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Comment by dorfsmay | Hacker News Reader

I agree with your last paragraph, and IMO the reason is reddit is based on common interests, like Usenet used to be, while Facebook is based on random ways you met people in life and twitter is based on people trying to boost their ego.

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I agree about Reddit being Usenet-like. Unfortunately it's a really horrible version of Usenet, partly thanks to the number of unpleasant people who use it, but also due to the karma system - in theory a way to collectively highlight good posts, but in reality often simply becoming an end in itself (karma whoring, playing to a gallery) and a weapon (people burying legit posts they simply don't like/agree with).

On Usenet you could filter anything you didn't want to see, which is reasonable, but you could not - as on Reddit, or HN - make it more difficult for other people to read it too, which is not reasonable, and simply helps to create a hostile, cliquey, poisonous echo chamber.

Cliques did exist on newsgroups, but they had less tools at their disposal. In fact one of the reasons people left Usenet for inferior moderated web forums is because while they could (quite rightly) control their own experience, they (quite rightly) had no ability to control the group.

Ironically, although Usenet is considered to be dead these days, it's in some ways in better shape than ever.

20 years ago it suffered from its popularity, under attack from spammers and trolls attempting and often succeeding in destroying newsgroups.

These days it probably has more users than it had before the mid 90s internet explosion, whereas spammers and trolls have largely moved on to bigger audiences elsewhere.

It's strange for me to read people talking nostalgically about how the internet was better in the past, about online forums they were a part of 15 years ago, or Reddit or 4chan, and seemingly have no experience or even knowledge of Usenet.

And that something as similar and simple to use as email is ignored by people who rue the loss of old (web) forums.

Unlike web options Usenet is no-nonsense, free, has no admin headaches, no advertising, no Evil Corp owner (or potential sell out to Evil Corp when the community grows enough), it's anonymous, private and allows unrestricted speech (within applicable law, obviously).

All it requires is for people to use it.

I agree about usenet, but must admit it’s not very accessible to people unfamiliar with it. I think a good web interface would go a long way to helping adoption. Perhaps one exists and I’m just not aware.

The company providing the world's most popular email web interface should have been the prime candidate to provide web Usenet, but instead they saw Usenet only as a means to get people on to their own terrible Google-only groups (while producing such a monumental amount of spam, trolling and abuse to Usenet, many people to leave altogether).

A better idea than a web interface IMO is Usenet access simply built into a browser by default. It makes sense to have Usenet in an email client, because they are closely related, but not many people use email clients any more, so not many people are going to find Usenet that way.

If Firefox had an option to open newsgroups, with proper filtering (not just on the overhead headers, but on the HEAD of each message), I would use it all the time, and I believe many thousands of other people would too.

> If Firefox had an option to open newsgroups

One part of me believes this would be the best native addon coming from Mozilla in years.

The other part of me worries it would bring on a new age of Eternal September to Usenet, which has been isolated long enough again to form a particular kind of culture that would seem fragile in the face of sudden mass immigration given the size of the Usenet community today.

Google makes some IMO very weird decisions about seemingly low effort/cost offerings, even if a bit niche, that would seem to be very complementary to products/services that it does put its full weight behind. Dropping Reader didn't make a lot of sense to me for this reason. The lukewarm support for Scholar is another.

Google's infrastructure is geared towards making enormous services cheaper to run, at all costs. As a result, the maintenance burden of Reader was far higher than you might have expected.

That should explain at least part of the decision.

Netscape Communicator, anyone?

Never mind Opera 12 and older.

Could be that we will see Vivaldi revive this, if they ever get that far...

> If Firefox had an option to open newsgroups, with proper filtering (not just on the overhead headers, but on the HEAD of each message), I would use it all the time, and I believe many thousands of other people would too.

Newsgroups were always bundled with email clients, so Thunderbird has support for NNTP.

I know, I said that in my post:

    It makes sense to have Usenet in an email client, 
    because they are closely related, but not many people
    use email clients any more, so not many people are 
    going to find Usenet that way.

> Usenet is free

Last time I checked it needed you to subscribe through some provider who charges money, ISPs used to offer it with the Internet access. Is it really possible to access for free?

Not only free, but you don't even have to register:

https://news.aioe.org/manual/faqs/#f2

Yes, if you don't care about the binaries groups, then there is at least https://dotsrc.org/usenet/ which offers free access.

For some reason your post reminded me of a list I saw quite recently of (surprisingly working) open/free news servers (maybe dotsrc was on it).

I can't seem to remember or find the exact list or page I saw before, but for anyone interested here are a couple of sites with a few of the other servers I remember.

Note: I haven't tested these, some may not work, some may not be deliberately open (perhaps just misconfigured), some may not allow posting, some may require registration, some may carry only a few local groups, etc etc etc.

Also, this post is related to text usage; if any of the following servers carry binary groups it's unlikely they'll have complete files.

    blaine.gmane.org freenews.netfront.net news2.informatik.uni-stuttgart.de
    news-archive.icm.edu.pl news2.neva.ru gandalf.srv.welterde.de

https://freenews.maxbaud.net/free-usenet.htm

And here:

    news.tin.org news.prz.edu.pl gandalf.srv.welterde.de pb1.pair.com lugnet.com 
    ingebrigtsen.no freedommail.novaithelp.com news.alaska-software.com richelieu.ac-versailles.fr 
    news.cadsoft.de news.omnitel.net news.tugraz.at news.mt.net.mk news.man.rzeszow.pl 
    serv3.vsi.ru news.szaf.org pair1.php.net news.sotcom.ru news.mozilla.org x6.develooper.com 
    hq.tin.org news.grc.com iad.wholesalenewsinc.com news.math.ncu.edu.tw bbs.math.ncu.edu.tw 
    news.securecomp.org guest.dogagent.com ddt.demos.su news.dbase.com newsfeed.iif.hu 
    news.iif.hu vm-news.spline.inf.fu-berlin.de news.spline.inf.fu-berlin.de mx.sotcom.ru

https://www.freeusenetnews.com

There's also https://www.eternal-september.org/ which offers free access to non-binary groups.

Google Groups ≈ Usenet

https://groups.google.com/

> I agree about Reddit being Usenet-like. Unfortunately it's a really horrible version of Usenet, partly thanks to the number of unpleasant people who use it, but also due to the karma system - in theory a way to collectively highlight good posts, but in reality often simply becoming an end in itself (karma whoring, playing to a gallery) and a weapon (people burying legit posts they simply don't like/agree with).

> On Usenet you could filter anything you didn't want to see, which is reasonable, but you could not - as on Reddit, or HN - make it more difficult for other people to read it too, which is not reasonable, and simply helps to create a hostile, cliquey, poisonous echo chamber.

( And... you apparently got downvoted :-/ )

The most infuriating thing I experience on the Web is indeed to see awfully wrong comments being massively upvoted, next to perfectly right, on the point comments being (even slightly) downvoted. And I am not talking about opinionated comments, but just factual comments. It just drives me nuts.

I noticed that even here, when I write opinionated, or a bit rough and definitive, or a bit provocative comments, I often get upvoted (sometimes downvoted, but that's not a problem, I understand it for this kind of comments); but when I write to state purely technical, factual, documented, provable facts, I get downvoted. I just sounds insane. I can understand the difference of opinions, I can understand being upset about an opinion being roughly put in a short comment. But what I don't understand is people who downvote perfectly right purely technical comments (like for example fixing errors in a program), where there is only one truth, there is no opinion to have about it, it is either right right or wrong. That's beyond me.

this is a reason slashdot's metamoderation was such a great idea, which has, oddly, never seen any further development.

Possibly because it is very strongly anti-gamification.

This while the HN/Reddit "karma" score is a very much a e-peen score board.

What is the problem in gamifying Slashdot? You can be "funny lvl 42" and "insightful lvl 8" for example.

I miss the ability to set your own scores so you could set Funny to score -1. Or ""Insightful"".

Sometimes people are not downvoting the content; they might consider the post was ill-timed, or irrelevant/pedantic, or inappropriate for any other reason in that context. It's hard to even guess without seeing concrete examples, but I often see people assuming too much of the motivations of downvoters.

> they might consider the post was ill-timed, or irrelevant/pedantic, or inappropriate for any other reason in that context.

I find the current single dimensional score limiting because of this. Sometimes I want to see a funny comment, sometimes I want to see an insightful one. Scoring them equivalently doesn't really make sense.

I don't really think "scoring" comments at all makes sense. I'd much rather systems like reddit do away with downvotes and point displays entirely, and only allow you to express your desire for something to be seen by 'upvoting'. That would influence it's sorting order, but nothing else. Users no longer get the dopamine drain of seeing "-15 points" on their post, and you stop seeing people edit things with "really? downvotes?". If someone disagrees so much that they need to express it, they should reply directly to the post.

HN as it appears to regular users is pretty close to my ideal system, except that it greys out heavily downvoted posts and you can see the number of points you have personally.

I can't stand comment systems with anonymous downvotes. It's like being in a group discussion, then someone else, hidden behind the curtain, calls out "You're an idiot!" Most people wouldn't stand for that. They'd say, "Come out and express your opinions, or stfu!"

I had a quick scan of your comment history for examples and the only one I could see that was grey and not simply opinionated was https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15849233 , in which you've completely missed why people want lifetime management in Rust.

Check out Hubski you guys! It's very small right now, but I believe it has a better system to encourage good content. You can filter out anything you don't want to see and follow tags or people you want to see, to create your own feed. When you vote on a post, what you really do is share it with all your followers. The system works very well, even for spam, and it encourages friendly discussion and tolerance, because if you don't behave that way, people will just filter you out and move on.

I forgot about karma. I'd argue karma doesn't matter in the smaller subreddits. Thanks for the note about Usenet, I'll check it out.

The problem with no ability to control the group is the maintainers bearing all the spam costs, as spam gets transmitted from host to host so each user can filter it individually. (Filter it as a group, and you're controlling the group, whoops.) The arms race in email has done severe damage to many aspects of email -- do you think if everyone stayed on UseNet the problem would be better?

You really hit the nail on the head describing the uses of these sites, lol

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