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Comment by tzs | Hacker News Reader

I'm disappointed that NNTP servers and clients didn't get wider use outside of Usenet.

Most public forums back in the day would have been vastly improved if they had been done as an NNTP server with each sub-forum as a newsgroup rather than doing them with something like phpBBB on an HTTP server.

Heck, most forums today would have better threading and post organization with NNTP than they do with the popular web forum systems.

Same goes for non-chat communication within companies. Newsgroups on an internal NNTP server would be better in most ways than mailing lists for topics in which people actually need to discuss things as a group.

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> Heck, most forums today would have better threading and post organization with NNTP than they do with the popular web forum systems.

I beg to differ.

NNTP's lack of moderation is a bug, not a feature. Between the spam and abuse, NNTP would be an utter cesspool in today's world.

> NNTP would be an utter cesspool

I've seen Usenet, and I've seen Reddit. I'll take Usenet.

Whatever platform gets popular is bound to become a cesspit.

If Usenet was as popular as Reddit, you would hate Usenet just as much.

You can only take Usenet because Reddit exists. If it didn’t Usenet would be more of a cesspool than it already is.

NNTP can be moderated.

Gibson Research (GRC) still runs an active news server, I believe.

nntp://news.grc.com

I also worked for a place in the early 2000s which used an NNTP server internally (large corp) for company communication and discussion.

using NNTP internally was something I always thought would be a great idea: all public discussion (i.e. public to all inside the company, as opposed to siloed conversations in emails or Slack/Teams) and a repository for knowledge transfer (whereas wikis and such are always out of date and usually do not record the arguments that led to a decision)... unfortunately I never saw it used that way at any place I worked at (lucky you).

Back in the late 90s I had some forum software which would sync with NNTP, either posting from the forum into NNTP and vice versa.

I ran it, and linked it to a new group. Nobody ever posted in usenet, and I suspect nobody read in there.

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