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Comment by Majromax | Hacker News Reader

> I get the impression your problem is more about the people, not the platform.

There's one structural difference: Usenet had no engagement metric but replies. Modern replacements measure and implicitly optimize for view counts (the lurker experience); both Reddit and Hacker News sort and surface posts based on a karma score/like count.

I think this difference led Usenet to implicitly optimize for high-effort posts. The stereotypical Reddit "in-joke" thread has no place on Usenet because the principal reward of karma is entirely missing. Instead, posters are implicitly rewarded with attention when their posts garner replies and discussion.

On one hand, this encourages real content and discussion over superficial "updoots to the left". On the other hand, it also encourages flamebait and high-effort trolling, which a vote-scoring system can silently suppress.

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> On one hand, this encourages real content and discussion over superficial "updoots to the left".

Yeah no, if you go back to the supposed USENET glory days you’ll find a sense of humor that, to be as charitable as possible, is incredibly cringey by today’s standards.

People smugly typing stuff like ‘Bahagaha ZAP LART!! plonk Welcome to my kill file, lamer!!!.’

Today you only really run into such bafflingly unfunny stuff in the Linux kernel mailing list— you know, supposedly hilarious things like ‘Come to the dark side, Sarah. We have cookies!’

(You may find a rare exception like a shaggy dog story about how a coin flip going differently would result in HP’s UNIX, HP-UX, being called PH-UX.)

What I wouldn't do to be done with (some of) "today's standards".

Just as in modern Reddit, the culture was very different from group to group. Some were like that, others were much more polite.

And culture is all it is.

Early technology for the internet was a natural sieve for nerds. As it became easier, that sieve became coarser until around Facebook and it became non-existent.

I still like plonk.

>The stereotypical Reddit "in-joke" thread has no place on Usenet because the principal reward of karma is entirely missing.

Nope. `rec.arts.sf.written` and `alt.folklore.urban` immediately come to mind as having extensive in-jokes. The phenomenon of replies to a post being almost incomprehensible to the uninitiated because they use/rely on the existing ecosystem of said in-jokes is as true for such newsgroups as it is for any subreddit. The only difference is that on Reddit said comments will be at the top of the tree, but the metastructure of their replies is otherwise the same.

omg, what even moderately trafficked group didn't have in-jokes? Any community will get in-jokes as it ages. This isn't a feature of reddit vs usenet vs Bob's Web Forum Software v3, it's a feature of a community.

Just because there wasn’t an explicit upvote/downvote mechanism, doesn’t mean people weren’t posting — sometimes extensively — for a kind of social cachet. Witness, for instance, Kibo [1]

1 - https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/James_Parry

edit can’t spel.

Having never experienced high-effort trolling, I suppose I don't really know whether if it's better. My gut reaction is that I'd rather have high-effort trolling over low-effort trolling though.

Then you have no idea what it's like to realize that a well-known Usenet crank is a real person, lives in the same town that you do, is pissed off at you, and is honestly crazy.

This happened to me with Archimedes Plutonium back when he was Ludwig Von Plutonium. You can find him discussed in https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Usenet_personality. (Luckily for me, his brand of crazy didn't trend towards violence. Though I still regret later having introduced him to the p-adic numbers.)

There is probably more aggregate pain over time from something like a group of 4chan users coming up with Rickrolling then successfully making it a meme. But the pain that a high effort troll can cause is rather...special.

Reddit has plenty of flamebait for the sake of updoots.

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