace collision; it uses reverse domain names as name spaces, like Java and some other stuff does; and like Usenet it can be federated, but usually isn&#x27;t). This is a better alternative to mailing lists and web forums, although it is possible to have multiple interfaces to the same messages (you could have web forum, mailing list, and NNTP, all interoperable with each other).<p>I would like to find more Usenet (and&#x2F;or Unusenet and&#x2F;or others; I think there is also something called &quot;Rock solid network&quot;, apparently?) newsgroups for some stuff I am interested to have, and would like to promote use of NNTP.<p>(I also think that those who make available Usenet archives should implement proper From-munging. The only one I downloaded so far, does not do this.)

Reddit is easily the best model for social media, if only the software was better. The key is prioritizing community over individuals. Subreddit admins have a ton of freedom, so long as a very small bit of their energy goes toward a few basic universal rules. This gives them a real sense of ownership.<p>Healthy social media must support and defend pseudonymity, because it’s the only way to juggle the fact that everything on the internet can be recorded by at least one other party. And the only way to defend pseudonymity is to treat every user the same. Twitter’s “approved” users violates this and Facebook violates it in many different ways, but Reddit just prioritizes communities over individuals. This is the root of the solution.<p>When people treat Reddit like it has some broad character or quality, I have to disagree. Those people just haven’t found a subreddit that they love, probably because they haven’t tried to. And I don’t think that needs to he changed or automated. If a Reddit-like site was the only social media, all these people would be motivated to create or build their own communities.

The only issue that killed Usenet was the illegal content, namely MP3s and child pornography. Back in the early 90s, I knew people that were using Usenet for regular porn (not kiddie porn).<p>But it was the MP3s once music piracy got big that became huge. The weight of all those binary posts, plus the risk of housing child pornography is why most ISPs shut off access to Usenet.<p>Reddit is an excellent upgrade on Usenet. If you have a specific interest, it&#x27;s usually well-maintained by a moderator or the subreddit dies. And unlike Usenet, the best comments usually bubble to the top, so you don&#x27;t have to read every single comment, the voting mechanism works on well-run subreddits.

Federating applications allows one to balance the competing factors of building a local community with its own identity and having that community participate in a wider whole. The hard part is convincing users to use the federated applications.

&gt; Unfortunately Twitter hashtags suffer from the same structural deficiency as Usenet newsgroups: unfettered anarchy collapses at scale.<p>Perhaps that is a feature and a life-saver after all. Nobody should have a megaphone that can reach five billion people.

I had fun writing my Master&#x27;s thesis on &#x27;Flaming&#x27; back in 1995. There was a 6 month long flame war between the denizens of alt.tasteless and those quiet, kind, kitty lovers in rec.pets.cats.<p>And what about Kibology - where is Kibo now??! ;-)

Ah yea, &quot;Eternal September&quot;. I&#x27;m just old enough to have gotten on usenet when ES was in full swing, but you could still get a glimpse through the dust of stampeding trolls and the campfires of the marauding neverdowells of the lost great edifices that stood in that land before. I have to confess that I was one of those trolls: Edgy McEdgeLord saying things and acting in ways that I&#x27;ll never dare with real people in a real room.<p>I would like to see AI moderated feeds of some sort, tuned to the preferences of the seed group. It would be a interesting social experiment at least.

If you make a usenet anyone can use you&#x27;ll just have another twitter or reddit. The reason usenet was different wasn&#x27;t the technology but people. If it had been centralised it would&#x27;ve been the same.

I agree with the notion that early on, participants were pre-qualified by having to clear a small hurdle of hardware reqs and technical chops to connect.<p>The mobile phone changed the barrier to entry forever on Internet 1.0, but if the satco&#x27;s decided to launch petabytes of storage into space and require a specific basestation&#x2F;modem to access the signal, that small hurdle would limit participation to those that made an effort and effectively leave 99% of Inet1 behind.<p>Perhaps not the best example, but all it takes is a small technical hurdle to limit participation.

Community and conversation are <i>exceedingly</i> difficult to scale. Mostly they simply don&#x27;t, and scaling will kill what little that actually does form.<p>The article cites a couple of pieces addressing why Usenet died. I&#x27;m fairly familiar with one of those as I wrote it about four years ago: <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><p>My thinking&#x27;s evolved somewhat.<p>First, as noted, Usenet was <i>small</i> by today&#x27;s standards, with Brian Reid and others&#x27; reports putting total active users at 140k (posting) from 880k with access, as of 1988, and just shy a million in 1995. Total worldwide Internet usage in 1996 was about 16 millions (through growing rapidly).<p>Those would be failed-social-media-site numbers today.<p>Usenet, like Facebook, formed on and around academic communities, and specifically <i>highly selective</i> institutions. This created several barriers to entry &#x2F; points of control, which were both highly discriminatory <i>and</i> highly effective at helping dissuade some of the worst forms of misbehaviour. For a while.<p>The type of organisation of a discussion ... matters a lot. Usenet&#x27;s fixed groups kind of worked and kind of didn&#x27;t, and we&#x27;ve seen a few additional models come up since. Ad hoc structures (which Usenet didn&#x27;t support at all), personal &quot;salons&quot; (think a typical blog -- Charlie Stross&#x27;s comes to mind, also some social media hosts, Yonatan Zunger at G+ for those who were there). Location, time-centred, event&#x2F;project based, and others. Clay Shirkey&#x27;s concept of fluid organisations (something that can be dated back at least to Alvin Toffler&#x27;s <i>Future Shock</i>, 1970, and &quot;ad-hocracies&quot;) captures some of this.<p>The liability and business-model problems (both upside and risk) are really huge, and cannot be overstated. I suspect a number of social media &#x2F; user-generated-content site&#x2F;service closures, including quite probably Google+ and Yahoo Groups, have much to do with this.<p>Factors-promoting-growth and factors-promoting-continued-survival differ hugely. The elements which create a viable and attractive social network are almost entirely <i>nontechnical</i>. The elements which are required for a social network to <i>continue</i> once it&#x27;s attained (or exceeded) critical mass are <i>highly technical</i> (though also call on a complex mix of other factors, business, social, legal, and more). Critically: the lessons and methods that <i>get</i> you successful won&#x27;t <i>keep</i> you successful.<p>Founding cohort is a huge factor for initial success and growth.<p>Starting a new social network with the express goal of becoming the next Usenet, or Facebook-killer, or whatever, is almost certainly doomed to failure. Even more than starting <i>any</i> social network is. Probably better is to address the needs of a specific, paying, interested, and motivated community, from which there may be a future growth path.<p>Tim Ferris&#x27;s downsides of fame article posted a few days back makes some really good points about bad actors and scale -- you only need a few dimwits at a million to a billion followers &#x2F; fans before negative encounters start becoming really common. Human brains simply aren&#x27;t built for mass social network interactions, whether as one of the many or one of the few.<p>Any concept in which nominal success criteria are principally predicated on scale means winner-take-all dynamics, and that there can be at most only one winner. Maybe a winner and an also-ran or two. Given numerous factors including several mentioned above, the winner will likely be determined based on starting conditions and a lot of raw luck. Possibly exchangable for ruthlessness.<p>We&#x27;ve existed in a technically-mediated world in which the winners have tended to be US or Wester-based private corporations. The next decade or several may see changes to that. US hegemony of the Internet has been strongly criticised. Several of the possible alternative hegemons don&#x27;t strike me as notable improvements.<p>Given inherent monopolisation of technical communications, questions of closed vs. open protocols, and of private vs. public ownership and control, should be asked.<p>Changing open standards is extraordinarily difficult. I&#x27;m inclined to say impossible. More typically, they&#x27;re supersceded. Sometimes by other open standards, increasingly of late, not. The reasons for all of this would make for some extraoridinarily interesting academic research across numerous fields.<p>Agreeing on how to do things is the most underrated technological innovation of the past 200 years.<p>Usenet&#x27;s client-independence is often stated as a benefit. I&#x27;ve argued that myself. Given variations in message formats and posting behaviours encouraged by highly different client mechanics, I&#x27;m not so sure of that. The Web is the worst possible applications development environment, but it does impose, not infrequently by force of law, a consistent UI&#x2F;UX and format. Supporting <i>both</i> a useful level of behavioural consistency <i>and</i> a diversity of access tools would be a good but challenging goal.<p>In my earlier Usenet piece I talked about the obvious advantages of decentralisation. I&#x27;ve been using several decentralised networks of late (Mastodon and Diaspora principally). I&#x27;m not so certain the advantages are entirely obvious any more. I think the questions &quot;what problems is decentralisation supposed to solve, and what new problems is it creating?&quot; need to be asked.<p>I&#x27;d <i>like</i> to believe decentralisation is a positive. I&#x27;m not sure I can.<p>And I was wrong about Ellen Pao and Reddit. She was doing well under an extraordinarily challenging environment, in which communicating basic facts was all but impossible. My apologies for my earlier comments.

BBS systems are still alive (SDF has one, and it&#x27;s reasonably good and well-read). So is IRC and mailing lists, the latter of which encourages the behaviour that Usenet had.

I&#x27;m convinced the way we&#x27;ll return to the golden age is if we all jump off broadcast social media if it&#x27;s not anonymous. The amount of people I see demanding special treatment because of their follower count or whatever, or insisting they&#x27;re to be free from all criticism is insane. I remember my parents telling me to never upload photos of ourselves onto the internet, now 20 years later we seem to have forgotten that little bit of common sense

What I got from this article is that the main reason to return to Usenet is the lack of requiring moderators. Wouldn&#x27;t you still need moderators on a big enough Usenet instance? There&#x27;s also the issue of what happens in an unmoderated community of any size (4chan).<p>EDIT: Also, I don&#x27;t see &quot;having more thoughtful discussions&quot; as a good reason for needing to return to Usenet. Not every discussion <i>has</i> to be thoughtful, and really, most aren&#x27;t.

I have a lot of positive feelings for Usenet, but it wasn&#x27;t because of the lack of central control. Most of the positive was that the internet was smaller, and the people on Usenet were often very influential. I got to talk to movie producers, scientists, business executives, rock stars and lots of very engaged, interested regular people.<p>The problem with Usenet was that it was that it slowly was infested with pirates (of the copyright kind), troll, netcops and spammers.

The concept of evaporative cooling (from other comments, not the OP) is really interesting.<p>If you buy the principle, then a way to encourage quality posts and discourage poor posts would be to:<p>1. Limit the number of posts a person can make. 2. Reward posts that get responses with the ability to make more posts.<p>Obviously you&#x27;d want to add some filigree to these principles to allow members of a conversational thread to post with abandon once they&#x27;ve already joined.

USENET was before my time (was born in 1987 but only started using computers seriously in 1999) so I really don&#x27;t know how it was. But, out of curiosity , I&#x27;ve payed a USENET provider for some months to try it. Downloads pretty fast most of the time, and you can find some pretty obscure shit, or things that aren&#x27;t released yet in torrent. But ultimately it&#x27;s not worth it.

Discrimination is the key, discrimination, hierarchy, an elite, but an elite drawn from the mass. I wrote a little on this within the context of LinkedIn a while ago myself: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;blog.eutopian.io&#x2F;building-a-better-linkedin" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;blog.eutopian.io&#x2F;building-a-better-linkedin</a>

I wonder what the technical hurdles would be to building a USENET client in a browser these days.<p>If not directly implementable, a USENET-to-HTTP proxy running in the cloud (to address the issue the author identifies of &quot;didn&#x27;t need to be installed&quot;) could obviously be done (and has been done, or near to it, a couple times).

I remember that in the late 90s, there was some effort at implementing distributed voting on Usenet with an out of band protocol. The newsreader I used implemented it iirc.<p>This could be implemented in a decentralized way cryptographically. Subscribe to people whose vote you trust by accepting their cert, you can also have a web of trust.

I think brining usenet back is problem solving in reverse. Usenet will not bring back the joys of early internet, but attempting to revive an old technology through the collaboration of other curious and passionate people certainly will.

&gt; <i>For more on how I plan to incorporate shared ownership into the community app I’m building,</i><p>Soooo the whole idea of returning to Usenet is part of your product pitch.<p>Can we get a giant asterisk on posts that are basically just advertisements?

I&#x27;m old enough to remember when every dial up and early ADSL ISP included access to their own first-party usenet server. Now I&#x27;m paying 3x the cost for 100x the bandwidth, but no usenet server.

I wonder if the flamewar I started back in 1988, when I suggested that &quot;Lost in Space&quot; was better than &quot;Star Trek&quot;, is still going on. I should check out rec.arts.tv.startrek and see.

Twitter used to be great before everyone and their opinion is great.<p>People make communities. It&#x27;s the people that are great and it&#x27;s the people that suck. The key is how do you filter people who suck out.

Usenet did not die for the reasons stated in the article. It died because all of the major ISPs succumbed to pressure from the media companies and stopped providing news feeds.

Usenet died because it cost infrastructure owners to make space and bandwidth available for it, over and above the cost of the infrastructure itself.

what was the total population of users on usenet before 2000? any community turns to a mob above a certain level and rapidly becomes useless. If you wish to revive usenet style community, build something that is only technically capable people get to use and aim to gather approximately the same number of users. some of the new decentralized media are probably heading for this point .

Would be nice to have an NNTP interface to read HN<p>Free agent still seems to work on Win8 :-)

Obligatory link to Aether as the modern, decentralized Usenet. I highly suggest everyone looking at this post download the app and join some tech rooms. Just repost links and help build the community up, quite literally &quot;for science&quot;.<p><a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;getaether.net&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;getaether.net&#x2F;</a>

All I want is NNTP access to HN, tbh.

Posted on Substack. Perfect.

good lord how old are we. just let USENET die and stay dead, the world moved on. we should too.

Has Usenet really died? I still see many active newsgroups with posts appearing daily.

(Disclaimer: 30 years ago, I got on the Internet as a junior operator. My first task, after setting up email for myself, was to build the company&#x27;s new USENET feed. This was the start of a very fast, loud, bumpy rocket ride... and now here I am, a grumpy old man, wishing we still had USENET... &#x2F;disclaimer)<p>All we need, is for the OS distribution vendors to include a way to mount a global, public filesystem - without involving any third party beyond a DNS request.<p>Imagine if Linux and MacOS users could point their machines, immediately upon install, to a global filesystem - and start publishing to it themselves, directly from their own machine - without involving third parties, or servers, or whatever.<p>Alas, the OS guys won&#x27;t do this, because they&#x27;ve decided to make money from ads and tracking peoples habits, so have stopped being decent OS vendors, these days.<p>But I keep thinking to myself, surely some kid is out there gluing IPFS and Debian together in a way that just makes sense. It really does make sense.<p>I guess, it&#x27;ll happen soon enough. And when it does, so many big fish are going to find themselves hungry.<p>(Perhaps thats also why it hasn&#x27;t been done yet.)

&quot;dealing with bad actors&quot;, as the author puts it, is censorship by another name.<p>Anything truly a public space is going to be filled with things you don&#x27;t like seeing. That&#x27;s the messy part of real freedom for a whole crowd of people.<p>I recently wrote about 2k words on this exact topic:<p>From <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;sneak.berlin&#x2F;20200211&#x2F;instagram&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;sneak.berlin&#x2F;20200211&#x2F;instagram&#x2F;</a> :<p>&gt; <i>For a moment, put aside the fact that you may or may not want to read any of that, or spend time thinking about any of that. Any time that doesn’t happen, considering how many people are on the internet and the theoretical ideal of any-to-any communication, then some communications are being censored (or you’re posting about the weather&#x2F;your kids). The why and the how of that censorship should interest you, even if you like or benefit from it most of the time, such as not seeing constant spam in your DMs.</i><p>&gt; <i>Who is permitted to create accounts to speak? What money, rights, privacy, or information must they give up to do so? Who doesn’t have access to the prerequisites for an account and is excluded from the public square? How many different accounts are people permitted? Can people create new accounts anonymously? How much or how often are they permitted to post? On which topics? How many people are they permitted to message? You can’t follow every single account on Twitter, for example. You can’t DM a million people in one day.</i>