Usenet – A worldwide distributed discussion system
en.wikipedia.org
en.wikipedia.org
Those problems ended up strangling Usenet to death, which is too bad; there were a lot of things to like about that system. Certainly there are things we had back then that I wish we had today, like killfiles (see https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kill_file).
It says a lot about our industry's persistent lack of institutional memory that each generation ends up struggling with these problems de novo, without reference to similar systems that came before. So we end up in an endless circle, fruitlessly trying the same things people tried and failed to do in the past and then scratching our heads in puzzlement when they don't work.
How do we manage identity and reputation on the internet?
Usenet had no answer and so it withered. Facebook and Twitter are throwing large amounts of cash at the problem and enjoying moderate (but far from ideal) success. What we need is a real, decentralized solution. I'm not sure how that will be achieved, though I suspect the crypto folks have a lot of ideas. I would like to see a demonstration of one that is simple for ordinary users and that works well at scale.
It could have been saved with a good web interface, but almost everybody working on web-based messaging preferred to create their own platform instead, probably because it’s a lot more fun and profitable to build your own community than it is to build a portal to one that’s already there.
As always, but even more than usual, this is just my opinion and I could be wrong.
Nah. It wasn't the UI. It was developers and corporations chasing the new shiny, which was the web.
Any UI could have been built on top of Usenet, but instead everyone jumped ship and on to the web bandwagon.
Usenet also had a big spam problem, but one which was not insurmountable, as Gmail and other web mail providers have proven. Modern anti-spam solutions could just as easily be applied to Usenet to keep it as spam-free as most web mail is today.
Of course, now there is the lack of historical knowledge, as another poster alluded to elsewhere in the thread, but there's also a contempt for the average user, and a widespread belief that UI's have to be dumbed down for the average user. Web UIs could be just as powerful as Usenet was, but corporations such as Google, Reddit, and Facebook choose to cater to the lowest common denominator rather than to power users.
Also, unlike Usenet, with these corporate walled gardens, alternate UI's for them are rare. At least Reddit has an API, so at least there there's a potential for some powerful alternative UIs built around it, but the ones that I know of are still a pale shadow of Usenet clients from 30 years ago.
What killed it was UBB/vBulletin/phpBB web forums. People who ran blogs with some traffic installed them for their community, it was easy for people to just click in and get started, and then you ended up with huge communities like gamefaqs and Something Awful (and car forums, collector's forums, etc etc). These then generated lots of content, which showed up in web search results.
Then web forums in turn got killed by social media (twitter/tumblr/facebook) and reddit and withdrew to a niche.
Provided, of course, that I have a provider, and can find something still worth subscribing to.
I started participating in groups on usenet in the late '90s. There were a substantial number of posters in the groups I lurked in or participated in.
> It could have been saved with a good web interface
From the mid '90s through the late 2000s, most people that I knew didn't look for a web application for everything they wanted to do online. They used various applications like mail and news readers, IRC clients, FTP applications, etc. In other words, they looked for desktop applications. Web applications weren't really a thing at the time.
Important at the time was that reading news occured from a local NNTP cache, and hence was fast (still 56k last mile). WAN internet was often slow, and browser UIs sucked. If you had a Unix box at home you could even cache overnight or during the day when no one was using the phone line, and your replies queued for when you went online.
NN was arguably the first 'groupware', we had patches from CVS going to news (& email gateway), build and test reports, threaded discussions, etc. Fast searching of the entire archive. Way more useful than Slack. Skype Business is barely better than ytalk + fingerd.
It seems we've barely moved in functionality since then.
Incidentally, PGP/GPG use was surprisingly high on Usenet (nowhere near ubiquitous) back then. Many newsreaders supported it was pretty common to see signed messages and the corresponding geek code block. It did little other than help resolve arguments about spoofed messages... and as a badge of geek cred.
I don‘t really see a solution to the problem of decentralization being effectively anarchy with people having the means to do so abusing their power.
Addictive, sure, but stupid. Ultimately that leads for smart people to leave, making the content dumber by the day. You can argue that the same thing happened to Usenet during eternal September, and you would be correct.
HN is so valuable because it’s curated by its users, and so far, they prefer intelligent content, but just imagine what would happen if HN had its own eternal September and all of reddit decided to visit. I mean, /r/technology wasnt always the political battleground it is now, and /r/programming wasn’t always teenagers arguing about what language will replace what.
When you allow everyone to speak on equal terms, all you get is squabbled noise, and it’s often dominated by the people with the most free time, and those typically are the people with the least to contribute.
Of course the internet hasn’t had a great deal of luck with curated forums either. Especially not if it didn’t want them to be echo chambers. But I suspect the first technology or media house, or perhaps library, that manages to make a curated forum for intelligent content and debate will have a lot of followers. Because all those platforms we no longer use, like Usenet, were actually really good, until they were ruined by the noise.
This misunderstands the intended use case for Facebook as well as demeans most of the people who use it as intended.
Not every social media platform is, or needs to be, about curating "intelligent" content, any more than the web itself needs to be about sharing whitepapers between university peers, or phone calls need to be primarily about business. The problem with Facebook, specifically, is that it's curated too much rather than not enough -- people just want to be able to form networks with their friends and share content within that network.
> but just imagine what would happen if HN had its own eternal September and all of reddit decided to visit
It used to be so common to accuse HN of "becoming Reddit" that it was mentioned specifically as something to avoid in the comments. And... there is a large overlap between the HN community and Reddit. A lot of the content that gets posted here is posted from Reddit.
I hate to break it to you but a lot of the intellectual elites here are also on Twitter and Reddit and Facebook and sometimes they share pictures of their food and cats. And there's nothing wrong with that.
Also, complaining about Eternal September on the World Wide Web is a bit like cancer complaining about lymphoma.
This here is a problem in and of itself. Selecting whose voice is to be heard the loudest is no mean feat and simplifying this problem by simply throwing scholars at it shows a lack of respect for just how hard this problem is. Scholars have been known to hold and present pretty atrocious and even murderous ideologies. Who's to say we should trust them and not ordinary Joe who goes about his business in a small but deeply meaningful way?
Not that scholars aren’t filling their Instagram profiles with pictures of food.
Sure, centralized services can and do have moderation, but when they grow past a certain size, this seems to break down catastrophically. I believe this begins to happen when a service grows past serving the needs of a single community, and begins taking on various factions and tribes with conflicting needs and interests.
This is a problem which absolutely confounds the centralized social media giants of the day. No matter what approach they take, they are bound to piss off millions of users, so they do next to nothing short of removing death threats. The end result: a practically unmoderated forum, and a room full of idiots screaming at each other. I don't recall this problem being nearly as pervasive in the days where each community had it's own independent bulletin board with active moderation. There were trolls, but they were the exception, not the norm.
Different communities have different needs, and applying a one-size-fits-all moderation policy is harmful to productive discourse. There is a difference between what behavior is acceptable at the library, the coffee shop, the church, and the pub, and online communities are no different. Each community needs moderators, but they serve different roles within each one. Federated services (ideally) make this as frictionless as possible.
How do we manage identity and reputation on the internet?
What killed Usenet? What delivered its most severe and ultimately fatal wound was the downward spiral of signal-to-noise ratio. The biggest contributor was spam, which completely overwhelmed unmoderated newsgroups. Another was the "endless September" effect of the massive influx of Outlook-using, AOL-trained new users with no respect for, ir interest in, the community civility of most existing audiences. FAQ reading before posting became dismissed as old-fashioned. "Top-posting" over relentlessly recopied content replaced thoughtful, contextual quoting. Duplicated questions that had been answered many times before (and white answers were easily found) crowded out new content and wore down longtime contributors. Finally, the difficulty in profiting from traffic sent many content providers into their own SEO-happy walled garden.
So, instead of, say, one well-curated FAQ article about how to root a given phone model/network combination, you get seventy different recipes on YouTube and proprietary forums... many with their own unique, fatal oversight that lures the novice into bricking his or her device. Yay, progress.
I started participating in 1986. Sadly, I don't even remember which year I abandoned my last newsgroup.
Mailinglists. They already were the good enough alternative when havoc running usenet-moderations were out to organize usenet to death.
Without rooting identities in the real world trust chain, what do you have? Proof of work? How does that help against adversaries who are willing to do a lot of work?
Reputation systems? Sybil attacks.
We know what the right answer is here. We just need to be bold enough to enact it and keep it enacted despite the expected outcry
But that is not the point I'm trying to make.
You said it not technically hard to enact a real name policy, but I argue that of the options you said, a real name policy is the by far the hardest, technically speaking.
I can simply say I have a real name policy, but who is validating these names. Hire an army of people to get scans of IDs, and then have no users because no one is going to sign up if the barrier to entry is so high.
Blizzard and Facebook have a real name policies, but they do no validation.
A government could roll out such a program, but the chances of a world wide program are near zero. And such a universal system would bring identify fraud into a new era of awfulness.
It's simply not possible to have a real name system that is valid.
In other words, you know it will do real harm to real people, but you don't care about them and don't want to listen.
Real names are not sufficient. Plenty of people will publish hate speech in the newspapers under their own byline.
That's an uncharitable and emotionally-charged way of saying that you think that an edge case affecting a tiny minority should preclude a policy that makes communities better for everyone. Do you not care about the population at large?
The state of discussion on the internet seems to have deteriorated since the major platforms abandoned their real name policies a few years ago.
> Plenty of people will publish hate speech in the newspapers under their own byline
Ah, so "managing identities" is actually just a euphemism for censorship?
People should be free to publish "hate speech" (whatever that means) in newspapers and anywhere else. That's what free speech entails and it's a good thing.
Not at all proven, and there's substantial evidence that for certain categories of abuse it makes no difference.
> edge case affecting a tiny minority
The whole point of equalities law is that you can't inflict things on people simply with the justification that they're a minority; you have to make arguments along the lines of it being necessary, proportionate, and that you've tried to mitigate the harm.
> The state of discussion on the internet seems to have deteriorated since the major platforms abandoned their real name policies a few years ago.
Usenet people like to date the deterioration of discourse back to ... 1993. Again this is kind of anecdotal and we'd have to define things like "state of discussion" and "deteriorated".
> People should be free to publish "hate speech"
OK, now you're really going to have to define "state of discussion" and "deteriorated", as well as "makes communities better for everyone", because hate speech is one of the very important things that we're trying to get rid of.
I take it you're the kind of person who thinks a good community is one free of ideas that make you uncomfortable.
* The emergence of the web as an application platform, which made it easy for anyone to set up a globally available discussion platform without any of the complexities of NNTP
* Binaries, which really did choke Usenet to death, forcing most independent operators to shut down.
The NNTP protocol isn't really that complex. I would say that it's simpler compared to some of the REST APIs out there.
This sounds like what Knuth was trying to solve with Literate Programming.
His wanted to ensure that solutions were as easy to read as they were to write.
Anyway, Usenet relies on what I call "Postel Decentralization": a system is described as lacking a central authority but has a critical dependence on a few sysadmins doing something manually. In the case of Usenet that's things like spam cancellation and deciding which groups appears on their servers.
Similarly ancient technology for group discussion is Fidonet, a modem-based message forwarding system.
Once I'd caught up on a.s.r, I couldn't really find any other groups other than alt.comp.lang.* that were worth reading.
Any HN suggestions?
There is also comp.misc which has some activity as well.
alt.obituaries
Unfortunately, once the web came along, usenet became a second-class service, and slowly degraded
- text only
- lots of subboards about every interest imaginable
- barely, or completely unmoderated (therefore full of spam and troll posts)
- similar reply conventions
- the web interface is so barebones that most users are using external desktop/mobile applications to read and post on it
- ASCII/character art is widespread
[1] http://5ch.net/
Furthermore your post lacks both hilarious memes and funny one liners so I’m definitely not upvoting it lol.
Something about that feels familiar, but I can't quite place it.
But in defence of Reddit, the sheer breadth of content is impressive. Like /r/skincareaddiction over to /r/showerbeer (NSFW). And the content remains permanently available unless it's actively deleted by the poster or a moderator as opposed to being eventually forgotten by your chosen Usenet host.
A lot of the commercial usenet providers have at least a decade's worth of retention at this point for binary groups. They may have even longer retention times for the text groups. The only thing that would keep a post from being archived now is having the X-No-Archive: yes header in the message.
The hivemind exists everywhere, downvotes just make it quantifiable. It's depressing to see wrongheaded and inaccurate posts voted to the top, but at the same time it's an interesting insight into the herd mentality.
I found some of my first posts that date back to 1993. I was active up until around 2013.
Astraweb is good but I ditched them after they had some drama a while ago.