In all seriousness, by far the best professional discussion i have ever had was at a company in 2000 which ran an internal NNTP server. For me, that combined the relevant strengths of email with a format more suited to active multi-party discussion.
I do think it's a useful model for private discussions, with plenty of supporting software. It wouldn't be bad for internal company use. But it doesn't have animated emojis and trophies, so no one would use it now.
Google Groups used to be handy for shadowing a bunch of Usenet groups, but that's gone now. I'm not sure how much Usenet exists these days.
In all seriousness, Reddit is the modern successor. I dislike a lot about Reddit; their UI/UX is a contender for the worst in the entire world; and they provide a forum for a lot of the most unpleasant people in the world (not quite 4chan bad, but pretty bad). But at the end of the day, Reddit is where most threaded public conversations moved to.
Some of the most interesting applications of NNTP would never connect to the legacy usenet network, which as you mention is/was a mess.
It didn't, as long as your server didn't distribute binary newsgroups, which where the only thing requiring a substantial amount of space. Furthermore, servers had no obligation to keep a long retention history, and could limit it to a few months if they wanted so.
Yes, I vote for NNTP. In my previous life I used to run a local NNTP/Usenet/Fidonet gateway, storage was not an issue at all, but bandwidth was.
The NNTP distribution model was you could take whatever subset of feeds you wanted and keep them however long your storage and bandwidth allowed. Back in the day, a 56Kbps link worked pretty well. A T-1 meant you could pick up the funner binaries feeds. You don't need some multi-meg JS frameworks to read that content. Now, it works fine with GigE and multi-terabyte storage. There's even an RFC for running it over TLS.
Reddit is the modern replacement? Things are that bad?
The sweet spot for me would be something like Discourse or even an old-school PHPBB. Slack has a similar problem to IRC - it's ephemeral and the answers don't show up on Google.
NodeBB's a lighter and more performant alternative to Discourse.
I think Google Groups killed Usenet when they made a web interface for it. It was flooded with people who didn't understand how it worked. There was a definite turning point at that time, and I cancelled my subscription.
Mind you, newsgroups had their dark aspects, too. Some binary groups had contents you'd prefer not to see - simply because the public at large was not really aware NNTP exists.
That event was called Eternal September, and netiquette has never been the same, or so I am told.
Mailing lists work because they work best with old-fashioned email. Old-fashioned email just works better. It requires a certain level of training to use properly (e.g. how to do inline quoting etc.). This is a good thing. But people seem reluctant to learn skills as an adult, especially when it comes to IT.
More importantly, mailing lists rely on etiquette (netiquette) to function well. This is essential for any interactions between responsible adults. But nowadays people have been trained to expect coded rules. They are used to operating in a playpen where they can test the boundaries with no consequences, like children.
Discord is just the latest regression in a long line of distilling what it means to have discourse into a few easily managed rules. It's ironic because, on the face of it, Discord with its huge array of "stickers", "emojis" and "fun" attachments etc. seems like it should be more expressive and allow for deeper discussion. But, in fact, by pushing aside language, etiquette and training in favour of emojis, canned phrases, and strict rules we get shallow, repetitive, and, frankly, boring exchanges. Great for mindless drones to do bullshit jobs, I'm sure. Bad for deep and enlightening discussion and debate.
however the real (search) power of the mailing lists is of course that you have the mails locally for the lists where you are subscribed to...
i remember forum searches becoming so heavy, site wide search forms had to be hidden behind sign up walls... and it was mostly poor keywords search, forget about full text.
with local emails at least i get a shot at organizing and searching for it. try saving a local copy of a forum thread...
I think netiquette breaks down the moment you have a diverse group of participants. (Early Usenet) and (Fidonet) were comprised of very knowledgeable participants of very similar cultural milleus. Usenet was mostly scholarly, young, white, and male (the standard demographic of academics at the time, I'm not trying to insinuate anything more than that), and Fidonet was more diverse because it was less tied to academia but was also very specific. That's not to say something like netiquette couldn't be enforced, but I also think it's correlation and not causation that early Usenet and Fidonet had meaningful conversations; I've been in Discord/Matrix rooms with mostly highly educated people with similar outlooks on life and they rarely require moderation, even with varying strong opinions.
> Discord is just the latest regression in a long line of distilling what it means to have discourse into a few easily managed rules. It's ironic because, on the face of it, Discord with its huge array of "stickers", "emojis" and "fun" attachments etc. seems like it should be more expressive and allow for deeper discussion. But, in fact, by pushing aside language, etiquette and training in favour of emojis, canned phrases, and strict rules we get shallow, repetitive, and, frankly, boring exchanges. Great for mindless drones to do bullshit jobs, I'm sure. Bad for deep and enlightening discussion and debate.
This just comes off as angry and elitist. Discords are there for regular people to engage in conversations. I don't think putting up these barriers to engagement is relevant for anything other than selecting for technical trivia or ability. If you want to actually select for a good community, I agree that moderation is important, but not using technical barriers. I'm glad the internet is such that nowadays I'm not just talking to some other person who is interested in heavy metal, anime, gaming, and programming (as it was until the late-90s for the most part).
That's great because mail readers have supported threading for decades. It's pretty essential for using a mailing list.
Most mail readers support it, but not Microsoft ones. Somehow they managed to ruin this simple feature. This caused Google to reinvent it in the early 2000s and announce it like it was an innovation of their own.
I’m almost certain thunderbird soft wraps plaintext emails when composing rather than inserting actual line breaks for that reason.
Besides, shorter lines are easier to read and parse; I’d take an 80 columns width text anytime over a 120+ cols, like more and more people tend to use.
For thousands of years prior to the invention of HTML email, back unto the ages of cuneiform on clay, people managed to express themselves. Entire competing schools of rhetoric developed to teach people how best to express themselves, long before any form of electronic mail existed. Some of those schools focused on eloquence and interest, others on brevity and clarity, and those were both possible with plain text written by reed pens and ink on papyrus. I wonder whether relying on HTML for one's expression is really better than cultivating a writing style that suffices to convey one's thoughts independently of the medium used.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eternal_September
It was when the flood of incomers was large enough that the enculturation process failed.
Being technical is a pathway and IQ only identifies how fast you can travel down that pathway. Someone who started before you but who moves slower can still be far beyond you or have gone down paths to treasures you would never discover because you with your high IQ decided it was dumb.
Axiom 2: There are vastly more windbags and vicious people than there are knowledgeable and mature people.
Axiom 3: Online moderation / gatekeeping is imperfect.
Axiom 4: Successful moderation depends on a few keystone people.
Lemma 1: A community of knowledgeable, mature people will be under perpetual assault by entropy. The internet baseline of know-nothing gasbags and vicious, damaged people will be pounding on the gates of any community.
Lemma 2: Some of the horde will bypass any gatekeeping and moderation to land blows on the knowledgeable and mature people. They'll be repulsed, and some will leave the community.
Lemma 3: The keystone moderators are inevitably among the people subjected to these blows. After a serious blow or one blow too many, some will get fed up and leave, and moderation will get worse, increasing the rate of knowledgeable and mature people getting repulsed by their own community and leaving. A hole will form in the fortifications, and the barbarians will flood in, driving out everyone mature and knowledgeable.
Thereom: A knowledgeable, mature online community that is open to new users will eventually collapse into the internet baseline.
Corollary 1: If you're knowledgeable and mature and currently part of an open online community you love, you too will eventually get repulsed by it and leave. Enjoy it while it lasts.
Corollary 2: There are several knowledgeable and mature people here on Hacker News. They're here entirely because of dang. He is our keystone, weathering the assault of the barbarians for all of our sake. When he throws in the towel, we're done.
Truer words were never said about Hacker News.
I think he's paid. I hope he's paid.
People introduced me to Usenet and told me to lurk on any group for a few weeks to see how people communicate before jumping in.
I remember coming back to school in the fall of 1993 and there were all these new people on the forums asking dumb questions. People would reply "Read the FAQ!" and they would just ignore it and ask questions already answered in the FAQ
I remember people making filters and kill files for anything ending in @aol.com
Timeless advice. Still applicable in tech thanks to open-source software, even as people lose agency in other areas.
If there was less potential for abuse through spam, scams, or (less likely but still worrying) targeted attacks then I would be much more likely to use email for regular communication outside of work.
But that was way too much effort. I don’t bother now. My Gmail address (josephg) is a cornucopia of junk. It gets the pay slips from a mechanic, lollypop orders, delivery notifications for shoes, Indian cell phone bills, and all sorts of things. I declared bankruptcy on that account years ago and moved on.
I have the same issue with a guy in another state. I know everything he rents from Redbox and everything he buys from harbor freight.
From my experience, spam/abuse is more likely with addresses used with online shops (the smaller ones seem to get hacked quite often) than with mailing lists.
Think of it this way: The Linux people and many other OSS projects have no problems with mailing lists.
That's a very biased view ("many people work like that so they like it") and I disagree.
I think that email based development is a fence to contribution. At least for myself.
Despites being of that generation, I really started contributing to open source when the GitHub model appeared (and previously in the Perl world thanks to rt.cpan.org, a ticketing system with both web and e-mail interfaces). I prefer to have communication centered about one project to be hosted with all the other data about the project instead of having everything in my inbox.
Few open source projects start nowadays with a mailing list based development process. I can't even cite one.
Most of the projects on https://sr.ht/ (basically all that aren't only mirrored there from somewhere else) do (as it did itself).
It hasn’t gone away. It’s usage has changed though.