[HN Gopher] Usenet - Let's Return to Public Spaces
___________________________________________________________________
Usenet - Let's Return to Public Spaces
Author : jsmoov
Score : 360 points
Date : 2020-02-13 12:38 UTC (10 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (october.substack.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (october.substack.com)
| dspillett wrote:
| _> Interface - UI made it easy to scan many posts quickly_
|
| This is the thing I really miss. The NNTP client I used in the
| late 90 / 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
| _anything_ I 've seen implemented via HTTP+HTML since.
|
| 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
| "old web" 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
| "read/purged/etc" 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.
| talkingtab wrote:
| does anyone have a screenshot of the usenet UI or an easy way
| to see it? A couple of people have mentioned this.
| pwg wrote:
| You can find several screen shots in the different client web
| pages linked from this wikipedia article:
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Usenet_newsreaders
| bookAlot wrote:
| Boom
|
| _uncontrollably_
| Paul_S wrote:
| If you make a usenet anyone can use you'll just have another
| twitter or reddit. The reason usenet was different wasn't the
| technology but people. If it had been centralised it would've
| been the same.
| tptacek wrote:
| 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'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.
| Isamu wrote:
| Do you mean newsgroups like alt.binaries.* ? I completely
| forgot about that. They ate up all the bandwidth? I'll take
| your word for it.
|
| Source code sharing was pretty important I remember. That was
| how I first got Perl source code to compile, although it was
| probably not in the alt newsgroup tree, it must have been in
| some other that escapes my memory.
| tptacek wrote:
| They ate up disk and CPU. It was the nature of NNTP, at least
| at the serious provider levels, that you had to be able to
| keep up in real time with a certain high level of
| responsiveness, or you'd miss your window for posts and
| there'd be holes in your binaries (because Usenet is perhaps
| the dumbest imaginable way to transmit a large binary, a
| Usenet binary was a chain of separate posts, all of which
| were needed to reassemble the binary).
|
| You could run a Usenet server without binaries, just to host
| the discussions and source code sharing and whatnot. But
| customers would have none of it: if you didn't have binaries,
| you weren't serving real Usenet, and they'd go to ISPs that
| did, and when ISPs generally stopped serving Usenet because
| it had become the world's lamest warez and porn distribution
| network, they moved to centralized NNTP services.
| webmaven wrote:
| > (because Usenet is perhaps the dumbest imaginable way to
| transmit a large binary, a Usenet binary was a chain of
| separate posts, all of which were needed to reassemble the
| binary)
|
| I just realized that this is superficially similar to how
| bittorrent works...
| tptacek wrote:
| Not at all. BitTorrent is forward error corrected. It
| splits binaries up into chunks as an optimization, and
| ensures that you don't need a precise sequence of chunks
| to reassemble the file; an error correcting code ensures
| that you only need _k_ of _n_ chunks. Usenet binaries
| were literally just raw binaries, _uuencoded_ (!), and
| split up into _n_ chunks, of which you need all _n_
| chunks. Those streams of chunks were then broadcast _to
| every node on the network_ , despite the fact that only a
| subset of nodes ever wanted any particular binary.
|
| It was and remains the most batshit file transfer
| mechanism ever devised.
| lvh wrote:
| Not that I'd know: but at some point after the nineties
| Usenet figured out PAR files too, so you wouldn't quite
| need all the chunks because NNTP servers would drop some
| of them occasionally -- though to your point, yes, every
| NNTP server would de facto mirror everything.
| 300bps wrote:
| They actually fixed that problem around 2001! It's been
| over 15 years since I've done anything with Usenet
| binaries so I'm shocked I was able to recall the PAR file
| technology. Essentially, if you posted 50 parts of your
| encoded binary, you would generally post an additional 5
| or 6 PAR files. Downloaders could then utilize a PAR file
| on a one-to-one basis to replace literally any of the 50
| original files. It's been a long time but I used them
| extensively and it was a good way to correct errors or
| missing files.
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Parchive
| [deleted]
| cpach wrote:
| Another weird thing is that in the early 10's, people
| where still downloading warez over Usenet. Maybe it's
| still a thing even today.
| ancarda wrote:
| I'm not following - in part because I'm too young to have ever
| used Usenet/NNTP. Did you have to offer hosting binaries? My
| (limited) understanding is it's a decentralized thing; couldn't
| you just do discussions over some niche topic (like web forums
| still do today) and have value in that?
| joshspankit wrote:
| This might help:
|
| - When someone hosted a usenet server, they were actually
| downloading (and keep in sync) a complete mirror of the sort
| of "globally agreed-on data". This was part of it's biggest
| appeal that the time of limited bandwidth: you could connect
| directly to your ISPs server with low latency and it wouldn't
| matter how busy the other servers were.
|
| - The technology itself never supported binaries, it's just
| that people figured out that you could encode binary data as
| text, post the text as a message, and have everyone else
| reverse the process.
|
| - Some providers actually chose to only host _some_ of the
| groups (alt.binaries.movies would be an easy one to avoid
| hosting for example), but that offered limited help if people
| decided to upload pirated content to other groups. As the
| restrictions tightened, many discussion groups completely
| lost the ability to discuss things when a "scene group" came
| in and started uploading hundreds or thousands of files as
| messages.
|
| Looking back; I suspect that even if there was a restriction
| of 10KB per message and the same level of policing, piracy
| would still overwhelm usenet with millions of 10KB "messages"
| per HD movie
| tptacek wrote:
| You could technically, but your service would not survive,
| because the people who wanted binaries would loudly boycott
| you.
| ping_pong wrote:
| 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).
|
| 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.
|
| Reddit is an excellent upgrade on Usenet. If you have a specific
| interest, it'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't have to read every single
| comment, the voting mechanism works on well-run subreddits.
| rbanffy wrote:
| > Missing a business model
|
| In the late 90's my main access to it was via my ISP. It was one
| more reason to sign up.
|
| > Surpassed in ease-of-use by browser-based forums (didn't need
| to be installed)
|
| 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't
| require installing anything the user wouldn't already have.
|
| 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.
| smileypete wrote:
| Would be nice to have an NNTP interface to read HN
|
| Free agent still seems to work on Win8 :-)
| johnminter wrote:
| 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 "Archimedes Plutonium". 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
| "Don't feed the trolls".
| beezle wrote:
| That guy was in my kill file...along with a few others that
| made sci.physics and similar otherwise unreadable! I do miss
| those groups and do check in from time to time but they are
| still heavily weighted to crackpot theories rather than general
| questions, reasonable discussion and new results. Sad.
| downerending wrote:
| I miss USENET, but I _really_ _really_ miss kill files. In
| principle one can locate substitutes for various sites like
| HN, but in practice it often seems ineffective and
| unreliable.
|
| I'd love to see a general solution to this.
| prepend wrote:
| 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.
|
| 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.
|
| I spent a lot of time on alt.food.tacobell and
| alt.destroytheearth and alt.music and places like that.
|
| 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.
|
| 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."
|
| It needs to be just confusing enough to keep out people, but
| useful enough to keep in enough people.
| chrissnell wrote:
| Sorry, but the ship has sailed. I ran a BBS and FidoNET node
| (and even a hub) and it was the golden era of computers for me.
| Sadly, there's just no way that we could ever drum up the
| sustained interest to (re)build a semi-private network with a
| high technical bar again. People simply don't have the time. It
| was the era before smartphones and social media and Netflix and
| most people came home from work and watched cable TV or read
| books and most average people never conversed with other people
| outside their immediate sphere. It was new and novel but that
| feeing is long gone. Now people get into arguments online and
| don't even appreciate the long chain of technology that makes
| it so instantaneous.
|
| Believe me, I would ditch all of this tech and go back to 1992
| in an instant if it was a viable option but let's be real:
| we've been discussing this in the semi-annul Fido and Usenet HN
| posts for years and yet, here we are.
|
| The only way this could happen is if some techno-elites with
| name recognition decided to recreate it. Even then, it would
| probably die quickly. Remember Ello?
| buboard wrote:
| 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 .
| nickdothutton wrote:
| 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:
| https://blog.eutopian.io/building-a-better-linkedin
| fao_ wrote:
| BBS systems are still alive (SDF has one, and it's reasonably
| good and well-read). So is IRC and mailing lists, the latter of
| which encourages the behaviour that Usenet had.
| yori wrote:
| Has Usenet really died? I still see many active newsgroups with
| posts appearing daily.
| smhenderson wrote:
| Forgive my ignorance but how/where do you get to it? It's been
| so long since I even tried I'm not sure where to begin anymore.
|
| Thanks!
| pwg wrote:
| Here is a long list of clients:
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Usenet_newsreaders
|
| And you can get free access to the text groups (no
| alt.binaries.*) from, at least, either of:
|
| Eternal September:
|
| https://www.eternal-september.org/
|
| or
|
| AIOE
|
| https://www.aioe.org/
| smhenderson wrote:
| Thanks, after I posted this I had a look at eternal-
| september that another poster also mentioned in a different
| thread.
|
| I decided I don't have time today but bookmarked it for
| some other time.
|
| Checking the list of clients I was pleased to see Claws on
| there, that also took me back. Might have to give it
| another look, it's been a while.
|
| thanks again, I appreciate the feedback!
| dredmorbius wrote:
| "Yes, Usenet still exists, technically. In terms of active use,
| outside a very few limited newsgroups (mostly peers of
| technical mailing lists), it's dead to today's Internet users."
|
| https://old.reddit.com/r/dredmorbius/comments/3c3xyu/why_use...
|
| (From one of the primary sources linked in TFA.)
| thom wrote:
| I suspect just as many users get just as much value today out
| of Usenet as they did in the early 90s, it just seems failed by
| comparison to explosive growth of the web.
| _kst_ wrote:
| I'm surprised I had to scroll down this far to see this. Usenet
| is still very much alive. It's not what it once was, but I
| regularly participate on several technical newsgroups that are
| still fairly active. The signal-to-noise ratio is not great,
| but killfiles (filters) can help with that.
|
| I use the https://www.eternal-september.org/ free NNTP server.
| There are others.
| rjsw wrote:
| I still use it every day too.
| kreddor wrote:
| I was a usenet user back in the day, but I don't actually
| know how I would access it now. Is there any other way than
| using a commercial provider? My ISP certainly doesn't provide
| access and haven't for I don't know how long.
| rjsw wrote:
| I use the free server at Eternal September [1] It only
| carries the text groups, no binaries (so no pOrn).
|
| [1] https://www.eternal-september.org/
| lunias wrote:
| Me too! Well, maybe not every day, but most days. Usenet
| rules.
| trasz wrote:
| All I want is NNTP access to HN, tbh.
| mothsonasloth wrote:
| Have a look at ActivityPub
| metalgearsolid wrote:
| 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.
| rafaelvasco wrote:
| USENET was before my time (was born in 1987 but only started
| using computers seriously in 1999) so I really don't know how it
| was. But, out of curiosity , I'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't
| released yet in torrent. But ultimately it's not worth it.
| ulkesh wrote:
| The author of the article isn't really referring to binaries.
| NNTP was wonderful for text-based discussion. It still could
| be, but not having moderation to alleviate spam/etc is a real
| concern.
| sequoia wrote:
| To add upon or when Ulkesh said: whereas today "USENET =
| pirated stuff" in the olden days "USENET = Discussion."
| rafaelvasco wrote:
| I'm aware of that. Never said USENET is and always was about
| pirated stuff. Was just giving my impressions on modern
| USENET.
| sequoia wrote:
| Ah OK. Your comments about download speeds on a post about
| recreating _communities_ like old-time USENET used to have
| created the impression that perhaps you were missing the
| point. I can see you were not! Cheers.
| rafaelvasco wrote:
| All good :)
| himinlomax wrote:
| 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.
|
| 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.
| derekp7 wrote:
| For dealing with "bad actors", 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't really that great either.
|
| What I'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.
|
| 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'm thinking that $5.00 should be enough for most purposes.
| (There would be a minimal cost to cover the CA's expenses,
| however anything above that can be specified by the user
| depending on if they want a bronze level or platinum level
| certificate)
|
| There could be additional fields that the CA verified, such as
| name, address, etc. These could also be marked as "Supplied to /
| verified by CA", 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.
|
| The whole idea here is that forums could better control when
| troll users register multiple accounts -- yes, with the
| "completely anonymous" 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.
| everdrive wrote:
| >For dealing with "bad actors", the problem is anonymity.
|
| I hear this a lot, and I always feel that it's misguided. I
| believe the greater problem is proximity. The problem is
| proximity, not anonymity. ie, People will treat total strangers
| like trash if there isn't much proximity. For example, verified
| twitter accounts make comments that people would never make in
| a face-to-face interaction. (without an audience) And, you
| don't even need computers to witness this: road rage does not
| have a "walking rage" analogue. Normal, calm people who don't
| get into fights will treat another driver like trash. But the
| vast majority of them would never escalate this sort of
| confrontation if they were both pedestrians.
|
| I'm not suggesting that anonymity can't contribute, but I don't
| believe it's actually the root cause. eg, HN is largely
| anonymous, and for the most part it's a very nice community.
| There are a few reasons for this:
|
| - Heavy moderation of what articles are available for comment.
| (so, less moral outrage, and more informed discussion)
|
| - Heavy moderation of inappropriate comments by the moderators.
|
| - More importantly, heavy moderation of community values by
| community members: comments which disagree are completely
| acceptable as long as they're constructive and devoid of
| personal attacks, slander, etc.
|
| - Most importantly (and most controversially) all of the above
| points, as well as the focus of HN create a gatekeeping effect.
| HN is generally full of thoughtful and intelligent people
| dredmorbius wrote:
| You're posting this to an HN thread on an article that cites as
| one of its principle sources someone who's only engaged
| anonymously or pseudonymously with the Internet for the past
| decade.
|
| You're now reading a comment by that same person.
|
| The fact of bad-faith actors under real names across multiple
| platforms is ample evidence that requiring real names is not
| itself sufficient. The examples of Homer, Voltaire, the
| Federalist Papers, Mark Twain, Willy Brandt, and numerous
| others shows that anonymity or pseudonymity can give rise to
| great works and thoughts. It's often the _only_ way certain
| thoughts, or communities, can find voice.
|
| _Impunity_ seems far more likely a core problem, and one
| which, when identified as such, should be able to be addressed
| without necessarily piercing the veil of identity.
|
| Technology is not the only realm of solutions -- social and
| civil conventions should also be explored thoroughly.
| inviromentalist wrote:
| I'm a fan of this idea.
|
| Reddit is a corporate cesspool where marketing teams do
| "reputation management".
|
| Today, You might think someone is sharing a deal on groceries,
| but in reality Aldi has carefully planned a post, buying
| accounts and upvotes.
|
| When caught, marketing teams learn what people use to identify
| fake accounts, and make future accounts more legitimate.
|
| Heck we still see this on Twitter with Trump. Identification
| should be optional but preferred.
| dexen wrote:
| _> For dealing with "bad actors", the problem is anonymity_
|
| I wish it was this simple :^)
|
| Consider Facebook, where people post mostly under their own
| name and photo. Even a casual visit to Facebook quickly reveals
| your hypothesis is wrong; it's nearly the exact opposite of
| reality.
|
| Contrast that with HN, where users range from pseudonymous to
| fully anonymous, and where discussion is kept to a much higher
| standard.
|
| It bears repeating - the discourse on HN is _kept_ to a much
| higher standard. Active moderation and community guiding,
| performed by _intelligent agents_ , is the real answer to the
| woes. Anything automatic, anything with a _guaranteed_ outcomes
| will be 'gamed' and put to bad ends.
|
| --edit--
|
| There's also the separate but equally important matter of
| privacy. As internet spaces became both the _town square_ and
| also _gentlemens ' clubs_ and also _private homes_ to multitude
| of discourses, we need privacy from various actors ' prying
| eyes.
| derekp7 wrote:
| The only way this works on HN is through active efforts to
| remove some of the anonymity -- I'm not talking about
| actually finding a contributor's real-world identity, but
| making sure that the same person doesn't create 5000 accounts
| and just switch to the next one when one gets banned.
|
| This requires at the minimum logging IP address that someone
| signed up from, and treating with suspicion IP addresses that
| are pooled (such as from a VPN or TOR, etc). There are also
| other heuristics to prevent sock puppets and voting rings,
| each of these removing some amount of anonymity.
|
| Whereas what i proposed, people can still maintain full
| anonymity, and if they really need a separate ID so that they
| can log in to the same forum under a different ID than they
| normally use (for things like whistle blowing, etc) then they
| have that option -- just buy another $5 (or cheaper, or more
| expensive) certificate.
|
| It would be up to the forum (or the auto moderation system,
| for assigning points), to decide how much to trust a user
| with a new cert, based on how much they paid for it (as an
| example), or how much PII they provided to the cert provider.
|
| Another thing this can do is allow someone to be anonymous,
| but with a chosen pseudonym, and allow their reputation from
| one site to benefit them on another site (by proving that a
| given reputation score belongs to them). Of course, this is
| almost sounding too much like a "social credit score", so it
| may not be acceptable on those grounds.
| dexen wrote:
| _> The only way_
|
| Way to start with a false premise. The _main_ way on HN is
| efforts, both by mods and by users, to buoy up good
| content, and push down bad content.
|
| _> [is to] remove some of the anonymity_
|
| Not even close. Preventing cheap creation of new identities
| isn't inherently tied to identification of users; there
| already deployed alternatives.
|
| One example, TeamSpeak uses proof of work - a computational
| process that's expensive to perform and cheap to verify -
| to protect identity creation. Works wonders, and allows
| anonymity just fine.
|
| At any rate, the thrust of my argument is different, and
| cuts deeper into your idea:
|
| any _automated_ process, any _guaranteed_ outcome, will be
| subverted and put to bad ends. To grow & maintain a good
| community you need active management by intelligent agents
| (ordinarily, people). And not just by selected mods - it
| helps when typical user is well aware what is up and able
| to fend for himself.
| downerending wrote:
| Discussion here may be kept to a higher standard, but that
| also means that a lot of things I'd be interested in are
| censored.
|
| Not sure what the solution is, but it would be nice to have
| some sort of ML-based approach that would tune the content I
| see to _my_ wishes, rather than the wishes of the average
| denizen or the moderators.
| dexen wrote:
| _> a lot of things I'd be interested in are censored_
|
| Same for me.
|
| Frankly I accept HN is a space to discuss a limited range
| of subjects, and keep other subjects to elsewhere. It's
| annoying to a degree, but it the longer run it works.
| sequoia wrote:
| "something awful" took this exact approach, charging I think
| $10 one time fee for an account. It's a token, but enough to
| stop banned people from creating lots of accounts as it starts
| to add up.
| heartbeats wrote:
| Making people pay for the privilege of posting online isn't a
| good idea - getting people to use a forum _for free_ is hard
| enough, just try getting Internet people to fork over "the
| price of a cup of coffee" as well.
|
| If you want decentralized spam resistance at scale, Web of
| Trust is the only solution that works. To register, I contact a
| node that adds you for free by filling out a captcha, talking
| to them on IRC, etc. They add me at a trust level just above
| zero. If I start off by posting spam, my account instantly
| dies.
|
| So I have to first post a bunch of productive comments that
| people respond to, and then I can start spamming.
| thosakwe wrote:
| What I got from this article is that the main reason to return to
| Usenet is the lack of requiring moderators. Wouldn't you still
| need moderators on a big enough Usenet instance? There's also the
| issue of what happens in an unmoderated community of any size
| (4chan).
|
| EDIT: Also, I don't see "having more thoughtful discussions" as a
| good reason for needing to return to Usenet. Not every discussion
| _has_ to be thoughtful, and really, most aren 't.
| amiantos wrote:
| What I got from this article was sheer nostalgia, mixed with
| early-internet optimism. The fact is, on the internet these
| days, you can't allow everyone to have an equal voice without
| threat of moderation, because more often than not people will
| use that voice to spew hatred and vitriol just for fun. In the
| early days it was somewhat easy for good people to shout down
| or ignore the bad actors, but these days there are more bad
| actors than there are good people--if this isn't the case, it's
| surely the case that the bad actors simply have more time, and
| the good people ultimately flee and do something else with
| their time.
| thosakwe wrote:
| Agreed, especially since it's often that the bad actors
| aren't even human, and simply explosive in number. Moderation
| is hard, but ignoring it is a recipe for disaster.
| olah_1 wrote:
| 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 "for science".
|
| https://getaether.net/
| iwalton3 wrote:
| For anyone on Linux that would rather not install Snap, Aether
| is a standard electron app. You can unpack the snap and run it
| as a regular application using unsquashfs.
|
| It also looks like there is a blacklist for Aether
| (https://static.getaether.net/Badlist/Latest/badlist.json). If
| you're concerned about using this application because someone
| might post illegal content, this could be used to prevent that
| from being a problem. (I'm not a lawyer though. There may still
| be legal risk in running software like this.)
| peterwwillis wrote:
| > _For more on how I plan to incorporate shared ownership into
| the community app I'm building,_
|
| Soooo the whole idea of returning to Usenet is part of your
| product pitch.
|
| Can we get a giant asterisk on posts that are basically just
| advertisements?
| arbitrage wrote:
| good lord how old are we. just let USENET die and stay dead, the
| world moved on. we should too.
| skrowl wrote:
| I'm old enough to remember when every dial up and early ADSL ISP
| included access to their own first-party usenet server. Now I'm
| paying 3x the cost for 100x the bandwidth, but no usenet server.
| rednerrus wrote:
| Twitter used to be great before everyone and their opinion is
| great.
|
| People make communities. It's the people that are great and it's
| the people that suck. The key is how do you filter people who
| suck out.
| kchoudhu wrote:
| Posted on Substack. Perfect.
| aSplash0fDerp wrote:
| 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.
|
| The mobile phone changed the barrier to entry forever on Internet
| 1.0, but if the satco's decided to launch petabytes of storage
| into space and require a specific basestation/modem to access the
| signal, that small hurdle would limit participation to those that
| made an effort and effectively leave 99% of Inet1 behind.
|
| Perhaps not the best example, but all it takes is a small
| technical hurdle to limit participation.
| rpiguy wrote:
| People miss the quality of discussions on Usenet, but don't ever
| think about why the discussions were better.
|
| 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't engaging in discussion they are shouting their opinion
| into the ether and moving on.
|
| 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.
| brobdingnagians wrote:
| True, kind of why love letters (and letters in general) were
| better back in the day. People took more time to think about
| things, and magnus opus was a thing.
| mumblemumble wrote:
| I think you're very right about the slower pace fostering
| better discussions.
|
| It plays out in other places, too. I've noticed that, since
| moving to Slack, the quality of electronic communication at my
| company has taken a serious nose dive. I think precisely
| because Slack makes it nearly impossible to have a deep
| conversation over a long period of time.
|
| I've also noticed that the quality of discussion in face-to-
| face meetings tends to be inversely proportional to the number
| of people present. The more people, the quicker you need to be
| to speak if you want to get anything out there before the flow
| of conversation moves on and whatever you have to say becomes a
| non sequitur. The less time you can take to compose your
| thoughts before presenting them. The people who place the
| highest value on measured speech generally don't open their
| mouths at all, unless someone puts them on the spot.
|
| The worst incarnation of this phenomenon that I can think of
| seems to be Twitter. Twitter doesn't host conversations. It
| hosts a conversation-themed massively multiplayer live action
| game in which participants compete for scorekeeping tokens
| known as "likes" and "retweets".
| rpiguy wrote:
| I agree. I am less glib and more quiet now than when I was
| younger and get crowded out of meetings quite quickly. I used
| to just speak my mind, but now I prefer to mull things over.
|
| Reddit is also like Twitter. Karma has certainly evolved into
| a game. The focus on Reddit has always been to shift content
| to the "new" topics as well.
|
| The primary difference between Reddit and Twitter, at least
| for me, is that I somehow became addicted to the former and
| could care less about the latter, despite trying.
| somesortofsystm wrote:
| (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'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... /disclaimer)
|
| 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.
|
| 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.
|
| Alas, the OS guys won't do this, because they've decided to make
| money from ads and tracking peoples habits, so have stopped being
| decent OS vendors, these days.
|
| 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.
|
| I guess, it'll happen soon enough. And when it does, so many big
| fish are going to find themselves hungry.
|
| (Perhaps thats also why it hasn't been done yet.)
| dredmorbius wrote:
| What could possibly go worng?
| dboreham wrote:
| Here you are: https://github.com/ipfs/go-
| ipfs/blob/master/docs/fuse.md
| fortran77 wrote:
| I wonder if the flamewar I started back in 1988, when I suggested
| that "Lost in Space" was better than "Star Trek", is still going
| on. I should check out rec.arts.tv.startrek and see.
| nige123 wrote:
| I had fun writing my Master's thesis on 'Flaming' 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.
|
| And what about Kibology - where is Kibo now??! ;-)
| dredmorbius wrote:
| Community and conversation are _exceedingly_ difficult to scale.
| Mostly they simply don 't, and scaling will kill what little that
| actually does form.
|
| The article cites a couple of pieces addressing why Usenet died.
| I'm fairly familiar with one of those as I wrote it about four
| years ago:
| https://old.reddit.com/r/dredmorbius/comments/3c3xyu/why_use...
|
| My thinking's evolved somewhat.
|
| First, as noted, Usenet was _small_ by today 's standards, with
| Brian Reid and others' 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).
|
| Those would be failed-social-media-site numbers today.
|
| Usenet, like Facebook, formed on and around academic communities,
| and specifically _highly selective_ institutions. This created
| several barriers to entry / points of control, which were both
| highly discriminatory _and_ highly effective at helping dissuade
| some of the worst forms of misbehaviour. For a while.
|
| The type of organisation of a discussion ... matters a lot.
| Usenet's fixed groups kind of worked and kind of didn't, and
| we've seen a few additional models come up since. Ad hoc
| structures (which Usenet didn't support at all), personal
| "salons" (think a typical blog -- Charlie Stross's comes to mind,
| also some social media hosts, Yonatan Zunger at G+ for those who
| were there). Location, time-centred, event/project based, and
| others. Clay Shirkey's concept of fluid organisations (something
| that can be dated back at least to Alvin Toffler's _Future Shock_
| , 1970, and "ad-hocracies") captures some of this.
|
| The liability and business-model problems (both upside and risk)
| are really huge, and cannot be overstated. I suspect a number of
| social media / user-generated-content site/service closures,
| including quite probably Google+ and Yahoo Groups, have much to
| do with this.
|
| Factors-promoting-growth and factors-promoting-continued-survival
| differ hugely. The elements which create a viable and attractive
| social network are almost entirely _nontechnical_. The elements
| which are required for a social network to _continue_ once it 's
| attained (or exceeded) critical mass are _highly technical_
| (though also call on a complex mix of other factors, business,
| social, legal, and more). Critically: the lessons and methods
| that _get_ you successful won 't _keep_ you successful.
|
| Founding cohort is a huge factor for initial success and growth.
|
| 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 _any_ 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.
|
| Tim Ferris'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 /
| fans before negative encounters start becoming really common.
| Human brains simply aren't built for mass social network
| interactions, whether as one of the many or one of the few.
|
| 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.
|
| We'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't strike me as notable
| improvements.
|
| Given inherent monopolisation of technical communications,
| questions of closed vs. open protocols, and of private vs. public
| ownership and control, should be asked.
|
| Changing open standards is extraordinarily difficult. I'm
| inclined to say impossible. More typically, they'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.
|
| Agreeing on how to do things is the most underrated technological
| innovation of the past 200 years.
|
| Usenet's client-independence is often stated as a benefit. I've
| argued that myself. Given variations in message formats and
| posting behaviours encouraged by highly different client
| mechanics, I'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/UX and format.
| Supporting _both_ a useful level of behavioural consistency _and_
| a diversity of access tools would be a good but challenging goal.
|
| In my earlier Usenet piece I talked about the obvious advantages
| of decentralisation. I've been using several decentralised
| networks of late (Mastodon and Diaspora principally). I'm not so
| certain the advantages are entirely obvious any more. I think the
| questions "what problems is decentralisation supposed to solve,
| and what new problems is it creating?" need to be asked.
|
| I'd _like_ to believe decentralisation is a positive. I 'm not
| sure I can.
|
| 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.
| enumjorge wrote:
| > I'm not so certain the advantages are entirely obvious any
| more.
|
| What was it about Mastodon and Diaspora that caused you to
| reconsider the benefits of decentralized networks? Genuinely
| curious as I haven't used either very much.
| dredmorbius wrote:
| It's mostly a sense that advocates of radical
| decentralisation seem to be operating a bit more on hopium
| than a solid rational basis, and that the actual goals and
| mechanisms aren't clearly or coherently articulated and
| reasoned.
|
| Both Mastodon and Diaspora are _mostly_ working out quite
| well, and have done far better than numerous other platforms
| or services. Mastodon has active development and generally
| has been implementing new (and for the most part good)
| features at an impressive clip.
|
| Diaspora not so much. Which is a significant concern of
| itself. Failure to sustain development is a concern. Diaspora
| has on the order of a million users (w/in an order of
| magnitude), and ... wants for love.
|
| More generally, my sense has been that both platforms have
| some magical thinking about scaling and what dynamics will or
| won't appear, which may eventually collide with reality.
| Mastodon's had somewhat more experience with this to my
| knowledge, notably with an extreme and intolerant political
| group adopting the platform (and being promptly defederated
| by most of the rest of it).
|
| But I've seen pretty regrettable behaviour by others,
| including numerous (mostly small) instance admins.
|
| The Wil Wheaton incident, in which the actor was harassed and
| bullied by a small but hyperactive set, was quite
| regrettable. Lessons _were_ learned from that.
|
| Ownership, control, and continuity of larger instances has
| been iffy. I don't think "everyone rolling their own
| instance" will happen for quite some time. Which means that
| some level of multi-user tenancy, at scale, will have to be a
| norm for the forseable future. That's another issue, crossing
| numerous concerns.
| hota_mazi wrote:
| I think reddit is a superior product to Usenet.
|
| 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.
|
| 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'
| genius "BBDB" 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.
|
| But obviously, this is not as effective as the crowdsource voting
| system that reddit uses. The combination of reddit's voting
| system (for the voting) and RES (for the customized author
| tagging) makes the reading a lot more efficient than Usenet ever
| was.
|
| I personally don'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.
|
| 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.
| Arathorn wrote:
| 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/fb/stack overflow left a massive hole on the
| open internet for open communications.
|
| The problem that remains is still one of solving the
| abuse/spam/reputation problem, but there's enough progress that
| hopefully this time things won't collapse again :)
| shadowgovt wrote:
| I wonder what the technical hurdles would be to building a USENET
| client in a browser these days.
|
| If not directly implementable, a USENET-to-HTTP proxy running in
| the cloud (to address the issue the author identifies of "didn't
| need to be installed") could obviously be done (and has been
| done, or near to it, a couple times).
| Dirlewanger wrote:
| I think the biggest problem is who is building it, and why.
| Open source is certainly a boon, but when insidiously
| magnanimous corporations start contributing and start spreading
| their influence, that's when rot creeps into the project.
| sequoia wrote:
| My understanding is that the client isn't the technical
| challenge, it's the (federated) servers, and it's more of a
| business challenge. In particular, "who pays for them." Usenet
| servers used to be something ISPs maintained & your ISP
| subscription would include (usually) a certain number of hours
| of internet access per month, an email account, access to
| USENET and perhaps a couple other things.
|
| As it fell out of favor in the mainstream ISPs stopped
| supporting it/paying for it & it became a niche service to pay
| for separately, if I understand correctly, and the only people
| willing to pay (by and large) are people sharing pirated
| software, media, etc.
| Symbiote wrote:
| For a while, I used a commercial NNTP service which was free
| for text-only newsgroup access. I think I stopped once I
| started university, as there were better distractions.
|
| With a quick look on a partial NNTP server (requires
| registration), the only groups I used to look at that are
| still active is the old/retro computer one. Most of the posts
| are people still using these computers day-to-day, and
| finding problems with Javascript-heavy websites or outdated
| encryption.
|
| https://dotsrc.org/usenet
| bmgxyz wrote:
| I'm too young to have been a part of Usenet, but it seems to me
| that there's no good way to recreate the space described in the
| article without keeping most people out. My understanding is that
| the "Golden Age" 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'll end up with a group that's
| more or less self-policing; the population will be small and
| largely homogeneous. It's hard to have conflict when your
| neighbors are almost identical to you, at least on a large scale.
|
| In my estimation, the larger and broader a group is, the more
| it'll approximate human culture and interaction as a whole. It
| shouldn'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).
| rdiddly wrote:
| Throw in "commerce" (on both lists)!
| wil421 wrote:
| Everyone thinks there was a golden age in a lot of platforms
| where a small group enjoyed a short amount of time together.
| When I started lurking around HN in 2010 they were saying the
| same thing, Reddit was identical, AOL, Internet forums, Usenet,
| BBS etc...
| modo_mario wrote:
| I think they're not wrong either. I was rather invested in
| what used to be a small subreddit that is now huge. It's a
| shitshow now sometimes but back then most of the posters were
| regulars and could recognized each-other. Moderating was a
| lot easier and context and what have you could be taken into
| account. I know i could trust one person's expertise, that
| another often would take a specific stance, another that was
| always an asshole but very careful to stay on the edge of
| getting banned and what was technically allowed generally got
| downvoted. There was space for public meta discussions about
| sources (not)accepted by the community that actually had an
| impact, etc
|
| Experiencing the transition has made me value small
| communities much much more.
| RubberMullet wrote:
| The Evaporative Cooling Effect[0].
|
| [0] https://blogs.cornell.edu/info2040/2015/10/14/the-
| evaporativ...
| rdiddly wrote:
| Small communities - you might as well say community
| communities. Not picking on you, just agreeing, to the
| point of asserting that "community" can't exist past a
| certain scale. Dunbar's number and all that.
| jcims wrote:
| Unsubscribing from any subreddit over ~50K users (incl
| defaults) really improves the reddit experience.
|
| The one problem specifically with reddit and other
| 'frontpage' type communities is that they don't surface
| where the actual conversation is in the way vbulletin or
| other forum software does. With the old reddit code,
| however, you could go to
| https://old.reddit.com/r/subreddit-name/comments and see a
| comment view of the entire subreddit. This would bring the
| current conversation to the top regardless where it is in
| the standard view. Really improves the experience for
| smaller subreddits that don't have much traffic otherwise.
|
| Unfortunately they seem to have removed the feature in the
| new code. You can still use it in old per above however.
| ghostpepper wrote:
| This is a very cool feature in the old reddit code
| (stupid they removed it) that I would never have thought
| to use in this way.
| Noughmad wrote:
| That's also a lot of rose-tinted glasses. The classic
| exchange comes to mind:
|
| A: Remember when 4chan was good?
|
| B: 4chan was never good.
|
| This is true for just about every community.
| AJ007 wrote:
| Right, the unifying thing there is basically about community
| size. The same thing happens offline. The fact that you had a
| highly educated user base made a difference too. Early
| internet users either at a university or affluent and
| interested enough to pay a lot of money for that use (pre-
| flat rate AOL.)
|
| A lot of the challenges today are related to community size.
| Also, a lot of the problems are either solvable or already
| solved, but just relate to platforms wanting maximum user
| growth/monetization so they disregard those early learned
| lessons. Just take a look at the stuff Randall Farmer has
| written. These are lessons dating back to easy online
| communities in the 1980s.
| flir wrote:
| I think you're mistaking "educated" for "similar". The
| community don't necessarily have to be educated, but it
| helps a lot if they're broadly similar in some way. Same
| background, same age, same goal, same education, same
| interests, something.
|
| (And lets be honest, the reason size is a problem is
| because beyond a certain point, you can't do human
| moderation).
| kingste wrote:
| I am old enough to remember Usenet. All you needed was an
| Internet connection, a usenet client, and access to a usenet
| server.
|
| Most ISPs provided usenet access just like they provided an
| e-mail address at the time. So it was no more difficult to be
| involved in usenet than it was to have e-mail.
|
| In modern terms, usenet would be reddit if it was distributed
| (so anyone willing to set-up their own server could run a node
| and let people connect to it). But for end-users it was as
| simple as having an e-mail account and a client application on
| your computer.
| WesleyLivesay wrote:
| During the "Golden Age" of Usenet, which I believe many
| people to consider to be pre-Eternal September, the number of
| Americans with any form of internet access was just a
| fraction of the population. I am finding varying figures
| online, but they seem to hover at <15% of the population of
| the United States.
|
| Given the costs of that access and the costs of the
| computers. It was both a very small and a very specific type
| of person that was accessing Usenet at the time.
| DanBC wrote:
| I think people do not appreciate just how expensive it was
| to get online.
|
| In 1988 Compuserve (more than 250,000 subscribers) was
| charging $11 per hour, The Source charged $8 per hour,
| Delphi charged $6 per hour, and BIX was $9 per hour.
|
| Eleven 1988 dollars would be about $23 today.
| h2odragon wrote:
| Long distance rates to BBS's were nasty, too. Thus the
| joy in finding any and all ways to get free calls. In ...
| 1992? i think it was I had a provider that offered dialup
| shell access for $8/hr on an 800 number, and that was the
| best legitimate price around for a good while. I built
| people _networks_ off that box.
| ghaff wrote:
| And that included intra-state long distance which could
| actually be even higher than inter-state calls. For quite
| a while I used a subscription BBS in a relatively nearby
| city. Phone calls were still expensive and there were all
| sorts of tricks/tools to minimize the time you spent
| online. (e.g. software that let you download new messages
| on specific boards and read/reply offline.)
| dredmorbius wrote:
| I've been digging up numbers over the past few years. In
| 1980 there were 2 million computers in the US, doubling
| every 2 years. By 2000, there were 168 million computers,
| only 6 doublings rather than the 10 the 1980 estimate would
| have provided. That suggests about 16 million users as of
| 1990, possibly 24-32 million by 1992.
|
| As of 1995, total worldwide Internet usage (then largely in
| the US, though also Europe) was 16 millions. As of 2019
| it's 4.5 billions.
|
| https://www.internetworldstats.com/emarketing.htm
|
| (From an earlier HN comment:
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21783812)
|
| Brian Reid's Usenet Usenet usage reports as of 1988
| reported about 140k active Usenet users, from a population-
| with-access of about 880,000.
|
| Usenet was _small_.
|
| (Some of these stats also cited in in one of the links
| (which I wrote) from TFA.)
| jfengel wrote:
| Indeed: the entire contents of Usenet up to the 1990s,
| including binaries, would fit on a thumb drive.
|
| https://ryanfb.github.io/etc/2015/02/23/early_usenet_hist
| ory...
|
| Getting it off piles of tapes and onto that thumb drive,
| however, was a large task:
|
| https://www.joe0.com/2019/02/17/converting-utzoo-usenet-
| arch...
| 300bps wrote:
| Yeah I got my first modem in 1985 (hence the username).
| Anyone outside of academia was all BBS, not Internet back
| then. I'm shocked to hear Usenet even had 140k active
| users in 1988.
| wccrawford wrote:
| Oh man, I had a 300 baud modem for a very short time.
| Then my parents found out how much it'd cost to use it
| (long distance to nearest BBS or provider) and they sent
| it back. Ugh.
|
| I did eventually get to use a 2400 baud modem though, and
| even ran my own BBS for a while. Fun days.
| bregma wrote:
| You didn't even need an internet connection. All you needed
| was the phone number of a UUCP node and a dial-up modem.
| rikroots wrote:
| From my days on usenet (rest in peace, rec.arts.poems) one of
| the more obvious trolls had to resort to accessing the
| newsgroups via his local library, after he ran out of ISPs
| willing to take his money.
|
| On the positive site, I know of one intercontinental marriage
| facilitated by RAP.
| whoopdedo wrote:
| > All you needed was an Internet connection
|
| That in itself was a significant enough barrier to entry for
| the general public. Most people prior to Eternal September
| were unaware that the internet existed, or falsely believed
| it could only be accessed by university students. And outside
| of the G10 countries getting online was a major technical
| barrier.
| kazinator wrote:
| > _All you needed was an Internet connection, a usenet
| client, and access to a usenet server._
|
| I happen to have all three, and participated in Usenet just
| minutes ago.
|
| You might want to delay your Usenet death proclamations by
| just a little.
| UncleSlacky wrote:
| Let's wait until Netcraft confirms it...
| ArtWomb wrote:
| For pure institutional memory from primary source. I went to
| the archives and read a lot of the posts on
| comp.infosystems.www.announce circa 1990-1994. Origins of
| Mosaic. Glory days at CERN. And that day had its share of
| cranks. Perhaps 25% of the populations ;)
|
| But even the cranks had a certain elan. The made up private
| research centers in the email sigs were optimistic: Paragon
| Institute of Cyber Consciousness, and such
|
| Whats interesting about IRC, with xdcc peer to peer file
| transfers, it already acted as a distributed peer brokerage
| back in the mid 1990s. Trying to bootstrap a laer like that
| today requires enormous overhead
| DrScientist wrote:
| I remember back in the early 1990's as the web took off people
| bemoaning the fact that the oiks from AOL were bringing the
| tone down.
|
| Back then studying for a PhD was almost the defacto minimum
| requirement to have access. Few undergrads outside computer
| science had access.
|
| As an illustration, back then, once I got into a usenet
| discussion with some called Martin Rees (
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Martin_Rees ) on the nature of
| science.
| jwing wrote:
| "Eternal September" is slang that originated on Usenet to
| describe just this phenomenon.
|
| You can read more here if you like:
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eternal_September
| tunesmith wrote:
| That was the original "Me Too" movement. I remember all those
| Me Too posts popping up everywhere.
|
| (AOL users were notorious for block quoting long parts of
| text they agreed with, and reposting with Me Too! above. It's
| like "This." but less hip, if that's possible.)
| ghaff wrote:
| That was probably the beginning of the end even if it held on
| for quite a while after that. (And a lot of other changes
| were happening at the same time.) Especially outside the alt.
| hierarchy, which was always more of a free for all, real
| names usually associated with university, company, or
| government email addresses and a culture built around a
| certain exclusivity tended to keep flame wars and and other
| disruption to a manageable level.
| zouhair wrote:
| > I'm too young to have been a part of Usenet
|
| Indeed you are[0]
|
| [0]: https://timeline.com/flame-wars-early-
| cyberbullying-1c509aa5...
| zozbot234 wrote:
| These conflicts didn't really matter because nobody used real
| names anyway. Online identities were very much expected to be
| disposable, if necessary. Real names and real-world
| reputation wpuld only enter the picture in more "serious"
| spaces where moderation actions and social expectations were
| correspondingly a lot higher. Modern social media merged the
| "real names only" expectation of the most academic Usenet
| groups with the conflict-orientation of alt.flame.flame.flame
| and www.4chan.org. Disaster is the predictable outcome of
| this, often with non-trivial real-world consequences.
| zouhair wrote:
| There were still a lot of flame wars between known people.
| fallous wrote:
| It was less the barrier to entry than a combination of
| limitations in the rate of new members in a subgroup (you may
| get burst of new members in September but the total number
| added over the course of a year was manageable) and a process
| of cultural (with regards to expectations of behavior and
| discourse) assimilation, made easier by the fact that there was
| no prior cultural expectations on the part of new members.
|
| Remember that usenet newsgroups numbers in the tens of
| thousands, usually focused on a very specific interest. New
| members joined either to gain knowledge, be among those who
| share an interest, or occasionally to troll. Trolls were easy
| enough to add to .ignore files, and the others had a desire for
| the benefits the newsgroup offered and thus were inclined to
| respect whatever rules were in place in order to receive that
| benefit.
|
| The general model of a usenet group is echoed on the web with
| message boards, absent the unified means of distribution and
| discovery.
| alexgmcm wrote:
| I learned Usenet in 2009 as a Uni freshman because the
| University blocked p2p software and monitored http traffic to
| stop people downloading loads but for some reason my Usenet
| usage wasn't detected.
|
| I mean that's over a decade ago now, but it seemed like it was
| still pretty big back then - albeit just for piracy.
| dejawu wrote:
| I've been toying with the idea of running some "chatroom
| experiments" - chatrooms each with different functional
| gimmicks, one of which would be capping the user count allowed
| in each channel. I think reddit's robin [0] was onto something
| really cool and I wish they'd explored it more in-depth.
|
| [0]
| https://www.reddit.com/r/joinrobin/comments/6398yp/what_was_...
| somesortofsystm wrote:
| USENET became irrelevant the day the OS vendors decided to
| include a web browser in their OS distributions.
|
| If they'd included an NNTP reader, we'd be still using USENET
| to this day.
| bluedino wrote:
| They (Netscape and Microsoft) did...eventually ISP's started
| not providing news servers, though.
| ZiiS wrote:
| IE3 came bundled with "Microsoft Internet Mail and News"
| later "Outlook Express" with full NNTP support.
| smhenderson wrote:
| Not sure what version they're talking about on this page[0]
| but it's dated 1994.Netscape had NNTP support as far back
| as then apparently...
|
| [0] http://home.mcom.com/home/guided_tour/news.html
| somesortofsystm wrote:
| '94 is mid-web ignition, imho.
|
| The point is, the web ate all the other info-sharing
| protocols, except for mail (which does look worse than
| ever, but still works) .. and as a result its near-
| impossible for a new user to easily share their content
| _from their own computer_ to the rest of the world ..
| karatestomp wrote:
| > except for mail
|
| My greatest hope for an open social network that people
| actually use and truly threatens Facebook & friends still
| rests on something built on top of email. A social-client
| that uses the email system as its transport layer,
| basically. It even already has calendaring for events!
| Heh.
| u801e wrote:
| > The point is, the web ate all the other info-sharing
| protocols
|
| I wouldn't say that really happened until after sometime
| in 2015.
| somesortofsystm wrote:
| >IE3
|
| Yeah, exactly. By that time, the web hype knob was already
| at max level.
| jaywalk wrote:
| Disagree. The Internet was still mostly a curiosity when
| IE3 was around, but people were becoming aware of it. I'd
| say things really took off in the IE5 timeframe.
| jacquesm wrote:
| No, that would have hastened USENETs demise. The whole
| eternal September problem stems from small villages turning
| into big cities.
| somesortofsystm wrote:
| I don't necessarily agree on why, but I do agree that
| Eternal September had major repercussions for how
| technology proceeded, and especially how marketing people
| managed to spread their insanity into the OS stack, as it
| were.
|
| The problem with Eternal September was, that we suddenly
| had a major influx of people who thought they knew how to
| use the Internet, suddenly on the Internet.
|
| They didn't, really, know how to use the Internet.. no,
| sir!
|
| AOL had its guardians and angels, COMPUSERVE had its
| governors, and so on - so when this all hit the near-total
| benevolent sovereign dictator anarachists that were holding
| the Internet together, it was, literally, a Cultural War.
|
| Eternal September was fucked; suddenly there were shit-
| posts everywhere, and oh so much entitlement from the
| 'paying consumers' who were suddenly interested in
| alt.binaries.* Someone _decided_ that Internet services
| should be deprecated /ignored - and decided not to build
| true "Internet OS"'es, but rather "Internet Applications"
| .. and appstores .. and so on.
|
| Now, it is my strongly held belief, as someone who
| weathered that fateful day and ever since with a sense of
| absolute wonder at the stupidity of humankind .. if the
| brainfucked horde that made up Eternal September didn't
| have the experience of suddenly getting "on the Internet"
| from some shiny CD from some TLA with its own custom
| browser, but rather - _the OS was set up to better guide
| behaviour over the stack from the outset_ - my belief is
| that we would still have NNTP, and possibly more of these
| kinds of services.
|
| Instead of the behemoth (and now totally out of control)
| web monstrosity.
|
| I mean, at some point, if we step back and see what really
| makes the Internet, its that there are more ports than just
| :80, and anyone can make one to another. You just have to
| have the right bits.
|
| The problem is, our borked OS'es aren't making it
| sufficiently easy for the Internet to work - _for the user_
| - without requiring a long list of third parties.
|
| So, I also think: someone has an opportunity to _change
| everything_ by making an OS stack which, out of the box,
| contains a user-publishable /accessible Global Filesystem,
| which makes the Web seem like UUCP over a soggynoodlenet...
| fallous wrote:
| With regards to Eternal September, you're exactly right.
| Prior to that AOL invasion you had relatively small
| bursts of new people joining with no predetermined
| cultural expectations who had to assimilate into an
| existing culture. When AOL hit usenet you had a massive
| number of people with their own established cultural
| expectations due to the walled and managed AOL garden
| colliding with the existing Internet culture, and the
| Internet culture was overwhelmed.
|
| Prior to Eternal September the primary conception of the
| Internet by those on it was that it was a tool. After
| Eternal September the primary conception was that it was
| a channel for consumption and entertainment.
| u801e wrote:
| Pretty much every installation of Windows in the mid '90s and
| onward had Outlook Express installed and it was definitely
| capable of interacting with usenet.
| Lammy wrote:
| > If they'd included an NNTP reader, we'd be still using
| USENET to this day.
|
| How does this square with Eternal September being caused by
| (paraphrasing) "too many normal users with access"? AOL
| giving its customers NNTP access is frequently cited as one
| of its downfalls.
| toohotatopic wrote:
| >there's no good way to recreate the space described in the
| article without keeping most people out.
|
| I have to disagree. You don't have to keep them out, you just
| have to provide an option to mark and filter them.
|
| Then, it's possible to see the full spectrum of comments and
| interact with everybody. However, if discussions become too
| big, the filters can be used to remove the noise.
|
| Creating such a system will be brutally eye-opening for some
| people but it will inevitably come. The minimum viable product
| will be the Chinese social graph. If China plays its cards
| right, they have the tool to overcome Eternal September.
| Giornito wrote:
| Golden age often comes from a nostalgia driven perspective of
| what life seemed to be at some point. In many cases it involves
| individuals who had similar views and beliefs which made them
| feel more comfortable around each other. In other cases, it is
| just the brain looking for things that made someone feel good,
| even if it only accounted for a short picture of what the
| good/service/experience really was.
| drpgq wrote:
| There's probably something to the average user IQ declining
| towards the overall population mean as a site becomes more
| popular.
| bmgxyz wrote:
| You may be right, but for what it's worth I caution you
| against equating being early and being smart.
| yoz-y wrote:
| Also intelligent people can be toxic, unwelcoming and plain
| rude too.
| mfer wrote:
| Technology both represents and influences our culture. For
| example, usenet and other forms of Internet posting in the past
| were more long form. They types of thinking and discussion were
| different. These days it's much shorter leading to shallower
| comments. Thinking in longer form vs short form influences us.
|
| Usenet itself may be a thing of the past but some of the useful
| elements can be reincorporated going forward.
| LaGrange wrote:
| > I'm too young to have been a part of Usenet, but it seems to
| me that there's no good way to recreate the space described in
| the article without keeping most people out.
|
| Hahahah no. So the biggest problem of usenet wasn't really the
| throngs of the "Eternal September" people (I hate the
| expression, btw). It was that nearly every Usenet group had its
| resident troll with too much time on their hands and an extreme
| obsession. So you'd post about, say, plans to build a 2nd
| railway track between Chachowek and Radom, and you'd get some
| dude go at you about how useless that would be and how
| improving transport between Warsaw and Radom would destroy the
| public infrastructure of the entire country. This is not
| theoretical, I've stumbled on usenet archives from _a few years
| ago_ recently and have seen the dude still going.
|
| And it was everywhere. Operating systems? Some journalist going
| off about how Mac's better than Linux in Every. Single. Thread.
| General "whine about the world" group? Some random libertarian
| to tell you that actually it's you who sucks.
|
| It wasn't many people, but they were active enough to ruin
| everyone's day. You could mute them, but unless you muted every
| thread that included them (and nearly every did) you'd still be
| exposed to them. And, because I happened to meet a few of them
| personally: if you further restrict the space by means,
| credentials and "interest", all you're going to get is a higher
| concentration of these people.
| pmoriarty wrote:
| _" So the biggest problem of usenet ... was that nearly every
| Usenet group had its resident troll with too much time on
| their hands and an extreme obsession."_
|
| This is what kill files were for, which every half-decent
| news reader of the time had (something that's _still_ lacking
| in most contemporary web forums).
|
| So trolling wasn't really a problem, because you could easily
| filter out the trolls. Same with spam, especially once
| Bayesian spam filtering was invented.
|
| No, the real challenge that Usenet faced was the World-Wide
| Web. People were enamoured with the new shiny, with
| hypertext, and with embedded pictures and styling, which
| Usenet did not have.
|
| Web forums were also a lot easier to use. You didn't need to
| download or learn to use a news client. All you needed was a
| web browser, which everyone already had and knew how to use.
|
| Also, web search results on your topic of interest usually
| pointed you to forums, not to Usenet newsgroups.
|
| If Usenet was better integrated in to the web, it might have
| stood a chance.
| LaGrange wrote:
| > This is what kill files were for, which every half-decent
| news reader of the time had (something that's still lacking
| in most contemporary web forums).
|
| ...that just didn't work, as I even wrote: with active
| trolls _most_ threads had the troll somewhere in them. They
| tended to dominate the groups and saturate everyone else's
| time.
|
| > Web forums were also a lot easier to use. You didn't need
| to download or learn to use a news client. All you needed
| was a web browser, which everyone already had and knew how
| to use.
|
| Oh, and frequently had better moderation. Maybe because of
| accumulated experience, or maybe because they were less
| cliquish than usenet was.
|
| > If Usenet was better integrated in to the web, it might
| have stood a chance.
|
| Usenet better integrated with the web is called a web
| forum. Some, like Discourse, are even pretty good, they're
| far easier to set up than a non-alt usenet group. The one
| thing going for Usenet is modempunk nostalgia.
| pwg wrote:
| > This is what kill files were for, which every half-decent
| news reader of the time had (something that's still lacking
| in most contemporary web forums).
|
| Agreed, but the problem was that every new user began with
| an otherwise empty killfile. And so they had to be quite
| thick-skinned to outlast the barrage long enough to build
| up a respectable kill file to quash the noise, spam, and
| trolls.
|
| Unfortunately what often happened is the new user was
| overwhelmed, disappeared, and never returned.
|
| > No, the real challenge that Usenet faced was the World-
| Wide Web. People were enamoured with the new shiny, with
| hypertext, and with embedded pictures and styling, which
| Usenet did not have.
|
| This had a _very_ significant effect. The draw of the web,
| new, shiny, and fancier than plain text Usenet postings,
| had a huge effect in cutting off the influx of new users to
| replace those who disappeared.
| flyinghamster wrote:
| Spot-on. I was on Usenet for a bit in the 1980s, and loved it.
| After I was out of school, though, it was effectively
| unavailable to me until internet access opened up in the 1990s.
|
| In the meantime, though, there was a similar but smaller
| network that operated in a similar fashion: FidoNet's Echomail
| system. For younger readers, FidoNet was a network of dialup
| BBS systems (usually single-user) with a central list of nodes
| distributed weekly. Echomail was an add-on that worked in much
| the same manner as Usenet; a message posted in a forum would be
| propagated to other systems sharing that forum. Strictly
| speaking, both still exist today, but like Usenet, FidoNet is a
| shadow of itself, and most FidoNet nodes are using the internet
| instead of dialup modems these days.
|
| I recall FidoNet having a lot fewer problems with spam and bad
| actors than Usenet, though, mostly because troublesome nodes
| could and did get de-listed.
| shadowgovt wrote:
| I think you are correct, and inconveniently, the principle
| doesn't apply to only USENET.
|
| The public square serves a vital purpose in public discourse
| and society at large, but it isn't actually where great ideas
| are born; it's where they're tested. Traditionally, salons and
| small groups are where great ideas are born and polished before
| being presented to a public. Otherwise, you're fighting a low
| signal-to-noise ratio that hampers motion.
| dredmorbius wrote:
| Warrens and Plazas.
|
| Both are necessary. Neither is superior. They are
| complements.
|
| I'd hived the idea from elsewhere, and this piece discusses
| it in the context of trying to form a new community (largely
| failed), but the ideas may interest:
|
| https://old.reddit.com/r/MKaTH/comments/4ntf5p/public_privat.
| ..
| dredmorbius wrote:
| Almost certainly from Ribbonfarm:
|
| https://www.ribbonfarm.com/2010/10/27/warrens-plazas-and-
| the...
|
| The Evaporative Cooling Effect is also a useful notion.
|
| http://blog.bumblebeelabs.com/social-software-
| sundays-2-the-...
|
| Archive as site seems down: https://web.archive.org/web/201
| 01012105003/http://blog.bumbl...
| javajosh wrote:
| What is the modern equivalent of a salon? Coffee shop?
| hairofadog wrote:
| I think this forum right here is pretty close to the modern
| equivalent of a salon.
| [deleted]
| shadowgovt wrote:
| I want to give a tongue-and-cheek answer and say "Discord
| and Slack," but more realistically I think you're right.
| Coffee shop, living room meet-up, face-to-face interactions
| among peers.
| ghaff wrote:
| A coffee shop is pretty much the modern version. In England
| coffee houses played the role in the Enlightenment. [1]
| Salons were more associated with France and were a bit
| different but related concept. [2]
|
| [1] https://conversational-leadership.net/coffee-
| houses/https://...
|
| [2] https://sites.google.com/a/wisc.edu/ils202fall11/home/s
| tuden...
| SamBam wrote:
| Is a coffee shop really the modern version -- in context?
|
| I think the whole relevance of the "coffee house" in the
| Enlightenment was that it was a space where different
| people were talking to each other and sharing ideas.
|
| Does that happen in coffee shops anymore? Do strangers
| talk about more than pleasantries, if that?
| ghaff wrote:
| People do meet and have discussions in Starbucks. You're
| probably right though that it's not really the same thing
| --if only because there are so many ways to have
| discussions that don't require physically sitting at the
| same table.
| type0 wrote:
| > Does that happen in coffee shops anymore? Do strangers
| talk about more than pleasantries, if that?
|
| Even in Vienna, which is somewhat of a self proclaimed
| coffee house capital of the world you can't really have
| any prolong conversations with strangers to exchange
| ideas. Beer houses of today are probably more suitable
| for discussions.
| vertig0h wrote:
| Online forums.
|
| Salons in 18th and 19th century Europe generally revolved
| around one or a few wealthy patrons of the salon who not
| only funded its operations but also attracted the
| luminaries and intellectuals to its doors.
|
| The analogue of patrons on the internet would be forum
| moderators, website owners, group creators, etc. But only
| to a certain extent because the owners and maintainers of
| an online forum are far less personally engaged with the
| conversation and daily goings on.
|
| Of course the scale is much larger on the internet, and we
| don't actually deal with one another face to face. Banter
| is usually restricted as well and discussions are highly
| focused, in contrast to salons which were more of a social
| club.
| pbalau wrote:
| I don't think online forums are the equivalent of
| saloons. I believe saloons were fairly scarce, thus if
| you got banned from one, you could not simply pop in
| another or make another account. The penalty for breaking
| the rules was fairly high and that made people leave some
| of their "crazy" at home.
| kazinator wrote:
| > _I 'm too young to have been a part of Usenet._
|
| Usenet exists. I read daily and post regularly.
|
| Just came here after a little Usenet session.
| kseistrup wrote:
| Me too. A few friends and I are running our own INN servers
| that are peering with bigger sites like AOIE, SunSITE, FU-
| Berlin, and others.
| taborj wrote:
| Same. I highly recommend those interested go get an account
| (some are free!) from someplace like https://www.eternal-
| september.org/
| tomjen3 wrote:
| Which groups do you go to? If you don't want to post
| publically, you can email me at tomjen.net@gmail.com
| u801e wrote:
| I would, except the groups I used to post in are essentially
| dead.
| taborj wrote:
| I've run into this as well.
|
| On the flip side, they were only "alive" because people --
| like me, like you -- posted to them. So they're dead, but
| like Lazarus they can be resurrected by commanding them to
| be alive, through the simple mechanic of using them, and
| encouraging others to come participate.
| floren wrote:
| I'm up for it! Where do you like to post?
| taborj wrote:
| I frequent alt.ham.radio, comp.sys.cbm and comp.os.vms
| (which is quite active). I lurk on some others that are
| generally used for notifications, such as alt.bbs (and
| alt.bbs.ads).
|
| I'm always up for more newgroups to hold my interest.
| Another poster mentioned comp.misc is active, so I'll
| probably start checking that one out as well.
| pferde wrote:
| Something like that happened back when Slashdot was
| bought by Dice.com, and lot of users just up and left.
| Some people started building new, similar sites, but a
| lot of them agreed to go to Usenet newsgroup comp.misc,
| which had been long dormant by that time, with nothing
| but occassional spam posting.
|
| Since then, comp.misc has been a rather nice place.
|
| EDIT: Corrected the newsgroup name. Note to self: don't
| drink and type.
| nonbirithm wrote:
| I opened up comp.misc and the first post was from 9 days
| ago arguing that women can't code, and the insinuating
| tirade of arguments.
|
| I don't think you'd find that on HN at least.
|
| I feel like since just anyone can sign up for Usenet
| these days instead of just the technologically motivated,
| communities like them have been altered significantly.
| pferde wrote:
| Yeah, I haven't been there myself in months (I forget,
| plus do not have a NNTP reader in my phone), but I don't
| remember it being this bad before.
|
| Still, there are still interesting threads, and with
| judicious application of PLONK (something you can't do on
| modern web forums like HN, by the way), you can make the
| worst idiots out of your sight.
| superkuh wrote:
| Join us on alt.cyberpunk.
| endorphone wrote:
| Usenet always had a dramatically diverse group of participants.
| However each peer -- how you connected, likely through your
| university -- had an authoritative position over participants,
| and was the singular authenticating partner[1]. So if you were
| a shitbag, so to speak, your university could do something
| about it, which can be as simple as removing usenet access
| which left one with no alternatives. And given that you only
| had one usenet account, any newsgroup could ban you without one
| being able to just pop up again.
|
| It started to fall apart when the nodes on the network included
| every ISP, etc. When people who have no authority over the
| participants, and no real punitive avenue if they broke
| conventions, it started to fall apart. Even if you got banned
| from that node, there were thousands of other nodes to jump to
| and continue your abuse.
|
| [1] When you went to some university, the account they provided
| you was your authentication on Usenet. You had that single
| account and it was your sole key to the network.
| PaulRobinson wrote:
| Usenet was full of people like me: educated, tech-savvy and
| interested in a whole wide range of obsessions.
|
| The first time I "met" people who weren't involved in tech
| online was probably Friends Reunited (school friends) and
| then Facebook. Reddit, Twitter, Instagram, Snapchat and
| TikTok are all far more diverse than Usenet ever was
| (although I only ever use Twitter these days, so that might
| have changed).
|
| I therefore can't accept your view that it had a dramatically
| diverse group of participants. It has an even less diverse
| group of users today, and it's worth remembering we should
| probably not talk about it exclusively in the past tense:
| it's still an active thing.
|
| On the authority thing: the OP link suggests a public shared
| space has to be owned collectively, and therefore the
| policing model that Usenet lacked (other than a few good
| actors at the edge of the network like you suggest), will
| eventually be its downfall. We see this in unmoderated spaces
| all over the Internet today.
|
| All public spaces are at risk of anarchy without some sort of
| policing, once populations reach a certain size. This is not
| a uniquely digital/online phenomenon.
|
| I wonder if it's possible to create a protocol where policing
| is built in somehow, whilst retaining the public commons
| features that the OP desires.
| plughs wrote:
| > Usenet was full of people like me
|
| I recognize you from afu! I only lurked, but I inevitably
| think of that group when I remember how good usenet used to
| be.
| Majromax wrote:
| > When people who have no authority over the participants,
|
| I don't think it's exactly a matter of authority. A
| university wouldn't care about someone merely being a troll
| in Usenet; they'd have to be breaking a law or otherwise
| acting egregiously to attract disciplinary action.
|
| Instead, I think it's a matter of reputation. A smaller
| community is one where everyone is likely to be familiar with
| everyone else on an individual basis, and a community with a
| technical barrier to access imposes a transition cost on
| someone wanting to take their ball and go elsewhere.
|
| In my opinion, both of these things act together to change
| one's target audience and engagement style. In such small
| Usenet-style communities, a user is speaking to that
| community at large. In larger forums with less individual
| reputation and lower barriers to access, the forum instead
| becomes more of a performance place: people are speaking to a
| subset of like-minded supporters.
|
| Twitter is a great example of a very large forum with a near
| zero-barrier, where I can shout _at_ an adversary while
| speaking _to_ like-minded people.
| luckylion wrote:
| > Usenet always had a dramatically diverse group of
| participants.
|
| How so? It was universities, tech people in corporations and
| a few folks that just had PCs as a hobby. In short: upper
| middle class (because those things are expensive), educated
| (because it really wasn't as simple as it is today) and with
| time on their hands.
|
| There may been some diversity in political leanings, but on
| the fundamentals, education, social class etc?
| jerf wrote:
| It depends on the time frame you're looking at. Sure, the
| very, _very_ beginning was that isolated, but by the mid-
| to-late 1990s, almost any first-world country resident
| could get to it if they _really_ wanted to. Varying degrees
| of how hard you have to "really" want it still, of course.
| But you certainly had non-trivial
| "alt.anything.you.can.think.of" communities for LGBT, any
| radical political position you can name that existed at the
| time, obscure anime fandoms, or anything else you can think
| of. The mathematical principle of "regression to the mean"
| ensures that you get a non-trivial diversity (by pretty
| much any standard) long before you get to the point that
| "everybody" can get on there. You do not need access by
| literally 100% of the possible population before you get
| "diversity". (After all, the internet is still not there
| yet either even in 2020.)
|
| (The only exception is if by "diversity" you mean "exact
| proportionality of representation"... but that's not the
| same thing. If you want to say that, go ahead. At that
| point I will agree with you that there wasn't exact
| proportionality of representation... but then, there isn't
| today either, nor is it even clear how one would get there,
| especially as you crank the requisite "exactness" up. Two
| decimal places? Four?)
| luckylion wrote:
| Yes, sure, but that's like saying that country clubs are
| diverse because members have different hobbies. If they
| _really_ want to, anyone could join, it 's just easier
| for some than for others.
|
| My point is that it's a diversity of opinions (maybe;
| they tend to be closer together on the important things,
| too, demographics predict politics fairly well after all)
| and of hobbies or interests, but not of backgrounds, i.e.
| where the rubber meets the road. I understand that people
| usually do not mean "the conservative child of lawyer A
| and the progressive child of investment banker B chat
| about their shared interests with the apolitical child of
| entrepreneur C", but "the child of a lawyer, the child of
| an office worker chat with the child of a day laborer".
|
| Again, I don't mind it not being or having been like
| that, I don't see any intrinsic value in diversity by
| itself. Calling it diverse just sounds like a
| misrepresentation of what it was.
| endorphone wrote:
| This sounds remarkably elitist. And honestly if one were to
| analyze the trolls of the world, I'd wager "upper middle
| class" (or simply middle class -- it was hardly so
| exclusive) and "educated" would be a dominant trait.
|
| A single university is an wide spectrum of participants.
| Yes, there are some demographic commonalities, but there
| are so many significant differences. Now add universities
| across the spectrum and across the globe.
| luckylion wrote:
| > A single university is an wide spectrum of
| participants.
|
| Is it? Sure, you'll have people studying physics, law and
| economics, but they'll be pretty similar in background.
| I'm not saying that usenet was a hive mind, far from it,
| but it certainly wasn't very "diverse" with regards to
| the background of participants.
| endorphone wrote:
| "Usenet always had a dramatically diverse group of
| participants"
|
| Who knew this was debatable. Every race, creed, religion, and
| demographic (even if skewed slightly to the higher end).
| Every political lean imaginable. People in sports programs,
| arts programs, and every other nature.
|
| The notion that this group has some natural agreement is not
| reality based.
| technofiend wrote:
| Post-golden age Usenet: see Eternal September [1] on Wikipedia.
|
| [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eternal_September
|
| The zeitgeist definitely changed as the general public gained
| access. Prior to wide availability conversations were close to
| Hacker News posts in that people were mindful to be
| constructive and meaningfully contribute to conversations. But
| that was only in the macro - there were still pockets of poor
| behavior and even groups dedicated to different standards,
| notably the alt tree was meant to be looser and groups like
| alt.flame were no-holds-barred.
|
| Similar to modern-day memes, one of the alt.flame threads
| inspired a tshirt (which I still have, somewhere) sporting the
| quote "Go jump in a goddamn volcano, you f.... cave newt." And
| like memes of today you need some cultural literacy to get the
| reference, much less for it to be funny.
| amyjess wrote:
| And keep in mind that HN is only able to be the way it is
| because of constant, vigilant moderation.
|
| The Internet has simply grown too large over the past couple
| of decades for any unmoderated public space to not be taken
| over by people who don't care about community norms,
| individual bad actors, organized invasions, and psyops.
|
| Usenet could handle the first two in small doses: people who
| don't care about community norms will eventually learn or
| leave, bad actors will get bored of trolling, and persistent
| individuals can be killfiled. But both of those two flooding
| in in large groups can kill a community. If bad actors harass
| and attack every new person every time they post something,
| the community can't grow. and enough people in a community
| who disregard the existing norms will simply cause the
| Overton Window to shift, establishing a new normal. And a
| killfile isn't a large-scale solution: when you have to have
| a triple-digit killfile just to get past the noise and
| actually _see_ the useful discussion, the community is dead.
|
| Usenet on the other hand has never been resilient against
| coordinated activity. The Meow Wars were one of the most
| deleterious things to ever happen to Usenet back in the day,
| and I'm sure it contributed a lot to people abandoning Usenet
| for moderated web forums.
|
| Now that the Internet has had 20 more years to further
| develop invasion techniques, and the invading forces are even
| larger and more malignant than ever, unmoderated communities
| can't survive unless they're invisible. Even heavily-
| moderated communities have trouble handling incoming raids
| from 4chan and 8chan.
|
| And then you have the subtle psyops, groups stealthily
| infiltrating others in order to promote an agenda. Imagine a
| coordinated effort to have new people join a newsgroup for a
| TV show and slowly push the Overton Window towards
| normalizing antisemitism. This is hard to detect and root out
| even in a place with moderators (see: Stormfront's psyop in
| /r/videos), and unmoderated spaces are completely helpless
| against this kind of assault.
| technofiend wrote:
| >Usenet on the other hand has never been resilient against
| coordinated activity. The Meow Wars were one of the most
| deleterious things to ever happen to Usenet back in the
| day, and I'm sure it contributed a lot to people abandoning
| Usenet for moderated web forums.
|
| >Now that the Internet has had 20 more years to further
| develop invasion techniques, and the invading forces are
| even larger and more malignant than ever, unmoderated
| communities can't survive unless they're invisible. Even
| heavily-moderated communities have trouble handling
| incoming raids from 4chan and 8chan.
|
| You really hit the nail on the proverbial head... curated
| or moderated forums are really the only thing that can work
| in the face of so much noise, but without passionate
| ownership as we have here on HN or possibly a paid position
| of some kind I'm not sure what the answer is. PGP's web of
| trust model sort of addressed this but failed to embrace
| the nuance of human social interaction needed in modern
| society.
|
| Google's circles kind of tried to do the right thing but
| failed there too. What I mean in a practical example is if
| my father who describes himself as slightly more
| conservative than Gengis Khan wants to send me some
| conservative screed that's fine I can handle it, but I
| don't want that to be generally consumable content in my
| "feed" and associated to me for all my friends to see,
| particularly as my views may be (and often are) wildly
| different. I need to firewall people based on
| multidimensional levels of interest and trust.
|
| I abandoned Facebook over a decade ago because their
| business model is antithetical to that way of thinking and
| their regular and involuntary updates to privacy policy and
| settings simply clashed too much with my needs. A practical
| example at the time was something like my wife didn't want
| photos of her shared with anyone but family, but I had
| friended people she'd never heard of and FB let them or
| possibly even friends of friends see her in my posts. Since
| I couldn't guarantee perfect separation of interests thanks
| to their meddlesome tweaking I deleted facebook.
|
| I suppose the trolls can claim a kind of victory because at
| least for me it's just easier to tune out and withdraw
| rather than slog through the noise.
| Animats wrote:
| _There 's no good way to recreate the space described in the
| article without keeping most people out._
|
| Right. Anonymity plus the ability to create an unlimited number
| of accounts guarantees spam.
|
| Originally, to have a USENET address you had to have an account
| on a time-sharing computer of moderate size, or run your own
| node. Both were hard to create in bulk, which kept the noise
| level down.
|
| What can we use now? Facebook real names? RealID? Proof of
| work?
| anyonecancode wrote:
| "In my estimation, the larger and broader a group is, the more
| it'll approximate human culture and interaction as a whole. It
| shouldn'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)."
|
| Yes and no, I think. Physical space has some constraints that
| counter this in a way online spaces don't. Take a place like
| NYC, for instance, where there are so many people, from so many
| parts of the world, that it arguably begins to "approximate
| human culture and interaction as a whole." What you see here is
| that people start to subdivide the space and agree on expected
| behavior -- in public spaces, like the subway, people by and
| large try to reduce interactions. Then there are public spaces
| that are pseudo-private, like bars or cafes or restaurants, but
| each have their own understood rules -- at a bar you can start
| to talk up a stranger, at a restaurant you don't just walk to a
| random table and join in a conversation. There are also many
| private spaces -- apartments, or your own room in an apartment
| shared with roommates.
|
| Contrast that with the typical online space, where it's not
| just that there are lots of people, but also no constraints.
| It's the equivalent of going on to a subway and yelling at
| someone about politics...
|
| I don't think the problem with the modern internet is scale so
| much as a failure to build some constraints into its design.
| Everything is public at a very loud volume.
| Psyladine wrote:
| >Take a place like NYC, for instance, where there are so many
| people, from so many parts of the world, that it arguably
| begins to "approximate human culture and interaction as a
| whole."
|
| Except people are a product of context, so putting them into
| a new context creates a new breed, the new yorker, of which
| no human being aspires to.
| anyonecancode wrote:
| Substitute any decently large physical collection of people
| for NYC. Same overall point I was trying to make applies.
| jasode wrote:
| _> I don't think the problem with the modern internet is
| scale so much as a failure to build some constraints into its
| design. _
|
| Can you speak more concretely what you mean here?
|
| Are you talking about technical "constraints" into protocols
| such as "http" or "TCPIP"? Or constraints into DNS? Or
| constraints on HTML markup language?
|
| What would an _" internet technical architecture designed to
| prevent negativity"_ actually look like? Is there an example
| repo on github or a computer science research paper showing
| the algorithms that would satisfy this ideal?
| anyonecancode wrote:
| I'm not sure -- in the physical space, a lot of the
| constraints are social, but they emerged in the context of
| physical constraints. You could, for example, walk into a
| restaurant and start haranguing the people there, but
| generally people don't. Without even raising the
| possibility of the police being called, there's a whole set
| of inputs the would-be haranguer can see and respond to --
| the facial expressions and other body language of
| disapproval by the others in the restaurant, the sudden
| change in noise patterns in the room as all the private
| conversations ceased and everyone shifted their attention
| to the disruption, etc. Such social signals are lacking or
| extremely muted in non-physical settings. Is there a way to
| bring similar social signals to the online world? Maybe
| some equivalent will emerge as we grow accustomed to being
| online (though, given how poorly people drive despite cars
| being a thing for several generations, I'm skeptical of our
| ability to fully adapt our social systems to some kinds of
| technology).
|
| Or to take another example of constraints -- if someone in
| a bar spreads a false rumor, that misinformation can
| quickly spread to all the patrons in the bar, but it's
| reach beyond that bar will be slow. By that time more
| factual information might also be circulating, and the
| damage of the false information blunted. Online, by
| contrast, misinformation spreads so much faster than
| factual information that it is often nearly impossible to
| counter.
|
| I don't know what the solution exactly is here, but I feel
| that public spaces need to have more speedbumps. In the
| same way that people are jerks when they drive and the
| answer is often "less driving, and slower," I suspect that
| the answer to bad online social spaces is "less online, and
| slower," but I'm not sure what that looks like.
| antepodius wrote:
| >if someone in a bar spreads a false rumor, that
| misinformation can quickly spread to all the patrons in
| the bar, but it's reach beyond that bar will be slow. By
| that time more factual information might also be
| circulating, and the damage of the false information
| blunted [...]
|
| I think you're being a bit optimistic about physical
| spaces here. Rumor mills are as old as the hills. News
| spreads more slowly IRL, but that goes for truth as well
| as falsehood. You claim that misinformation spreads
| faster online than truth and imply this is different from
| IRL info, but I don't see why this should be the case.
| The same underlying reasons that favourite one message
| over another operate in both domains.
| ryandrake wrote:
| > I suspect that the answer to bad online social spaces
| is "less online, and slower," but I'm not sure what that
| looks like.
|
| Kind of like how HN limits us to a handful of posts per
| day before the "you're posting too much" roadblock,
| causing you to really think about what you have to say
| and whether you want to burn one of your budget on it.
| Usenet could have used something like that.
| JoshTriplett wrote:
| > Is there a way to bring similar social signals to the
| online world?
|
| You're assuming that people will react to those signals
| by stopping (or not starting in the first place). Many of
| the most disruptive people look for those signals as
| their goal, because they _want_ to be disruptive.
|
| Think about people who will interpret any variation of
| "ugh" signals as "oooh, I've found the buttons to poke to
| get fun noises". If you want to solve this problem,
| that's a large part of the threat model.
| anyonecancode wrote:
| Another angle on this is the economic models. Physical
| social spaces are generally social as a side effect -- it's
| not how they make money. People go to a restaurant or a bar
| because they want to be around other people, but bars an
| restaurants make their money by selling food and drink, not
| by selling a "social experience."
|
| The economic models we've seen so far online are different
| -- the product is "be social here" and I think that's
| problematic. Few people want to pay just to hang out,
| online or off. But those selling this space have to make
| money somehow -- so if you're Facebook, you make your money
| by advertising to the people hanging out at your place,
| meaning to make more money you need to get more people to
| come be advertised to, or convince advertisers they're
| getting more value per ad (and so you start intrusively
| data mining your advertising targets).
| cmsj wrote:
| Usenet somewhat has that division of space, in that it's
| divided up into thousands of individual newsgroups, each of
| which is (ostensibly) about a particular topic.
|
| It's more like having thousands of parallel NYCs, each one
| focusing on just a specific subset of the overall culture. To
| your point, they're still public spaces though where anyone
| can come in and yell about their thing, that is undeniable
| (and it happened).
| derefr wrote:
| > Contrast that with the typical online space, where it's not
| just that there are lots of people, but also no constraints.
|
| I feel like you're right about some communities, and wrong
| about others, and it's interesting to distinguish the two,
| because I don't think this is a distinction anyone usually
| bothers to make.
|
| There are some communities where the same community divides
| its _activity_ across multiple _channels_. Your average
| "same _small_ group of people, different channels " Slack or
| Discord server is this way. IRC communities also usually end
| up this way after they grow to sufficient size, forking off
| channels of #foo-offtopic, #foo-announce, #foo-help, etc.
| phpBB forums are/were well-known for their structure of
| forums with subforums (where most forum admins would set up
| even _more_ subforums than anyone needed, just because they
| could) but where there were certainly always separate "news"
| and "chat" and "on-topic" forums.
|
| But other "communities" (more like societies, I suppose?)
| like Reddit, or Usenet, or Twitter, do basically none of this
| constraint-based splitting. You'll get _topic_ -based
| splitting, but this doesn't change the tone of the
| conversation at all. It's less like being in a separate place
| with its own rules, and more like just having your
| conversation tagged with a topic so that people can find
| conversations like that.
|
| I find that the only time this type of community/society
| seems to work, is when it generates _entirely coincidental_
| non-connected member subgraphs, i.e. when its members _aren
| 't_ just a random sampling of the larger community/society's
| membership, but rather mostly their own cultural enclave that
| happens to use the community/society's social network as a
| gathering place. Then they can have (probably mostly
| implicit) rules that are different from the free-for-all of
| the larger society's.
|
| There are also [sub-]communities with specific explicit
| rules, like Wikipedia, or /r/AskHistorians/. I feel like
| these aren't _really_ relevant to the question, because the
| explicit rules often cause a selection effect in the
| membership who bothers posting, such that it 's not much
| different to just picking those particular people and saying
| that only they can post. So you can't really use them as an
| example of how to solve the problem of general Internet
| discourse being shitty.
| floatingatoll wrote:
| The constraint that no one in tech wants to consider is on
| full-text search.
|
| If you want to regain the pseudo-privacy of physical spaces
| online, put your community's conversations behind an
| authentication barrier and disable full text search of
| conversations.
|
| Search engine indexing is what turns a pseudo-private space
| into a humiliating-public one.
|
| It's okay to let search engines index your forum's existence,
| the sub forums it contains, and their descriptions. But do
| not let them index participants or conversations - either by
| subject, by participants, or by content. And do not offer
| full text search of post content to authenticated members.
| It's okay to index keyword tags, but that's it.
|
| If you do this, you will regain the semi-anonymity that made
| the early Internet possible to enjoy. If you don't, you will
| continue to suffer the trolls and abuse that full-text search
| enabled in the mid-90s (see also DejaNews, X-No-Archive: Yes,
| and Google's purchase of DejaNews).
|
| EDIT: If you truly feel that full-text search is so valuable
| that it must not be withheld, you have to do a lot of things
| to defend against abuse attackers - for example: charge money
| for search credits, deduct credits when they choose to reveal
| the text of results, warn users that their searches will be
| monitored for abuse, require users to be in good standing
| with paid membership and posting activity for at least 90
| days, etc. Otherwise trolls will just use stolen cards to
| perform full content searches to identify users to harass and
| then report their findings back to a central forum. They may
| still do that after all the above criteria, but they'll have
| to work excruciatingly hard at it. Yeah, they could manually
| scrape the site, but you can defend against that too ("you've
| participated on 12 days, so you're allowed to view 12 days of
| old content" is a good simple test).
| Yen wrote:
| I broadly agree that infinite perfect archival, and
| searchability of that archive, make an online discussion
| effectively public forever, subject to broadcast forever.
|
| But, even if you disable search, disable history, there's
| the fundamental fact that _anyone_ can record everything
| they see, easily and silently. You can't just have a
| private authenticated space, you need to be able to
| personally trust every single person you let in that space.
|
| At that point, the features around archiving or search are
| a bit moot.
| floatingatoll wrote:
| "It's impossible to stop a truly determined attacker, so
| we'd better not take any steps to fend off the less-
| determined attackers" is a terrible approach to building
| safe spaces. Some applications of that logic:
|
| - We shouldn't bother checking for characteristics of
| credit card fraud at transaction time, because a
| determined attacker might get a fraudulent card through.
|
| - We shouldn't bother checking IDs at bars, because a
| determined attacker might get a fake ID through.
|
| - We shouldn't bother trying to prevent email spam,
| because a determined attacker might get a spam message
| through.
|
| - We shouldn't bother making laws against recording
| people without their consent, because a determined
| attacker might do so anyways.
|
| Please construct a more plausible argument than "it's
| ultimately hopeless". I'm willing to consider
| alternatives, but I'm not willing to consider fatalism.
| marcinzm wrote:
| Three of the four items you list work because the
| government will use force against those who break the
| rule which prevents rampant abuse. If you want a
| government run and legally protected safe space then
| sure. I suspect most people talking about them don't
| actually want that.
| namanyayg wrote:
| How about not showing any usernames or profile info for any
| search results? That way you get SEO benefits as well.
| floatingatoll wrote:
| Do you want to improve SEO or do you want a safe semi-
| private public space?
|
| If you permit full text search of content, you permit
| abusers to discover and harass your members, because they
| can just sign up to find out who posted something once
| full text search discovers it.
| rubsh99 wrote:
| IMO humans keep developing ornate epistemologies that have
| nothing to do with utilitarian needs of the public, and keep
| ramming them down the masses throats.
|
| An open literal trade network of materials is one thing.
|
| Deference to the godheadeds romantic notions that a minority
| rule of that trade network is proper order is nonsense. It's
| WWE as a political platform.
|
| Yet at scale we keep deferring to the romantic until the
| utilitarian aspect is kept from the growing masses, we refuse
| to accept the literal growing population, so a new romance
| comes along to expand access to utilitarian life and then it's
| gamed over a generation until... well you get the point.
|
| Chimp tribes have been observed killing their alphas.
| Utilitarian life became more normalized for the tribe at large.
|
| Humans might consider figuratively doing the same. Emotionally
| disempowering such nonsense. It does nothing to limit our
| capacity for great ideas. Einstein was not an Alexander the
| Great literally.
|
| We need to be modeling neurons, which is exactly what rule of
| law/religion/monarch does so let's not get all "oh that's scary
| mind control", we've long accepted it's required without having
| the science to see how literal that truth is, to disempower
| unaccountable empire building.
|
| Personal property is one thing. Unaccountable manipulation of
| social agency at scale is inequality, and despite many of us
| here making bank in tech, the daily cadence should be in our
| control as individuals. And it's pretty clear to me the
| messaging has effectively made it so it's not.
|
| Talking heads on MSNBC going on about socialist death squads,
| keeping the ship on course. Then Fox News of course. Don't look
| behind the curtain! I saw this in the 80s/90s too. Who is all
| in office still?
|
| What a shock the narrative isn't feeling much different 30
| years later.
| krilly wrote:
| 4chan partially solved this problem by using inside knowledge
| to identify 'newf*gs' and push them out. Triforce, fingerboxes,
| etc. The weirdly complex boardculture was self sustaining
| because new people couldn't even keep up with the conversation
| without lurking for a year or so.
|
| And then of course, the newcomers started taking the abrasive
| and politically incorrect culture at face value.
| at_a_remove wrote:
| I agree with the first half but not the second.
|
| 4chan has largely been a place where people can express
| counter-culture views. Whoever and whatever could not be
| criticized in public, that was the place to do it it.
|
| The left is currently unable to directly admit to themselves
| that they are in power (they teeter on awareness of it: where
| once they were concerned about tone-policing and voices being
| silenced they now say things like "deplatforming works") in
| the universities, the news, the entertainment media, and so
| on. And so 4chan (although largely /b/ and /pol/) is the
| place where you can tweak the noses of the left just as it
| was once the place to tweak the noses of the Scientologists,
| the right, and so on. Should the pendulum actually swing the
| other way, you would see the shift.
|
| My archives of the chans dates from 2005 onward. You can see
| the expression of what was "naughty" shift one way or another
| tacking into any political or cultural wind.
|
| In any case, 4chan's "solution" has been to simply embrace
| the idea of Eternal September and say, "it's up to YOU to
| ignore things you do not like." Having watched various
| communities succumb to stifling moderation like HOAs
| descending into controlling nightmares, I would say that
| there's a very crude wisdom to the approach.
| jandrese wrote:
| My impression is that 4chan did a Mother Night on itself.
| They started with ironic Hitler memes and edgy teenage shit,
| but eventually people took that seriously and all that were
| left were edgelords and nazis.
| kick wrote:
| 4chan still has a lot of good boards.
|
| People have an impression that 4chan is exclusively /pol/
| and /b/, but a lot of it's fantastic.
| krapp wrote:
| I know it's comforting to believe that there were never any
| _real_ racists on 4chan until relatively recently, and that
| it was all naive shitposters and kids making edgy memes,
| but it 's far more likely that actual racists have always
| hidden behind the pretense of 4chan's ironic culture and
| anonymity, and have always been active there.
| 83hajfjeijg wrote:
| racists, racists everywhere! go to a /pol/ meetup and get
| back to me - it's _still_ edgelords and trolls. they just
| got a lot better at trolling and exploiting mainstream
| media for lulz
| jandrese wrote:
| In the olden days you could read between the lines to see
| people mocking the very culture their post was supposedly
| glorifying. Later this nuance disappeared as the board
| was overrun with actual Neo-Nazis.
| eirini1 wrote:
| Clearly this failed massively, because these days its flooded
| by /r/The_Donald transplants.
| LaGrange wrote:
| 4chan was started by people too awful for Something Awful,
| and I mean you're self-aware enough to recognise that they
| used slurs to scare people off, so you _know_ it was always a
| horrible place.
| aepiepaey wrote:
| "Any community that gets its laughs by pretending to be
| idiots will eventually be flooded by actual idiots who
| mistakenly believe that they're in good company."
| DanBC wrote:
| > of course you'll end up with a group that's more or less
| self-policing
|
| ...don't forget that the supposed golden age of Usenet included
| a bunch of assholes, and that you could usually call or email
| their sysadmin at their university / work and get that person
| to have a quiet word.
| giancarlostoro wrote:
| It's funny because I think this is true of most online
| communities I've joined. People will say on here things like
| "HN has changed now that its big" or "HN is not how it used to
| be", and I'm sure some would say the same of 4chan as well, and
| reddit, and probably even Facebook.
| prepend wrote:
| 4chan was once pretty funny. I remember when they did fun
| things like hack Time polls [0] before they got too big and
| went off the rails.
|
| [0] https://techcrunch.com/2009/04/27/time-magazine-throws-
| up-it...
| giancarlostoro wrote:
| This was around the time I left 4chan, when the gore stuff
| got out of control. The snuff films were being posted and
| other nasty things.
| iso1631 wrote:
| Usenet never survived Eternal September
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eternal_September
| gspr wrote:
| Is perhaps the article author's name - October First - a
| reference to Eternal September? :-)
| crankylinuxuser wrote:
| No, it never survived the late 90's campaigns against the
| RIAA trying to stop piracy at the ISP level. Thats when all
| the big ISPs yanked support, especially after alt.binaries
| was sharing damn near everything.
|
| And they were big bandwidth sinks due to the distributed
| model usenet has, so it was easy for ISPs to yank the
| carpet and look at the immediate gains.
| ajross wrote:
| Yeah, exactly. I worked for a small employer in the early
| mid-90's who maintained a NNTP feed (and had for years),
| and ultimately had to shut it down because it had
| basically become a giant unmanageable firehose of porn
| and piracy. The actual human-written text content had
| dropped down to the 1% level or worse.
|
| Usenet died for the same reason Facebook won: people
| exploit "free" forums in ways that ruin the experience.
| It's simply not possible to have an unmoderated
| discussion environment in an unrestricted internet, which
| is why we're having this discussion on a moderated site.
| pwg wrote:
| I don't think the RIAA's efforts had much effect on
| Usenet, since in that time-frame the RIAA all but ignored
| Usenet. They were much more in shock-and-awe over
| Gnutella (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gnutella) at the
| time.
|
| What I think led to the decline was at least a
| combination of:
|
| 1) an overrun of SPAM - Usenet was first to be hit by the
| spam flood, email SPAM came later as Usenet usage died
| off.
|
| 2) the 'newness' factor and the 'new shiny object' factor
| of the web drew away existing users, and resulted in new
| users never joining (i.e., pictures, fancy formatting,
| etc. all made plain text character Usenet posts look
| "old-fashioned"). And once you have a situation where new
| users don't join, and some number of existing users
| continue to depart, you are on a downward slope to
| disappearance.
|
| Both of the above helped contribute to ISP's dropping
| NNTP service. Bandwidth costs for #1 (plus bandwidth if
| they were carrying alt.binaries.*) and a drop in NNTP
| usage due to #2. They (ISPs) no longer saw offering NNTP
| as a sales factor for obtaining subscribers, and once
| NNTP was no longer a "hook" to bring in subscribers, it
| was only a matter of time before they decided to just
| drop it entirely.
|
| And of course ISP's dropping NNTP accelerated the issues
| around #2 above.
| dspillett wrote:
| _> RIAA ... especially after alt.binaries was sharing
| damn near everything_
|
| While this didn't help, I don't think it was a key factor
| for ISPs. Most ISP NNTP services didn't carry binary
| groups anyway for bandwidth cost reasons. There were
| _some_ issues with groups that linked to where to find
| copyright covered material, but the RIAA and their ilk
| were going more for the direct sources at the time. The
| public list /pointer resources were actually useful to
| them as lists of places to chase down.
|
| Of course this led to people paying for external NNTP
| services which _did_ carry the binaries groups. These
| services _were_ obvious targets for the RIAA and other
| such groups unlike the ISPs.
|
| _> they were big bandwidth sinks due to the distributed
| model usenet has_
|
| This was a far more important reason, even without
| carrying binaries groups Usenet could consume a large
| amount of bandwidth. As well as the incoming load, and
| the bandwidth used sending data to clients, back then
| modem access was common and NNTP lead to people leaving
| the line open to download a huge pile of stuff (most of
| which they'd discard without reading anyway) meaning ISPs
| would have to invest in more modem racks, impose
| unpopular limits, or be perpetually busy, any of which
| would lose them custom.
|
| Another significant issue was the cost of building and
| maintaining the servers required too. To run an NNTP
| service for a noticeable amount of users with reasonable
| performance you needed an arrangement with impressive IO
| performance stats for the time, and the access patterns
| (constant & random) could be murderous to the drives,
| sometimes chewing through them as fast as they could be
| replaced.
| kevin_thibedeau wrote:
| Usenet wasn't dependent on binaries groups in the 90's.
| There was plenty of active discourse. Non-commercial
| hosts could easily drop binary groups. Commercial
| providers were the ones stuck in a bind.
|
| The massive cross-posting of troll threads in the late
| 90's is what helped kill it off. The lack of effective
| moderation controls is the biggest weakness of Usenet.
| chungus_khan wrote:
| My ISP still includes Usenet, which is pretty cool.
| Melting_Harps wrote:
| Who do you use? I had Cox because they were the only one
| left offering usenet (albeit capped).
|
| I was a really late adopter to torrents because of my
| background in usenet, sometime around 2010 all the
| alt.binaries I used to frequent went dead or were broken
| with little par2 support.
|
| It was a great time back in the early 2000s, though.
|
| If I'm honest, I don't download as much as I used to, but
| I do miss the niche communities based on those groups,
| though. They have since moved to IRC but for the most
| part its all gone from what I can tell.
| u801e wrote:
| There are a number of free text only usenet providers out
| there. Why couldn't the ISPs simply stop carrying the
| binary groups instead of discontinuing their usenet
| service entirely?
| ape4 wrote:
| Yeah, no binaries would be a start for a new Usenet
| crankylinuxuser wrote:
| The problem is that binaries are transferred in a non-
| binary manner. Base64 was the preferred way. Except it
| was also used to push images back and forth as well for
| pertinent conversations.
|
| For any method of communication, you can transfer content
| that someone else tries to prevent.
| chalst wrote:
| Upper bounds on per-user bandwidth would work.
| Implementing this is nontrivial, but it's an essentially
| easier problem than spam.
| shadowgovt wrote:
| Upper bounds on per-user bandwidth would help. Though for
| significant messages, one still has sock-puppet accounts
| (or aggregates of like-minded individuals with copies of
| the source message pooling their resources). And, of
| course, upper bounds create knock-on restrictions (should
| the system be allowed to transmit public-domain large-
| volume data? A bandwidth limit blocks that "valid" use
| too).
|
| It's fun to game-theory how such limits can be broken.
| kick wrote:
| Who cares about piracy? It exists over HTTP, too, and in
| a far greater volume than a modern USENET-equivalent
| could ever hope to achieve, and it's not like ISPs need
| to be sucked up to anymore: they've already taken their
| ball and went home on this matter, proverbially-speaking.
| shadowgovt wrote:
| Unfortunately, technically banning binaries merely means
| binaries will be transferred in a more spacetime-
| inefficient manner.
|
| You can mathematically prove atop Shannon's theorem that
| if the system can transmit comprehensible text
| information between two users, it can transmit binaries.
| Worst-case scenario, the users could use the text
| information layer to just say 'one, zero, one, one, zero,
| one' at each other, etc.
|
| (Socially banning them can certainly "work," in the same
| sense that social banning works in any context: pushes it
| underground out of the moderators' lines of sight.
| Depending on what you're trying to accomplish, that can
| be good enough).
| tomjen3 wrote:
| I have given this some consideration, and what I ended up
| with is super low tech: require a user registration where
| users can't just sign up for N accounts and limit all
| accounts to 10 MB a day. Too little to share any
| meaningful binary data and way more than a person can
| type in a day.
| shadowgovt wrote:
| It's a good idea. What stops a user from registering for
| N accounts? How do you tie one account to one human?
| tomjen3 wrote:
| In my original consideration you could only sign up with
| government ID -- actually the original problem was what
| to do prior to the day reddit banned your community, so
| that you could keep going.
|
| In either case it was pretty trivial to picky bag of
| existing IDs, if I ever solve that for the general case,
| you will find out.
| cat199 wrote:
| many interesting usenet groups were long dead before that
| due to spam... the things you mention are more like
| pulling life support than the cause of death
| takeda wrote:
| Spam started when Google acquired DejaNews renamed it to
| Google Groups, and have Usenet access to everyone without
| responding to any abuse complaints.
| iso1631 wrote:
| Not sure, wiki puts that as 2001, and I remember being
| annoyed with spam in the 90s.
|
| I think the rise of web-based forums is what killed off
| usenet as a general tool.
| kps wrote:
| Usenet spam started in 1994, before DejaNews existed.
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Laurence_Canter_and_Martha_
| Sie...
| webmaven wrote:
| That's a bit ahistorical. The "September that never
| ended"[0] (aka "Eternal September") was in 1993, the
| Canter and Siegel Usenet spam[1] was sent the following
| April. The DejaNews acquisition[2] wan't until 2001.
|
| [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eternal_September
|
| [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Laurence_Canter_and_Mar
| tha_Sie...
|
| [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Google_Groups
| inviromentalist wrote:
| The cycle-
|
| >New users, new ideas.
|
| > Mods ban these new ideas because they don't comply with
| existing culture
|
| > Mods get heavy with their justice
|
| >Core users are mistaken for newbies, and face mod wrath
|
| > Core users migrate to new websites
|
| Guess where HN is on this timeline
| Steltek wrote:
| I feel like this is a broadly applicable human phenomenon
| akin to Isaac Aasimov's "Psychohistory" in the Foundation
| series. It also feels easy enough to capture that someone's
| already done the research on it.
| microcolonel wrote:
| HN is kinda dying as a community, though moderation isn't
| the whole story. There are also some long-standing bugs,
| and misbehaviours of the voting system.
|
| Being able to downvote replies without any refutation, to
| me, seems like a massive mistake; it just teaches people
| not to say anything interesting, because they won't get a
| response anyway, even when they're wrong in a subtle or
| interesting way.
|
| The formatting available to users is maybe close to the
| right amount, but the implementation is broken (for
| example, it doesn't end URLs when it sees >, so you end up
| with broken URLs when you go out of your way to protect
| them). It could probably also do with proper first-class
| block quotations, people end up putting them in <pre>
| blocks or italics, and it's not always clear.
| 300bps wrote:
| _HN is kinda dying as a community_
|
| As someone who's been on HN for about 9 years, it's funny
| to read this. I don't see how it's gotten any worse
| during my time here.
|
| I think HN's community is fantastic but you either get it
| or you don't. I really enjoy the signal to noise ratio
| and I'm happy that silly comments and jokes are downvoted
| or moderated.
|
| I read HN with showdead on and personally I think the
| moderation is spot-on.
| hliyan wrote:
| Almost 7 years here. If anything, I feel like the
| discourse has improved.
| microcolonel wrote:
| I get HN's community, and I enjoy it. That said, I often
| think twice about posting anything meaningful; I know
| I'll get a bit frustrated when I put myself out there in
| good faith, and people have nothing to say, but downvote
| anyway.
|
| I know that some very bright and lovely people have been
| totally turned off of the place by this, and this
| behaviour of the system doesn't really help anything.
|
| > _I read HN with showdead on and personally I think the
| moderation is spot-on._
|
| I too use showdead, I think the moderation is generally
| good (though I think at times I've been handled somewhat
| unfairly). The times when there's a dead post that I
| don't think should be dead, it's usually from a person
| who has worn out his welcome with other comments. This is
| why I say moderation isn't the main problem, contrary to
| the parent reply.
| laumars wrote:
| > _That said, I often think twice about posting anything
| meaningful; I know I 'll get a bit frustrated when I put
| myself out there in good faith, and people have nothing
| to say, but downvote anyway._
|
| I've notice more and more people say this and it's a
| sentiment I feel myself too. Personally I don't come on
| HN half as much as I used to because I just don't fancy
| putting myself out there when, at times, it can be a flip
| of the coin whether your gain or lose "points" over it.
|
| I know it's just numbers and it shouldn't bother me; but
| it does. Judging by the comments others have posted, I'm
| not unique in that regard either.
|
| In any case, HN will keep rolling on albeit the signal to
| noise ratio will gradually worsen over time as people get
| more apathetic about spending their time writing a high
| value post.
| geggam wrote:
| Ditto
| krapp wrote:
| >Personally I don't come on HN half as much as I used to
| because I just don't fancy putting myself out there when,
| at times, it can be a flip of the coin whether your gain
| or lose "points" over it.
|
| I just accept that Hacker News culture can be vitriolic
| and petty and that anything I say that's even mildly
| controversial to someone might be downvoted, and I'll
| probably never know why, beyond the obvious fact that at
| least one person disagreed for some reason. It's much
| easier to participate here once you stop caring about it,
| though.
|
| My account's even been rate-limited now, and rather than
| letting that serve its intended purpose of driving me
| away from the site altogether, it just helps me focus on
| writing better comments which sometimes get downvoted
| even more than they otherwise might.
|
| Like the movie says, it's Chinatown. This aspect of
| Hacker News culture is never going to change.
| dsfyu404ed wrote:
| >The times when there's a dead post that I don't think
| should be dead, it's usually from a person who has worn
| out his welcome with other comments. This is why I say
| moderation isn't the main problem, contrary to the parent
| reply
|
| It really annoys me when I see this happen cross
| subject/thread. Someone's opinion about zoning has no
| impact on the correctness of their opinion about low
| level disk IO.
| 300bps wrote:
| With a minimum level of karma, you can vouch for a dead
| comment which will resurrect it. You click on the time
| the comment was posted and then click vouch.
| kevin_thibedeau wrote:
| The reflexive downvoting of earnest opinions is a
| problem, as evidenced by parent.
| philipkglass wrote:
| I'm occasionally surprised by downvotes and wished I knew
| why they were issued, but overall I would rather permit
| silent downvotes than have every disagreement spawn
| another comment.
|
| The tit-for-tat exchange of conflicting earnest opinions
| has degraded many other discussion systems. My wife used
| to comment a lot on a newspaper that used Facebook
| comments. Some articles would have hundreds of comments,
| with 3/4 of them coming from a small core of people
| rehashing fundamental differences of opinion.
|
| Without downvoting, many people can't ignore bad comments
| because "someone is wrong on the internet." Leaving bad
| posts untouched looks like an implicit signal of
| community approval. But countering predictable comments
| with predictable responses makes the whole discussion
| worse.
|
| My favorite comment chains here are ones where I upvote
| the original, then the counterpoint, then the refutation
| to the counterpoint; everyone in the chain is making
| good, fresh arguments or observations.
|
| My least favorite comment chains are ones where someone
| opines aggressively, which spawns a sarcastic reply,
| which leads to a heated response... In those cases I'm
| happy that I can downvote everyone involved without
| having to add any more text.
| ryandrake wrote:
| I think the "drive-by downvoting from people with nothing
| to say" problem could be solved by requiring down voters
| to type even a short rationale. Good ol Slashdot did this
| well 20 years ago with the "reason" drop-down you needed
| to select from when downvoting.
| geggam wrote:
| Quite a bit of group think on HN with controversial
| concepts and ideas squashed.
| pdonis wrote:
| _> HN is kinda dying as a community_
|
| I've been here almost 10 years now, and I don't think so.
| I think the overall quality has remained about the same.
|
| _> Being able to downvote replies without any
| refutation, to me, seems like a massive mistake_
|
| If downvoting is going to be used just to express
| disagreement, I agree it's too easy to do. (A number of
| commenters have posted links to comments by pg where he
| has said that's what downvoting is for, but I still think
| it's too broad.)
|
| If downvoting is going to be used only for posts that are
| seen as adding no value to the discussion or the site,
| that's a much narrower category, and it doesn't really
| lend itself to "refutation".
|
| _> it just teaches people not to say anything
| interesting_
|
| The way around that is to build up enough karma that you
| don't care if you get downvoted. Of course, then you have
| to police yourself by not saying unpopular things just to
| be difficult, but only if you genuinely think they need
| to be said and are adding something to the discussion and
| the site. But people who have built up enough karma are
| going to have learned to do that anyway.
| microcolonel wrote:
| > _Of course, then you have to police yourself by not
| saying unpopular things just to be difficult, but only if
| you genuinely think they need to be said and are adding
| something to the discussion and the site._
|
| It seems like you're impugning their motives here.
|
| Do you honestly think that most people whose thoughtful
| comments are downvoted are engaging in bad faith, "saying
| unpopular things just to be difficult"?
| pdonis wrote:
| _> Do you honestly think that most people whose
| thoughtful comments are downvoted are engaging in bad
| faith, "saying unpopular things just to be difficult"?_
|
| No. Remember that I was talking about a particular subset
| of users: the ones who have enough karma that they don't
| care if they get downvoted. In order to get that much
| karma, such a user will have already made a lot of
| thoughtful comments that were made in good faith. I was
| just observing that, once a user has enough karma not to
| care if they get downvoted, the feedback mechanism that
| regulated their behavior up to that point--karma--no
| longer has much impact. When put in that kind of
| position, it has been known to happen that a person might
| change their behavior. But I would hope and expect that a
| change for the worse under those circumstances would be
| rare.
| leonroy wrote:
| I wouldn't say HN is going down hill but one thing that
| I've noticed more of is downvoting because people
| disagree with the comment.
|
| That was never the intention behind downvoting privileges
| if I remember right. Down voting exists to bury flippant,
| inappropriate or insulting comments.
|
| We really cramp quality discourse when we automatically
| hit down just because we disagree.
| krapp wrote:
| >That was never the intention behind downvoting
| privileges if I remember right. Down voting exists to
| bury flippant, inappropriate or insulting comments.
|
| PG said it was OK once, because upvoting for agreement is
| also OK, and now it's permanently baked into the culture,
| despite the obviously incorrect assumption that merely
| because the actions are symmetrical, their effects are
| also symmetrical.
|
| It's also funny that people have been saying HN has been
| going downhill or "turning into Reddit" since the
| beginning. It's common enough that it is (or used to be)
| specifically barred in the guidelines.
|
| I think there's a tendency for many people to consider
| everyone who came to a culture before them to be
| authentic, and everyone who came after them to be the
| ones destroying it. The Eternal September effect is real,
| but it also panders to nostalgia and a sense of
| entitlement that says things were better when we and our
| culture were more relevant.
| astura wrote:
| No, pg said that downvoting for disagreement is ok.
|
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16131314
| pdonis wrote:
| Then I disagree with him. :-)
|
| I personally try not to downvote a post I disagree with,
| if I think it's a valid, reasonable contribution to the
| discussion.
| brewdad wrote:
| I think this is a reflection of the culture at large,
| online and off, where so many argue in bad faith or
| refuse to accept basic facts as true.
|
| In online communities where so many are anonymous or
| psuedo-anonymous, it becomes easier and more mentally
| healthy to downvote an opposing position than to reply
| with a well reasoned response only to find out your
| dealing with a bot or someone who insists the sky is
| green.
|
| I'm not sure how we fix this, though the signal to noise
| ratio is higher here than many other sites, so I keep
| coming back.
| microcolonel wrote:
| I think it's natural that downvoting is used for
| disagreement, but the barrier to entry should be higher.
|
| The system I've proposed is: you can downvote a post if
| you've upvoted a reply to it, or if you have replied.
|
| If somebody is breaking the rules in clear bad faith,
| that's what flagging is for.
| baud147258 wrote:
| There seems to be something like this in play, there are
| discussions where I can't downvote, but I've never dig up
| to check why
| microcolonel wrote:
| You can't downvote replies to your own replies, that's
| the one I'm aware of. Maybe there's another level based
| on karma that was introduced since I got where I am.
| detaro wrote:
| Can't downvote comments older than >24 hours is another
| thing.
| exterrestrial wrote:
| 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.
|
| 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.
|
| 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.
| [deleted]
| sequoia wrote:
| 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 & we stopped.
|
| 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 "for abuse." 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.
| MrGilbert wrote:
| > [...] how to build better online communities by studying
| internet history.
|
| I love that part already, even without reading the full article.
| Yesterday, I had an interesting experience (yes, storytime):
|
| I started using a fountain pen again a while ago, and wanted to
| research why I've some pain in my wrist after using it[1]. So I
| stumbled upon an old thread, which basically asked how to develop
| a "well-refined handwriting"[2]. This thread was from 2004, so
| just short after when I started to use "the internet". The
| conversation was all in all very polite, respectful, with some
| tips from other members, and often some kind of "well, you could
| try it like this and that" or "I found something here, where xyz
| showed you could do it like this", "I prefer to do it like this,
| but ymmv.", and etc.
|
| The thread spans 19 pages, and, interestingly, is still active
| almost 15 years later.
|
| What stroke me the most was the change of tone towards the end.
| There was a lot more "you HAVE to do it like that", "THIS is how
| it WORKS!" and there like. Also, they started discussing what
| "well-refined" means at all. 15 years later. There was a lot of,
| let's say, "whining" towards the end of this thread (that school
| nowadays needs a lot of parental involvment, nothing works, and
| everything is bad).
|
| I am left confused. Something has changed in the last 15 years,
| and I'm not sure what the reason is.
|
| [1]: You guessed it: It has to do with the way I'm holding it.
| Now, back to topic!
|
| [2]: //edited upon request, german page though:
| https://www.penexchange.de/forum_neu/viewtopic.php?f=17&t=37...
| prox wrote:
| I think you bumped into something here. I noticed trends over
| the years in various communities. I personally call it the
| "proverbial 12 years old" effect. I came up with it when I
| noticed that on days when school was out that some public fora
| became a lot more degenerate (trolling, low-effort, accusatory
| tone, and so on) and often it was noticeable age played a
| factor.
|
| It's probably wrong to call it that towards the many fine young
| users on any platform, but there is definitely some
| correlation.
|
| There is also a trend when a social media platform becomes
| suddenly very popular : not all have the means, the inclination
| or the ability to be respectful.
|
| As others mentioned, training people to be excellent towards
| one another and forming and following a netiquette takes time,
| and unfortunately needs to be enforced (even at HN which I feel
| has a pretty good to high standard for discussions and little
| tolerance for bad faith disruption)
| yummypaint wrote:
| Could it be more school-aged children online?
| yori wrote:
| > Despite the english name of the website, it's a german page,
| so no use in linking it here I suppose.
|
| No, please do link it here. First, there are many Germans here
| who would appreciate it. Second, people like me who cannot read
| German can still auto-translate the page to English and read
| it.
| MrGilbert wrote:
| Understood - I added the link. :)
| cjslep wrote:
| 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.
| tom-thistime wrote:
| Key part: Usenet was effectively a public space. Nobody had their
| hand on the OFF switch.
|
| Much less important part: Usenet was full of horrible behavior
| for many years before people started complaining about "Endless
| September." If there was a golden age it was before my time
| (1985).
| webmaven wrote:
| Prior to "Eternal September", maintaining a personal
| killfile[0]/scorefile was only a minor chore (indeed, adding
| someone to your killfile could be accompanied by a sense of
| glee), but in the next few years the addition of spam to the
| mix made it overwhelming, giving an edge to moderated mailing
| lists and discussion boards.
|
| YMMV, of course, depending on which groups you frequented and
| their community norms.
|
| pg's "A Plan for Spam"[1] provided a lower-effort solution
| eventually, but by then it was too late as the onboarding
| experience for new users had become hopelessly polluted and
| toxic (new email users at least had a grace period before their
| address was discovered).
|
| [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kill_file
|
| [1] http://www.paulgraham.com/spam.html
| PaulDavisThe1st wrote:
| Bitnet! the hot tub channel! 1985! the golden age!
| sneak wrote:
| "dealing with bad actors", as the author puts it, is censorship
| by another name.
|
| Anything truly a public space is going to be filled with things
| you don't like seeing. That's the messy part of real freedom for
| a whole crowd of people.
|
| I recently wrote about 2k words on this exact topic:
|
| From https://sneak.berlin/20200211/instagram/ :
|
| > _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 /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._
|
| > _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._
| netsharc wrote:
| To anyone who read through those 2k words: Is it worth reading
| (after clicking away a "subscribe to my newsletter!" dialog),
| or is it just some guy's mental masturbation? (Hah, on the
| topic of things one doesn't like seeing...).
|
| I scrolled to the end and I think sneak concluded with "delete
| social media, send emails to each other".
|
| Then again, people who think they're highly philosophical
| enough to be offering newsletter subscriptions are probably not
| worth reading.
| krapp wrote:
| >"dealing with bad actors", as the author puts it, is
| censorship by another name.
|
| First, one must accept that bad actors exist, and that all
| forms of moderation are not merely attempts at political or
| cultural oppression.
|
| Second, one must accept that all public spaces, both online and
| offline, enforce some degree of restriction on how one can
| legitimately interact with that space. I cannot, for example,
| walk nude in any public place, or shout obscenities at people
| with a megaphone without suffering both social and legal
| repercussions. Those repercussions are the result of society,
| even in the context of a "public" space, attempting to deal
| with a bad actor.
|
| Online, one has the further restrictions imposed by the
| architecture of the software itself, beyond whatever rules are
| enforced by the nature and moderation of the platform. Hacker
| News won't let me make death threats or dox people, and the
| software won't let me upload pornographic images.
|
| So, yes, dealing with bad actors is censorship. By your
| definition, merely requiring participants to obey the law is
| censorship. But "censorship" at that point becomes so abstract
| and general a concept that it ceases to become a threat to
| anyone but anarchists and bad actors, and becomes self-
| evidently necessary to have any kind of a civil society or
| constructive dialogue to everyone else.
|
| Also, it seems weird to see an attempt at a full-throated
| defense of maximalist freedom of speech from someone who claims
| to require an NDA with a non disparagement clause for basic
| social interaction[0].
|
| [0]https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22282579
| morceauxdebois wrote:
| Then why are you here on the dictatorship of HN instead of Gab
| or 8chan?
| sneak wrote:
| To answer your question directly, because websites aren't
| citizenship. I read a lot of different webpages, with varying
| levels of quality content. HN, Gab, and 8chan are among the
| list of websites I have loaded in my browser before. I
| imagine you've visited them at least once too - or do you
| rely entirely on conjecture and gossip to tell you what they
| contain?
|
| Forget about that, though. This isn't about any specific
| website. Indulge me with a hypothetical.
|
| Imagine for a moment a future in which a web browser exists
| on par with something like a Gopher or Usenet client: a
| historical curiosity, used only by a tiny fraction of weird
| people, a few thousand worldwide, tops. The majority of
| content is posted and consumed via native apps, communicating
| with centralized services from cryptographically secured
| devices that do not allow any sort of inspection, debugging,
| tampering, ad blocking, memory dumping, hot patching, or
| other runtime-modification fuckery. It's an end-to-end chain,
| determined entirely by a small group of people at TSMC,
| Apple, Comcast/Cox/et c, Facebook, and Google.
|
| The apps all still use HTTP (with TLS) to talk to their APIs,
| of course. But you can't go to webpages, even ones you don't
| like, because there aren't any. You can't start a new
| website, because nobody uses browsers any longer.
|
| This is the trajectory we're on. It has nothing to do with
| whether you like whether or not specific sites like Gab or
| 8chan exist or not, or where you fall on the freezepeach
| spectrum of opinion.
|
| Now, out of the hypothetical. Let's talk _today_. These
| censored platforms are engaging in an all-out assault on the
| web. Instagram has _banned hyperlinks_. Browsers on mobile
| _cannot be extended via plugins or extensions_. Gmail is
| censoring inbound emails not sent from a small whitelist of
| providers. Google Chrome is about to defang effective
| adblocking via a plugin API change. Apple, in their iOS, has
| hidden the Taiwanese flag in mainland China, and has replaced
| the gun emoji with a picture of a squirt gun worldwide. There
| 's no hack or workaround for this. Entire swaths of potential
| businesses have been prevented as a result of this type of
| overarching design: bake censorship into everything.
|
| If the world continues on the path it's on, soon the web will
| be gone and mass publishing will be centrally controlled, as
| mass publishing has been for almost the entirety of the
| history of mass publishing. The free and open web where
| virtually anyone can start building an audience was an
| _anomaly_ , a first of its kind in history, and several
| extremely large and well-funded organizations, Facebook and
| Apple primarily among them, are working to bring an end to
| this historical deviation.
|
| I really, really don't want that to happen. And it has
| positively nothing at all to do with the sites you listed.
| bovermyer wrote:
| Sounds like you're OK with trolls and death threats. Should I
| assume you originate that kind of content?
| Mediterraneo10 wrote:
| > Should I assume you originate that kind of content?
|
| No, you shouldn't. Slashdot (in its golden age, which was
| also a golden age of inventive trolling) and 4Chan has shown
| that there are a subset of internet users who, while not
| creators of that kind of content themselves, actually enjoy
| the trolling, it brings them merriment.
| dredmorbius wrote:
| Censorship, as with policing, is occasionally necessary.
|
| It should be kept to the minimum level sufficient. But time and
| again has proved that _lack_ of effective moderation is far
| more fatal.
|
| The people who bring quality discourse go elsewhere.
| indymike wrote:
| I have a lot of positive feelings for Usenet, but it wasn'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.
|
| The problem with Usenet was that it was that it slowly was
| infested with pirates (of the copyright kind), troll, netcops and
| spammers.
| Mediterraneo10 wrote:
| > pirates (of the copyright kind), troll, netcops and spammers.
|
| Don't forget the mentally ill, who ruined a lot of science
| newsgroups. It became hard to find solid discussion among
| university-employed experts once the newsgroup attracted cranks
| who wanted to propound their ideas, e.g. "Perpetual motion
| machines are possible!" or "I have deciphered Linear A!"
|
| Even if you killfiled the mentally ill, a lot of the experts
| got bogged down in pointlessly trying to refute the cranks, so
| you would see their replies and it totally destroyed the
| group's culture.
|
| That said, I am not sure why you find pirates a problem.
| Sharing binaries actually goes back to the golden age of
| Usenet, before Eternal September.
| indymike wrote:
| There were quite a few enthusiastic believers in the
| impossible, but that happens in real life, too.
|
| The reason pirates were a problem was they were the excuse
| for removing Usenet as a service for ISPs. Binaries were most
| of the bandwidth, legal and storage cost.
| _red wrote:
| It really annoys me that increasingly its required to join slack
| / discord / telegram channel in order to connect with developers
| of projects I'm interested in.
|
| I understand spam is a problem, but its such step backwards from
| just subscribing to alt.whatever.
|
| 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.
|
| The future of our world looks to be hyper-siloed with incessant
| privacy leaking and no one actually seems to mind.
| ghostpepper wrote:
| It's equally annoying that to sign into discord you need to
| disable your ad blocker and solve a series of google captchas.
| sneak wrote:
| It's not just leaking. You cannot use Discord anonymously.
|
| Signing up for a new Discord account via Tor means you are
| prompted for a phone number, which is a single API call to a
| data broker away from full name, email, and home address.
|
| You cannot join anyone's discord chats without the digital
| equivalent of showing an ID.
|
| A lot of us mind. We're just being excluded from more and more
| conversations.
| beefhash wrote:
| > You cannot join anyone's discord chats without the digital
| equivalent of showing an ID.
|
| This only happens via Tor and oft-abused VPN providers.
| "Showing ID" has two benefits:
|
| 1. It helps mitigate a lot of unsophisticated spam attacks,
| taking off server load and annoyance off users.
|
| 2. It helps to some extent with mitigating criminal affairs
| because any potential criminal that falls in the gap
| _between_ "doesn't realize IP addresses may leak location
| information" and "knows how to use compromised hosts as
| proxy" can be picked off by the authorities once they're
| noticed.
|
| Anonymity is gone and it's not coming back. We have to adapt
| and we don't get a choice. At least there's some minor
| upsides to it.
| catalogia wrote:
| > _I understand spam is a problem_
|
| From what I've seen in numerous channels for software projects
| on freenode, spam is not a problem on IRC. A project choosing
| to use discord/slack/etc instead of IRC is a real
| disappointment.
| crb3 wrote:
| IRC lacks backscroll. Even if you park a bot in your channel
| to act as recording secretary, there's no low-friction means
| of getting at that history without going out of band. This
| means that spam doesn't persist... but neither does
| consideration and consensus.
| catalogia wrote:
| These are properties IRC loosely shares with traditional
| face-to-face discussion. I honestly don't see it as a
| significant problem.
| detaro wrote:
| There are several client options that make it low-friction
| if you want.
| detaro wrote:
| It's occasionally. Freenode has a few days a year when
| someone is running a big spam campaign and everyone scrambles
| to get up defenses against it until it dies down.
| pmoriarty wrote:
| _" It really annoys me that increasingly its required to join
| slack / discord / telegram channel in order to connect with
| developers of projects I'm interested in."_
|
| The Freenode IRC network is full of developers and users
| providing support for open source projects, and is still highly
| active.
|
| For example, Freenode's #ubuntu, ##c, and #vim channels have
| about a thousand users each, and plenty of them are developers.
| There are plenty of channels for smaller projects too, usually
| with developers of those projects hanging around and answering
| questions.
|
| Come join us! Sure, it's not Usenet, but it's not a proprietary
| walled garden like slack, discord, or telegram either. You can
| actually keep text logs of the channels you're in and IRC
| clients are pretty full featured. The only thing I miss from
| the proprietary competition is embedded images/video, the lack
| of which is sometimes actually a plus.
| chaz6 wrote:
| Thank goodness for gmane. I hate mailing lists with a passion
| when nntp does the same thing with less overhead. Plus, when
| you join a group, you get to see the entire history. It's hard
| to reply to a message you do not have.
|
| As a corollary I plan on writing a rfc to add SNI support to
| nntps, so you can virtualhost newsgroups for different domains
| (e.g. nntps://news.example.com/announce and
| nntps://news.corp.com/announce can be served from the same IP
| but refer to different groups).
| Topgamer7 wrote:
| I am more disturbed that these groups are not search index-
| able. If you want to find an issue that someone encountered in
| a game for example. You won't be able to search to find it.
| u801e wrote:
| You can to some extent by searching Google groups (which
| would include posts to usenet). It doesn't work very well in
| some cases though.
| vascocosta wrote:
| 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.
|
| Usenet was also great due to it'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.
|
| 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.
|
| 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.
| beezle wrote:
| Back in the day...guess around 91 or 92... I was taking a full
| feed from UUNET using a Trailblazer modem. Clearly had to drop
| the binaries not long after but kept the rest until around 97
| when a local ISP emerged that also had access to a feed. Memory
| lane!
| mmcgaha wrote:
| I couldn't agree more; In the 90s, my main internet usage was
| lurking various news groups. Everything that I wanted was on
| usenet. I could get answers to programming questions, tech
| support, source code, software, quality images, and plenty of
| reading material. I am not sure when my net habits changed, but
| I was still setting up leafnode as late as 2003.
| vascocosta wrote:
| Indeed. I forgot to mention what you just did. Usenet,
| despite its distributed/federated technical nature, which
| made the network extremely resilient, centralised the way we
| searched for information on all sort of different topics.
|
| There was no need to use dozens of different protocols or
| visit different websites. I remember I had my newsgroups
| grouped by topic like programming, operating systems,
| science, sports and so on.
| a3n wrote:
| Usenet died because it cost infrastructure owners to make space
| and bandwidth available for it, over and above the cost of the
| infrastructure itself.
| ageofwant wrote:
| Ah yea, "Eternal September". I'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'll never dare with real people in a real room.
|
| 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.
| daotoad wrote:
| The concept of evaporative cooling (from other comments, not the
| OP) is really interesting.
|
| If you buy the principle, then a way to encourage quality posts
| and discourage poor posts would be to:
|
| 1. Limit the number of posts a person can make. 2. Reward posts
| that get responses with the ability to make more posts.
|
| Obviously you'd want to add some filigree to these principles to
| allow members of a conversational thread to post with abandon
| once they've already joined.
| h2odragon wrote:
| Keeping a decent Usenet spool running was _no joke_. I 'd say the
| primary reason Usenet died is ISPs and schools stopped hosting
| their own news feeds. You had to go commercial, by around '96;
| and by '98 that'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.
|
| I don't know what "store and forward" publication would look like
| today; the "common carrier" concerns about being responsible for
| something someone else posted to your spool seem to be larger and
| murkier today then they were back then.
| u801e wrote:
| > You had to go commercial, by around '96; and by '98 that'd
| pretty well killed it off.
|
| My ISP had a Usenet feed up till 2010 and I was a regular
| poster in several groups from 1999 through 2014.
| joshspankit wrote:
| You touch on the very difficult legal conversation that was
| just bubbling up when the commercial providers stepped in:
| Companies that had their own Usenet servers had to not only
| keep a _massive_ storage pool with serious bandwidth, but they
| were _without question_ hosting illegal material.
|
| At a certain point before that it was flying under the radar:
| most people seemed to assume that it was just text since that's
| all the technology supported, but of course 7-bit encoding,
| multi-part archives, and parity files all had changed that.
| Once the rights groups got wind, the clock was ticking
|
| Some "scene groups" chose to encrypt uploads and change post
| names, but that only served to splinter the usefulness of it
| since most of those became group specific.
|
| For everyone else, it was ISPs committing more and more
| resources to fighting to keep illegal files off their network,
| and end-users scrambling to either grab stuff fast before it
| was taken down, or move to a grey market "full archive"
| provider for a fee.
|
| Somehow, as bittorrent took off, the newsgroup technology never
| ended up having to "pay the piper". But that is definitely
| something that could happen very easily in current day.
| jasode wrote:
| _> Decentralized / Shared Ownership - a genuinely public space no
| one "owned"
|
| >IMO, this last aspect is what made Usenet truly special.
|
| >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 took the opposite lesson from USENET history: shared spaces
| where _everyone_ has equal say and power is _impossible_.
|
| (Much of my thinking in the following paragraphs is influenced by
| Clay Shirky but his essay seems to be deleted from the
| internet.[1])
|
| Any digital shared space that _needs to function for the long
| term_ 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 _devolve into unequal power_. This has happened with all
| "digital shared spaces" of any significance outside of USENET
| such as _Bitcoin_ (democratic home computers -- > China ASIC
| miners), or _Ethereum_ (a few influential developers choose to
| reverse the DAO hack), or _Wikipedia_ (super editors with special
| powers to reverse edits). The repetition of that human history
| across many digital domains shows that _only a subset_ will hold
| the keys to the castle.
|
| 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't change the fact that
| reddit/Stackoverflow/HN are far more useful to me than USENET
| ever was. I think that private ownership of those entities
| _improves baseline quality_ 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 't like to admit that
| decentralization makes shared spaces _worse_ on many dimensions
| which is why I abandoned USENET because it wasted too much of my
| reading time.
|
| [1]https://www.google.com/search?q=clay+shirky+group+worst+enem..
| .
| homarp wrote:
| Archive version of Clay's essay:
| https://web.archive.org/web/20160130112601/http://www.shirky...
| prepend wrote:
| There aren't too many truly successful forums I know of, but I
| think the key is some form of benevolent dictatorship and
| transparency so the community can fork or more quickly depart.
|
| HN might be the last forum working forum where I participate
| and it's pretty topic specific.
|
| There are still some dev projects that use irc (maybe pandas),
| but email is expensive to support because it's 1:1 in that my
| answer only helps the recipient and it gets mixed in with all
| the other stuff.
|
| I recently had a problem with the Altair python viz package and
| submitted a question on GitHub but found their google group [0]
| from searching and had someone help me in the middle of the
| night EST. That was neat.
|
| I think my take away is that there doesn't need to be a single
| protocol like nntp as long as there is effective search.
|
| Although I do miss my morning coffee and Usenet. Phenomenal
| porn too.
|
| [0] https://groups.google.com/forum/m/#!forum/altair-viz
| jsmoov wrote:
| I'm a huge fan of Clay - wish he'd bring his essays back online
| :/
|
| I think he's right re: _equal say or power devolves into
| unequal power_
|
| Maybe the key is not giving everyone equal power, but
| distributing power in away that captures each member's
| preferences for who should wield that power?
| btbuildem wrote:
| > Unfortunately Twitter hashtags suffer from the same structural
| deficiency as Usenet newsgroups: unfettered anarchy collapses at
| scale.
|
| Perhaps that is a feature and a life-saver after all. Nobody
| should have a megaphone that can reach five billion people.
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