The Crankiest Group in Cyberspace | Hacker News Reader

The Crankiest Group in Cyberspace

echonyc.com

Found a write-up from 2017 in The Atlantic:

https://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2017/05/echo-...

> In the intervening decades, Echo has never changed its primitive interface. To navigate within it, you can’t just click on links, but have to type in Echo-specific commands: j cen; l a m; sh 123. You don’t access it in your browser, but through a telnet client, a program that allows you to access the command line interface of another computer. It doesn’t support images or sound, much less video. It doesn’t even have colors. It’s text-only, and even editing text is a time-consuming pain in the ass.

>"The conversations on Echo are not on the web (yet). Once you have a userid (also called a login id) and a password, you must either dial us up directly, or telnet to us from anywhere in the world on the internet. When you open an account, we'll send you instructions in the mail (postal mail). This will take a couple of days."

Oh, this is lovely. It’s what we had before Dejanews and Altavista and Google came along and indexed everyone for free-text search. You could have conversations and reasonably expect that only people looking up the forum topic would then be able to see the conversations you’d had. This is dreamy.

I hope they never allow web (Google etc) search indexing of any kind, it would destroy them utterly.

I thought we were the crankiest group in cyberspace.

Anyway, how NYC-centric is it?

Sounds like an alt.flame offshoot going back to BBS tech

A fish, a gun, and a smoking barrel.

I miss suck.com

A fish, a gun, and a smoking barrel.

is there a remotely compelling reason for me to trust them with my physical address?

Self-selecting target audience; not you.

anyone interested in this group is the target audience. therefore I'm in the target audience.

I disagree.

Do you have any evidence to support your assertion that the target audience is anyone interested in the group?

There are many groups that elicit widespread interest amongst people that are not the target group for joining.

People silly enough to give their address out to randomness on the internet?

if only there was some way to receive mail without providing your physical address. perhaps some sort of numbered "box" at the post office that could receive mail for you to retrieve at your convenience.

Will the postal services deliver to just a PO Box number, or do they require a name? Because giving out a name can be rather threatening, especially if you live in a small town or there's someone in the group that's near you.

Technically, name must match a name on the account.

perhaps, also, one could receive mail electronically.

Wait, the crankiest group in Cyberspace isn't Star Wars fans?

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