Ask HN: Could Usenet get revived, to replace the soon to be unusable Reddit? | Hacker News Reader

Ask HN: Could Usenet get revived, to replace the soon to be unusable Reddit?

182 pointsnetfortius149 comments

I recall the comp., sci., and soc.culture., from just before AOL opened the flood gates (access), and even soon thereafter, as they used to be so fun...

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I feel like the HN hivemind likes to bash Reddit for some reason, but for me it has not been that bad. I've got small work gigs on there, discovered places where I've got to learn about stuff that I like, being updated about what's going on in the FOSS world, discover new music, etcetera.

Yes, some people in there would like to drag you into absurd and nonsensical arguments, but even in here where I do not participate that much have fell into that situation. I went into Reddit after 6 years of using Facebook which was much, much worse. Reddit made me ditch Facebook once and for all.

Not that I agree even in the slightiest about the changes they are about to make, but I'm yet to find an alternative where I could find all of the aforementioned but with a more sane support. I don't see how usenet can bring all of that all of a sudden, nor see myself using something like Mastodon and become a social media addict.

I use reddit almost daily for niche subjects, and I only use it in the browser. Granted, I use old.reddit, but still, I have no idea what people are on about when they say they need a 3rd party solution to use it. It's practically zero effort. To me, it takes more time to complain about it than to actually use it.

They're not complaining about old.reddit, that's for sure.

The mobile site pushes you to use their official app, which is horrible in quality compared to the many third party apps.

I'd stop using reddit entirely before I switched to their official app or new site design.

Some problems with Reddit (like it having a lowest-common-denominator general user base due to its size) are avoidable by going on smaller subreddits.

The real problem with Reddit is that even small subreddits tend towards beginner or introductory content because that reflects the level of understanding of most users.

Having separable, more focused forums can allow for discussions at a much higher level of knowledge and expertise than Reddit. You can see plenty of examples of this today with HN having better content and discussion in its niche than anywhere on Reddit, and plenty of complicated high-skill-ceiling discussion topics like vehicle maintenance or travel hacks still being discussed at high quality on oldschool forums.

I don’t see a benefit for Usenet because it wasn’t obsoleted by Reddit, it was made obsolete by forums. Honestly I just wish those would make a resurgence. They allow for so much more customization than Reddit, Usenet, or Facebook and don’t have centralized policies constantly messing with them. And I really don’t think there is a need for a one-stop-shop site or tech stack for focused discussion. Reddit and FB may have replaced forums in most cases for most people from 2010 to now, but as they’ve become more commercialized with more rules, maybe we can switch back

> reflects the level of understanding of most users

It’s also this elitist mindset that makes HN boring often.

I’m not trying to be elitist, there’s certainly a need and place for content aimed towards beginners or people very casually engaging in a topic, and when I’ve been getting into a topic I’ve found Reddit quite valuable. It’s just that after a few years as you get more into the topic you start wanting a different kind of content and discussion, and don’t want to keep reading the same rehashed advice or beginner-oriented content any more. So there has to be (or should be) a place for content aimed at more experienced people.

> don’t want to keep reading the same rehashed advice

Rehashed, sometimes outdated, advice is what you'll often find here, though.

I don't think wanting to have a space that's not flooded with beginner-type questions all the time is "elitist". That doesn't mean you're against such spaces.

I wrote an entire thing about this a few years ago: https://www.arp242.net/elitist.html

It’s hard because you don’t want to be overly exclusive of beginners either. In the real world various mechanisms like cost, hiring, applications for membership, referrals can work. But online, unless you’re running a very small community, there’s way too much process and overhead in that, and it comes across as sanctimonious given it’s not standard practice at all.

Honestly I think one of the biggest reasons Reddit fails to work for experts is how voting affects visibility. When the majority of users are beginners, they’ll vote on things that appeal to and are understandable by beginners. Because voting affects the likelihood something gets seen, stuff oriented towards experts doesn’t get as much visibility, so discussion doesn’t happen, and it seems like that content isn’t there. In your example, at least there wasn’t a voting system making it so all the highest ranked questions at your meet up were from absolute beginners.

Somehow HN avoids this but I think it’s because they do both manual curation of bumping/upranking/downranking content and have some heuristic for vote:comment radio deranking posts. Plus low effort posts get banned or hidden.

Without the ranking:voting relationship, like in regular forums where ranking is just based on the last time a thread had a post, beginners would just ignore expert-oriented posts or be ignored if they contributed in a non constructive way. IMO that’s perfectly fine

I think that for many subs the volume would be low enough that voting would be somewhat superfluous if beginner questions would be taken out of the equation: you can just check it once a day (or even once a week) and catch up on it all.

There's some "newsletters" and such which primarily seem to source "the best of Reddit this week", but then you're almost always too late for actual discussion, and the curation also isn't always to my liking.

> it comes across as sanctimonious given it’s not standard practice at all.

I can almost guarantee you that it will on occasion no matter what you do. I've had strangers both email and post GitHub issues asking for help on random stuff that's completely unrelated to any of my projects. I've usually answered some of the more open-ended ones (why people ask me for career advice is beyond me), but I answer the "plz fix my codez" with "no, I don't have time, sorry" and the reply is usually "okay, no problem, thanks for answering" but on a few occasions some gobshite got angry for "not helping the community" or some such nonsense.

It's probably very hard to run a technical $topic-specific community without having an endless stream of beginner questions because the expectation is that's accepted behaviour. This is something where better tooling can help, but e.g. Reddit is pretty ill-suited for it right now.

My issue with reddit is that it has become way over moderated. Don't conform to the narrowly approved hive-mind viewpoint? Shadow-banned.

Echo chambers are boring. I don't need reddit to be an affirmation of my opinion on a subject, I want real discussion with alternative viewpoints.

Have you thought about just making your own subreddit?

You can technically do that, but you will probably never succeed, because 90% of voters never or rarely post (so they have no idea how over moderated their subs might be) and probably 99% of users will just go straight to /r/myhobby or /r/mytopic instead of doing extensive research regarding whether /r/realmyhobby or /r/freespeechmyhobby is better and what drama lead to it being created.

From what I understand all mods also get a lot of bullshit requirements foisted on them by Reddit itself to remove content that infringes various sitewide policies. Which contributes to the supermod problem as it makes moderating time-sensitive in a way that regular people can’t consistently uphold.

I agree, I mean voting literally hides comments, and if someone is being mean or rude it at least tells you other people think they’re being unreasonably rude. Which hopefully makes you feel better about it and consider that it may not dignify a response.

Moderation is complicated by sitewide moderation requirements (which result in the sub being banned if not followed or inherently part of the topic, or the moderation replaced if followed but too slow) and cabalistic supermod groups. If we instead used the web then typical DMCA and other procedures could be followed, and European users wouldn’t get American laws (eg Reddit bans discussion of some kinds of grey market drug vendors because the drugs are illegal in the US, despite being legal in many European countries) foisted on them.

This like the most shallow take of reddit over moderation.

Karma limits, account age limits, even surving "new", automoderator deleting things based off some word in a title, needing a email verified account to post,unresponsive mods.

Then yes, there's the downvotes when you say something different or isn't a joke.

This is untrue. Even the smallest subreddits are beholden to Reddit’s ever changing “rules”.

I'm a big fan of old school forums as well, and still regularly find useful information there. I think the reason for their decline is that the single point of entry on these social sites is just too convenient to pass up. The phone gets unlocked, and one tap on the home screen pulls up all the aggregated content. Forums are separate and isolated from one another. The need to specifically navigate to one site for permaculture, and another for beer brewing is a blocker. I may not even think to do so. Open up a Reddit or Facebook app, and all the things I'm subscribed to just magically show up.

This other side of the coin to this benefit is the centralized control that we're lamenting. I'd also add that there is a real parallel to be drawn here with regard to government. Centralizing functions at the Federal level has it's benefits, but also drawbacks, in much the same way.

Maybe a partial solution in the former case could be an app or service that aggregates web based forum content?

This is about alternative front ends becoming untenable. Have you used the new interface?

I find it slightly annoying how Reddit gets always singled out as being “better than other social media” when it’s often more toxic and addictive.

Most of my FB feed is photos of my friends/ life updates. Most of my Instagram feed is dogs. You can curate almost any social media into what you want, Reddit isn’t extraordinary in that respect.

But there’s a smugness to a lot of redditors I really despise that I think the voting system rewards. As if having the statistically most broadly agreeable opinions makes one superior. Even in small to medium sized communities.

Reddit is very good at pitch forking opinions that aren't the majority. Thats why its considered the frontpage of the internet because its what "most" average people go for entertainment and engagement. Its not a place to cultivate meaningful discussions or debates. Really most of the people in this thread that doesn't like Reddit are people who don't follow the opinions of the general population.

For some needed context, Reddit clients will be charged for API access.

https://www.reddit.com/r/apolloapp/comments/13ws4w3/had_a_ca...

Not just charged. Charged an exorbitant and unrealistic amount meant to kill off third party apps.

USENET still exists, and some groups are still active, just not at their peak from yesteryear -- so why not go join and see if anything is happening in your old haunts.

Free access to text only groups: http://www.eternal-september.org/

Pick a newsreader: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Usenet_newsreaders and go take a look.

It would be interesting to know from a USENETer perspective how it feels to see the hordes of Redditors flooding their platform in an Eternal September once again [1].

[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eternal_September

I feel that the Usenet protocol in hand with today's technologies should be amazing. It should be possible to make a very powerful client that summarizes groups discussions say, by day/week; filters spam pretty aggressively and sorts or "mutes" known trolls or bad users.

The one thing I also wish would be better is discoverability... Just the other day I logged in into an irc server (LiberaChat?) but just didn't know where to go from there.. I got into my country's room, but it was very quiet.

> The one thing I also wish would be better is discoverability... Just the other day I logged in into an irc server (LiberaChat?) but just didn't know where to go from there.. I got into my country's room, but it was very quiet.

Check out netsplit.de. It has a list of channels sorted by popularity.

Any chance you have a recommendation of newsreader for android?

Could Usenet get “revived”, to replace the soon to be unusable Reddit?

Technically yes. Become widely adopted, maybe if...

There are free Usenet providers for the text groups. People would have to agree on methods to ignore the spam bots, maybe a signed message header/footer that a UI recognizes. There are forums and chat systems that already leverage Usenet as the transport/storage but they all need some tender loving care.

In my opinion for that to be widely adopted people would need a low friction way to access Usenet and it would need to provide them a UI/UX they are familiar with. Perhaps Usenet would be entirely transparent to them. Perhaps it would be a simple nginx web front-end so that anyone could run a node and it would use Usenet on the backend for storage and transport, ideally the sites that implemented NNTPS (TLS). Just nginx+python, or nginx+golang or an nginx module and super-lightweight with secure safe defaults. There would need to be a group set up where all the front-end nodes ingest group keys, identities, etc... and maybe a git repo that bootstraps all of this.

Traditional methods like using a Usenet reader such as Thunderbird? Probably not. Probably very small technical circles. I think this would be akin to convincing people to switch from Discord back to IRCD or using Mumble/Murmur for voice.

I want something new.

I want a client that looks basically how reddit looks today. An aggregator.

And maybe that aggregator has a back-end that runs on a VM somewhere that I control, or I can pay someone to run an aggregator for me, or whatever.

But I want each subreddit to be federated. Run on its own server, with its own moderators.

I want to be able to make as many Reddit accounts as I want to (dozens, maybe not hundreds), and pick which ones I use on which subreddits. Some decentralized authorization / authentication scheme? Or maybe some centralized server? Or using OAuth or something? I don't really care.

I want to SUBSCRIBE to a list of Admins. If an Admin shadowbans a user, I don't see their posts. I find this incredibly useful. Other people will disagree with me about which users, which actions, should result in shadowbanning.

I think that about wraps it up. What am I missing?

Way back in the day, Reddit was marketed as a way to create a forum without any technical setup, and then to view content across all the communities you were a “member” of in one place. You can still see glimpses of that, I think when you signup or register a subreddit it suggests making one for your dnd clan or something like that.

I don’t think Reddit realized how smart this strategy would end up becoming, because over time what happened is that existing Reddit users would just join the subreddit for some topic they were interested in (like a band) instead of seeking out forums for it on the web. Eventually enough people started doing that, that subreddits for a topic would absolutely dwarf any single traditional forum in activity. Because reddit is a single site they could also do a bunch of SEO optimizations due to having larger scale than independent forums. The result is a massive network effect and controllling the top-of-funnel for online discussions on the web.

Anyway, what fucked up Reddit was that after 2010 or so they started turning it into more of a consumption platform than a discussion platform, plus various issues with moderation (the emergence of powermods who are all secretly monetizing their subs to help advertisers, implementing platform-wide moderation policies), turning it more into a centralized service with less focus on discussion.

Honestly, combining the web with forums provides like 90% of what you want, it just doesn’t do aggregation, nor does it let you directly ban a mod (but you can always switch sites). But it does decentralize auth, moderation, servers, and allow more freedom in how a subreddit-equivalent gets run while also allowing moderators to directly monetize their sites rather than having to resort to secretive scheming. Maybe we simply need some kind of protocol or common API + FOSS client that lets you automatically grab and sort top posts from a list of forums that implement the protocol.

...and the lack of friction. I'm not making a new account for your forum on your site.

And consistent UI. Threaded conversations rather than a single scroll by date. Upvoting. Following a user to see the content they've created in other forums. Easy discovery. Some guarantees of not being hacked by the site itself. Ways to block users. The auto-moderation tools. The fun bots in some reddits.

And yes, most of all, the mnemonic forums. /r/minnesota. I just guessed that, and I was right. There's good and bad to that land-grab. I kind of wish that there was one more layer of indirection... That if I made a /r/minnesota and you made an /r/minnesota, that whoever has the most engagement is the "default" /r/minnesota that some new user will see... but that if the other gets the most engagement, the "default" would change. And that a given user can pick which /r/minnesota they want to be what they see when they type /r/minnesota.

But that's just how I want to handle the case of tyrant mods who own popular mnemonics but have instituted terrible policies.

The landgrab is part of the problem, you get discoverability and less of a fractured community, but always and forever that’s gonna be the first and probably main place people go to for Minnesota content. Which allows for really shitty moderation and all sorts of perverse incentivizes like registering subreddit names as soon as you find out about a new show/companies registering their own subs

Splinter subreddits still happen, like the various right wing politics subs, but a lot of them fizzle out. People have attempted free speech subreddits and of course there was voat, but it turns out there is a lot of adverse selection in which kind of user goes there.

One reason I’d prefer using the web and regular forums is that popular domains are already taken, so there’s naturally going to be more room for competition and multiple forums all discussing the same thing, with all the pros and cons that entails. While the vote->ranking/visibility mechanism is interesting I think it also biases towards simple content that appeals to the broadest base of users. It’s good for surfacing feel good pictures of something vaguely Minnesota related but not for things like discussing the merits of a legislative bill.

Sounds like you are talking about lemmy (https://join-lemmy.org/)

Neat! Do you know what I also want - I wish the aggregator I'm describing was API compatible with Reddit, so that Apollo and etc could have a setting to switch servers to it. Or I could hack my VPN to point at it. Does Lemmy happen to do that?

Also, mandatory Lemmy or God:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fM1UPeAOyHM

I don't see anyone talk about search discoverability. Many, many people add "site:reddit.com" when searching for product reviews and other information to weed out the garbage, and so far as I know, it currently isn't possible to search usenet with Google, Bing, etc.

I think it'd basically mean there was an easy way to access usenet text groups via the browser, and thus also an easy way for the average Joe to access usenet.

Some have already mentioned spam and moderation, and I think this will be a huge factor. Without the ability to moderate, bad actors quickly ruin any potentially-popular social media outlet. Most comments are happy about the lack of moderation so far, but that's actually a problem IMO.

Unfortunately you can't do site:old.reddit.com , It is a tragedy as old version loads more comments and has better UI.

Why can't you?

It just isn't indexed nearly as well.

But you can still do it, right?

When I first read this comment, my initial thought was that it would be neat if there were a forum-provider that made it easy for nontechnical users to create and run forums on their platform. That way if you wanted to do a site:forumprovider.com search you’d search across all forum instances. Then I realized that’s exactly how Reddit was originally designed and used!

Anyway, the forums of the aughts were discoverable through search and anecdotally used to be more highly ranked in search queries until they mysteriously started getting derailed by Google I think around 2016 or so. They solve the moderation and spam problem by have forum moderators just like Reddit - unlike Reddit these were usually real people from the forum + owners, and not powermods. Power mods I think do all kinds of shady stuff to monetize their control, with forums that’s less necessary as you can just put up banner ads, sponsored content, etc without running afoul to Reddit policies. And unlike with Reddit, there is no huge incumbency/landgrab advantage from controlling a common term like “politics” because you’re not running on a single site. I was surprised not to see it mentioned more here or on the current top Reddit post also discussing this, I guess most Reddit users are too young to have had exposure to them, but besides Digg it’s actually what Reddit replaced as it grew in the early 2010s.

I see this oft repeated...but why do we pretend companies and advertisers didn't figure this out long ago and start gaming the system? Because they absolutely do.

Anymore you have to verify each response, look into their history, etc. Which puts it back on par with Amazon reviews, really.

When I do this, I'm reading the contents of the reviews, both on Amazon and on Reddit. I want to know how people used the machine/whatever, and how it performed. Fluff reviews that say everything was great don't mean much to me, and neither do reviews where the person clearly didn't know how to use the thing properly.

Putting site:reddit.com in the search removes a ton of garbage from the results. While companies might still game Reddit, they absolutely flood Google with fake pages and Google seems to do nothing to filter them out. Most of those pages don't even try very hard and are obviously fake... There's just so many of them that looking past them is painful.

It doesn't combat spam very well. So I doubt it will come back at least in substantial way. Other thing is that you would need some agreed standard to make it "rich" as in user experience.

Killfiles are the generally accepted way of combating spam on Usenet. With only a few lines, I see very little of it even on the wider Usenet groups.

Generally blocking public services (like Google Groups) is enough to block 90%+ spam

I wonder how truly effective those would be if the spammers really started to combat and circumvent them actively.

And blocking public servers would kill the network effects. Thus keeping it only to small communities.

It just means that services that allow bad actors get blocked. Like Google Groups.

I have and enjoy using “public” Usenet servers like eternal-september and SDF which disallow spam and hold users accountable for their actions.

I feel like it's easy to avoid spam on Usenet at the moment because few spammers give a crap about Usenet. If it became popular again this would change, just like the first time it became popular.

That said, one of the things I really liked about Usenet is that the client was entirely in your hands. Some of the Usenet readers were incredibly sophisticated and no internet forum software has ever come close to offering an equivalent level of utility. I would jump on a "Usenet, but with moderation/spam control baked in" in a heartbeat. In fact this is pretty much what Reddit is, which makes me sad that they're trying so hard to Digg it.

Seems more likely that "the fediverse" will take up the slack. Perhaps not Mastodon (the best known implementation) which is more of a Twitter alternative, but Lemmy seems to fit this niche pretty well. OTOH, a revival/update of Usenet would not be unwelcome either. NNTP > ActivityPub, after all.

Spam killed Usenet so probably not.

Unless someone moderates.

Then you have Reddit, ie the need to fund moderation.

Or a corner case where there are volunteers.

And besides users will want tags and private messages and the ability to follow personalities and avatars and such.

None of which addresses zero latency for the first child porn. Remember how common it was for ISP’s to block everything starting with “alt” ?

Yes it was fun while it lasted but it wasn’t AOL that killed it. It was ubiquitous bandwidth improvements worldwide.

The pricing model is hot garbage, but most Reddit users will continue to use it (myself included). That said, I'd be happy to move to an alternative, even usenet. Reddit has so much weird baggage associated with it (powermods, admin shenanigans, a surprisingly high number of racists/sexists) that I'd love to find a place for more nuanced and interesting discussions.

why do you use reddit? I'm not being argumentative, I'm just wondering.

I stopped because I found that looking at reddit would negatively alter my perceptions of reality. Hacker news doesn't seem to do that. I also found that conversations on reddit were not very engaging but rather formulaic. It wasn't about having a discussion, just towing a party line (whatever the party for the particular subreddit might be).

I use it because domain-specific subreddits are usually gems of advice and discussion. r/ObsidianMD, r/YNAB, etc. are often as useful, of not moreso, than product forums. Also, there are many subreddits that are simply fun... r/BitchImATrain, for instance, or even the great, highly moderated r/AskHistorians. The bigger, more general subreddits may be burning trash heaps, but there's good stuff if you dig.

> I'd love to find a place for more nuanced and interesting discussions.

... what about here?

Hacker News is great for Tech news. But it's not so great at niche hobbies like reddit is.

That's true ... tech and tech "adjacent" or other serious topics like history and some politics, but you wouldn't come here to talk about your favorite TV / streaming show ...

> I'd be happy to move to an alternative, even usenet

Well, reddit is free (for the individual user) - Usenet is not. ISP's don't even offer news accounts any more and even when they did, they were so useless you had to pay for an NNTP account anyway.

Eternal-September.org has free text based Usenet. No binaries, but works just fine, and has for years.

Small newsgroup services that use NNTP, like Usenet, still exist as well—not to mention the “big” services.

Tilde operates one, as does SDF, the two *nix communities that I belong to.

https://tilde.wiki/wiki/NNTP

(SDF is member only access)

That would be incredible. The passing of Usenet was a huge loss to the internet, and nothing has come even close to being able to replace it.

Just do what slack did with irc. “Reinvent” it with a modern interface and some fixes. The mercurial masses will flock to the hot new platform, VC will shower you with adoration and cash, we’ll tell stories about how you don’t eat breakfast and only ever wear one sock. Everyone will emulate you and then you can come back around as a wealthy guru investor.

Duh. Have you learned nothing of the tech cycle?

Fear not. Your wisdom is preserved at https://github.com/globalcitizen/taoup

How exactly is reddit going to be "unusable"? I mean, apart from the general low quality of posts in a lot of subs?

I think this is out of the complaints about API access costs and those using third-party clients will "just stop using reddit" which I'm not sure is actually going to happen as broadly as folks may believe

But it might.

I have a bias here, though... I got fed up with Reddit and quit it entirely a couple of years ago, so I can easily see why others would bail on it without a great deal of prodding.

I suspect it'll be like a lot of things, where everyone says they're ditching it, and they are not ditching it.

I don't really understand why people use an "app" anyway, when browsers exist.

> I don't really understand why people use an "app" anyway, when browsers exist.

Reddit from a mobile browser is one of the most unfriendly sites I've ever found.

It also consistently insists, breaks functionality and nags you to try and get you to use the app instead of the browser. Its barely useable from a mobile browser.

I refuse to download the app out of principle. I just manually go into the URL bar and add "old." to get the classic experience.

They can steal a lot more data from you using the app, that's why they insist on you installing it.

I avoid native mobile apps for anything but the most essential for this reason. If it wasn't for the cars and public transportation I'd be using a feature phone by now.

Because Reddit's web experience is shit. The apps exist to make using Reddit bearable.

It works just fine in a browser.

You make think so, but it's a minority opinion, particularly among people who use reddit a lot.

Can you give an example of why?

Im not going to stop using reddit, but I'll use it a lot less. I primarily consume it on my phone using Apollo when Im relaxing. I would likely only use it on my desktop and that would become infrequent at best.

A part of me almost wants the API changes to happen. It would free up more of my time in the evening and provide a little bit of schadenfreude. But honestly, I should just uninstall the app anyways.

In particular, third party apps like Apollo are popular for moderators because the default tools from Reddit are just hard to use, especially on mobile. Thus, I think the big impact to reddit's model is to actually drive off a lot of moderators.

i.e., I've seen a lot of comments like this that makes me think this is going to be a real problem: https://www.reddit.com/r/apolloapp/comments/13ws4w3/comment/...

Personally, this is what bothers me the most; subreddits that are strictly moderated are usually useful, and ones that aren't are just not worth regular time.

This is also why I'm not really sure about usenet or any other replacement, because moderation is still the hard problem to get right.

> (...), because moderation is still the hard problem to get right.

Why not try AI?

While I do think AI could greatly help moderation, someone has to implement it, to be responsible for trust issues. And, right now, I'm not sure Reddit will be that someone.

And it's even more unclear is who would do that more generically where it could be used on a platform like usenet

Every community has tons of people that would take up the moderation mantle

The new Web experience is horrid. Intentionally bad it looks. Maybe it works if you just read the posts and maybe few comments, but trying to go any deeper in conversations is just not possible.

The official clients suck, but that's not currently a problem because there are quality third party clients you can use instead. But this change is going to shut down the third party clients.

If they also stop offering old.reddit.com I'm convinced the place will be a ghost town like Tumblr in a matter of weeks.

Usenet won't be as effective, since it lacks "karma." People love up and down voting, and usenet simply does not provide that.

That, and the the whole question of who's going to pay for a large amount of usenet traffic. Think of all those images traveling uuencoded and being stored at every hub...

> Think of all those images traveling uuencoded and being stored at every hub.

Yes, the text-only bias of Usenet (really NNTP) is a bit of a problem, but otherwise it's a pretty good starting point. Better IMO than ActivityPub, which is insane wrt consistency - e.g. everyone viewing a post from different servers is likely to see a different set of responses - and is actively cache-hostile. Fix the text bias, or add a side protocol for images like IRC did, and it would be pretty close to what you'd want for a decentralized Reddit (or HN) replacement.

Are there any alternative (open source) implementations of the _server_ side of the Reddit API? Then you could just point Teddit, Aurora, etc. at the alternative server. The only required work would be implementing the database backend which seems... feasible.

A Reddit/HN-like site is relatively simple to implement, but the main problems are moderation, spam protection and network growth

What will happen to Reddit to make it unusable? I feel a bit out of the loop here...

Pricing out of third party clients via API fees > only official website and clients are available > they get worse with monetization attempts > smart people who don't want to put up with less-useful UIs leave > site becomes devoid of "good" content.

I exclusively use old.reddit.com and it seems pretty good.

How long you think until they dare take that away too? For all intents and purposes, old.reddit.com is just like any third-party client. Vastly preferred by its users, harder to monetize or exert control over.

I'm somewhat anxious about old.reddit.com going away, no doubt.

> harder to monetize

Honest question: how is old.reddit.com harder to monetize than 'new.reddit.com'? I've been seeing ads creep in over the past couple of years I think. (Not that I necessarily have any beef about that..)

Old reddit doesn't have many of those newer features in the main reddit ui that's geared to steer users to pay for premium. For example, old reddit users don't see avatars, which can be customized with premium stuff in the main reddit ui. Awards are also less pronounced. As an old reddit user, I'm sure you have no desire to spend money buy avatar gears and more awards. Users of the new UI got exposed to those stuff more often and thus more familiar and more likely to buy them.

I exclusively use relay for reddit, if they take that away, I'll probably stop using reddit. Their mobile app is shit. I only use reddit on mobile.

More context on that monetization bit is that they're apparently planning an IPO later this year.

https://www.reuters.com/technology/reddit-aims-ipo-second-ha...

Third party clients are going to be cut off. IMO the case is overblown: Reddit has their own mobile apps which are... fine. Definitely not amazing but they serve the uses of the vast majority of Reddit users.

The idea that a serious number of users would rather move to Usenet than use Reddit's official offerings feels like very optimistic thinking to me.

There's probably an overlap between people who use third-party clients and those who fondly remember Usenet or still use it.

The best sub reddits are heavily modded, but Usenets support for moderation is very small, which means it will only be great if you can preselect by limiting who gets access to the groups.

I remember alt.religion.emacs - quite vividly, in fact.

NNTP was a massive quasi-distributed forum (I wasn’t the newsmaster at the ISPs I worked at, but frequently dealt with the servers and setups) and a pretty big overhead resource and management-wise, but pretty interesting to deal with until it was overwhelmed by binaries groups and all sorts of weirdness.

I do miss the quirky sense of humor and the community - somewhat like Mastodon, for those who are leaving Twitter - but I don’t miss the drama, the flooding and the flame wars.

Anyone in here claiming to use "old.reddit.com" -- so you're a non-logged-in lurker? and have a weird sense of entitlement for how the site should serve you? The old UI is great yes. But if you can't be bothered to log in as a normal user of the site (and set your preferences to the old UI) your opinion loses alot of steam.

What exactly do you think the Venn diagram of: users who are annoyed with the API change + users who are willing to put up with Usenet?

Look at migrations to Mastodon and Matrix. It's still niche. It's great for that niche, but it's not something the average user will understand.

Users care about UX, quality of life. This argument isn't grounded in that.

I have a feeling good things get "improved" upon but I never really saw what it brought.

What I do like about reddit. It is still one place where you just use an email address and nick name. So you can be anonymous. Or reasonable anonymous. No one looking back 10 years back into your posts to cancel you for something you said that in that time maybe was not an issue.

I was so reluctant making a Facebook account back in the day because they wanted your REAL identity. Man I was a nickname on irc or on the internet in general. That was what I loved about it.

Usenet was the same you could just use throw away email account and just say whatever. Ask whatever without being scared.

Reddit is the only place where you still can do that.

I set up a net news server, created two groups, hooked up to another net news server, we started peering… It sure is possible! And with peering, newsgroups are federated. They will survive individual servers going down.

I also wrote a minimal web frontend.

Example: https://campaignwiki.org/news Source: https://metacpan.org/dist/App-news

somebody was asking in a thread the other day about some open protocol for forums/subreddits/whatever that different people could host, that could be fronted by independent clients.

well, there you go, NNTP still exists.

write some ios/android NNTP clients that can handle multiple servers w/credentials, and run some NNTP servers. no need to distribute the posts to other servers.

How do you deal with spam and moderation? What about the sidebar and pinned posts? Upvoting/downvoting? There’s a lot of quality-of-life features in modern forums like Reddit and HN that you don’t have with these old technologies.

"extensions to the protocol" do you need the whole thing designed in a comment?

the original context was to decompose subreddits into their own decentralized and separately hosted things. so:

dump spam into some hidden pseudo-group that only mods can see. let them post replies to the posts which are interpreted by the server to release/delete the spam

add additional headers on posts to mark that they're pinned or sidebarred. clients will have to know how to interpret that, but you'll remain backwards compatible with everything that already exists

again if you really want upvoting/downvoting, have specially formatted reply posts which the server uses to increment/decrement the vote counter, which is presented as a special header on the posts. special clients can display it like reddit, and even old clients can probably make use of it for filtering purposes.

now, i did the design work, so you go implement it.

I don't see the advantage of doing this vs. doing a new federated protocol from scratch, with all of the modern features built-in, and accessible from a web browser rather than a separate news reader.

> How do you deal with spam and moderation?

Moderated newsgroups existed (and presumably still do). I was never a moderator myself, but to my understanding they use an SMTP-based system. I'm sure that could be improved.

> What about the sidebar and pinned posts?

The equivalent of pinned posts would be a FAQ. Links to the FAQ (or the FAQ itself) were posted at regular intervals to newsgroups.

> Upvoting/downvoting?

The biggest difference between web-based discussion boards and Usenet is that in Usenet almost everything is done on the client side. Threading, searching, filtering, subscribing, blocking of users and threads, and other such administrative tasks were all done on your computer by software that you chose.

Filtering in particular could be much more advanced than what we have today. Newsreaders had "killfiles"[1] which could have regex-based matching and scoring. This would allow you to have filters like "ignore posts where person X uses the words Y and Z".

The downside of all this was that it was entirely local, individual, and ephemeral. Usenet is a distribution protocol, not a storage or display protocol. News servers typically didn't keep old posts for more than a few months. If you wanted to save a post you either archived it yourself (possibly in your newsreader) or posted it to the web somewhere. Responses to posts provided context by quoting the post inline. Another downside is that Usenet is text-only -- you could embed binaries (and there were whole groups dedicated to that), but it wasn't normally done in discussion groups. If you needed images, you made ASCII art. :-)

Some of the downsides can be mitigated -- shared blocklists, for instance, already exist and are used by ad blockers and (IIRC) Twitter clients. But part of the charm of Usenet is that it's not a modern web forum with eternal storage and constant redesigns and monetization attempts and Official Policies from Corporate Management. It's just a place where you can talk about things. It doesn't really scale to having three million people on the same forum, but not every forum needs or wants three million participants. (And back in the day there weren't three million people on Usenet in the first place.)

Links to the FAQ (or the FAQ itself) were posted at regular intervals to newsgroups.

Not a fan of having lots of repeat posts like that! They're yet another form of noise to deal with, along with spam.

Newsreaders had "killfiles"[1] which could have regex-based matching and scoring. This would allow you to have filters like "ignore posts where person X uses the words Y and Z".

Local scoring/filtering seems like a non-starter to me. The advantage (and disadvantage) of up/down-voting is that it harnesses the "wisdom of the crowds". This can be pretty awful in very large forums such as the most popular subreddits, but can be pretty great in smaller communities (such as small subreddits) or those with strongly-defined community norms such as HN.

With an entirely local system you're going to end up creating a very elaborate bespoke protocol to manage and distribute this information or you're going to force individual users to handle everything themselves (with no wisdom of the crowds). Either way is less than ideal and seems to lose much of the advantage of NNTP: simplicity. Might as well go all the way and create an entirely new, federated protocol with support for moderation and up/downvoting and sidebars/pinned posts as well.

> Not a fan of having lots of repeat posts like that!

IIRC it was typically once a month. If you were going to post in a new group it was customary to read the FAQ and/or lurk for a while.

> The advantage (and disadvantage) of up/down-voting is that it harnesses the "wisdom of the crowds".

If you want a forum built around a collaborative effort to decide which posts are "good" and which aren't, then that is indeed very different from a newsgroup, where the front-line method of filtering is "skim new threads and posts and ignore what you're not interested in". I think this is mostly a matter of personal preference, although I will say that skimming was much faster and easier with a newsreader than a typical web forum UI. Here are a couple examples[1][2] of Forte Agent, for instance. (Sorry about the low resolution in the first one.) Keep in mind that the posts have already been downloaded, so navigation via keyboard shortcuts is instantaneous.

But it's also true that Usenet worked best with A) a lower volume of posts, and B) posters who put effort into proper threading and quoting.

> Might as well go all the way and create an entirely new, federated protocol with support for moderation and up/downvoting and sidebars/pinned posts as well.

That seems to be the holy grail these days. Not sure if anyone can actually pull it off, but I look forward to seeing what happens.

[1] https://courses.cs.vt.edu/~cs1204/usenet/images/agent_8.gif

[2] https://images.betanews.com/screenshots/1012115881-1.gif

If you were going to post in a new group it was customary to read the FAQ and/or lurk for a while.

But it's also true that Usenet worked best with A) a lower volume of posts, and B) posters who put effort into proper threading and quoting.

In an ideal world, every new poster would read the FAQ and lurk for a while, then make their best effort to fit into community norms when they start posting. Usenet was born in that idealized "first age" of the internet. But now we are in the Eternal September age (and the age of highly automated spam). We really need highly sophisticated tools of moderation and norm enforcement.

We also need it to be as easy as possible for new, unsophisticated users to get up to speed so they can start contributing. Installing an app from one of the official app stores is just about the most you can ask of new users before you risk bouncing them out the door. News readers (and potentially other tools for managing killfiles, distributed moderation, etc.) are a very big ask. You'd essentially be restricting the community to hard core, tech-savvy folks. And that's a real shame, because some of my favourite subreddits are for non-tech hobbies, where I'd find it unusual for users to have a lot of tech knowledge.

> We also need it to be as easy as possible for new, unsophisticated users to get up to speed so they can start contributing.

If you actually want to replace Reddit, I suppose. But this, too, is a matter of preference. Growing the userbase as quickly as possible is a business concern, and isn't necessarily better for the community itself.

> Installing an app from one of the official app stores is just about the most you can ask of new users before you risk bouncing them out the door ... You'd essentially be restricting the community to hard core, tech-savvy folks.

I think you are overestimating how sophisticated these systems are and underestimating what users are capable of. Plenty of people who were not hard-core tech-savvy IT experts participated in Usenet. There were many, many non-technical newsgroups, and they were quite popular.

All that being said, the blunt truth is that Usenet failed to scale. I think it got a lot of things right (and that we've thrown a lot of baby out with the bathwater in the last 25 years), and certainly we could stand to revisit that in an era where people are groping towards decentralization again. But while it might work for small forums, Usenet cannot support 800 million active users as-is.

Yes, I actually want to replace Reddit. I want to have communities where people are into hobbies OTHER THAN computing.

They had no other choice back then. I don't think you'll ever see the success of something as sophisticated as Usenet be duplicated, ever again. Non-technical users will just move to Facebook or Instagram or Discord.

Binaries groups devolved into UUEncode spam at the gigabyte level, and private servers sprang up to provide access to curated piracy, so there’s that as well.

Why would you want Usenet to be like reddit? Reddit is awful.

99% of posts are a desperate grab for attention. Every comment is one of:

- a smug, know it all response by someone who thinks they are an expert in some field rather than a loser who spends their day on reddit

- an attempt to be witty

- some reddit saying that gets repeated over and over ("man got that dawg in him" and so on)

It is also a bunch of teenagers just saying one liners

And this differs from Usenet how?

I guess you can argue that the Karma system is counterproductive and leads to Karma farming, even though Karma is explicitly worthless. But I think attention seeking is going to happen no matter what the platform is.

This was part of the forum and usenet experience long before reddit.

I wrote a few years ago of my understanding of why Usenet died to some positive reception. There are four principle failings:

<https://old.reddit.com/r/dredmorbius/comments/3c3xyu/why_use...>

1. It got spammed to death.

2. It lost control over its culture, and that culture was crucial to its functioning.

3. It was too problematic for ISPs (or others) to provide ready access to it: spam, harassment, child pornography, and copyright violations all posed massive concerns.

4. There was no viable business model for providing the service.

All of those are significant, but I would (and did) argue that points 3 & 4 were the final nails in the coffin. Anti-spam measures and tightly-curated / moderated newsgroups could survive despite the spam, but with firms willing to brave the very real legal and financial risks, and without any other viable financial support, Usenet fell to a mix of mailing lists and early online blogging / forum software (phpBB, Slashdot, and others).

There've been several attempts to revise or update Usnet (most noteably Usenet II),. Those ... have also failed to take hold. (Though in fairness: social media is extremely fickle, many apparently well-structured, and occasionally well-capitalised, attempts have similarly foundered, and the limelite often moves on with time.) Gaining traction and viability is a mix of luck, timing, and execution (mostly getting out of your own way).

Reddit can be seen as a response to points 1, 3, and 4. Reddit offers reasonably good spam defences, it has evolved protections against legally-problematic content (with some large bumps along the way), and it's attempting to develop advertising as a business angle. And has had some success at all of these.

Reddit's has still fallen flat on the second point, and fails further in many people's view (my own included) in that it simply isn't a very good discussion forum. There are small and limited spaces that work, sometimes. But even moderately large subreddits are a hot mess, and the very largest could have the late Newt Minow's classic phrase applied.

As for Usenet, it's a cautionary tale that open protocols and federated control are no guarantee of either effectiveness or continuity.

/me side-eyes Mastodon and the Fediverse.

Tangential, but what happened to the various usenet archives that google obtained and mashed into google groups? Do they exist anywhere else in a more reliable [1] home?

Edit: To clarify, I'm wondering how extensive the non-google archives are.

[1] As in not google

There are archives out there, such as https://www.usenetarchives.com

Yeah, but its hard to get a feel for how comprehenive they are or how far back in time they extend. I seem to remember that the archive that google bought from dejanews goes back to the mid/early eighties - much earlier than the IA's archive.

Rocksolid Light (rslight) is a web based Usenet client. https://github.com/novabbs/rocksolid-light

I'm ready. I'm here. But I've essentially abandoned usenet just because most groups I was in are now dead or spammed... So... Well... Not much faith in mass of people...

At Qbix.com we will be launching something soon to compete with Twitter and Reddit.

It is described at https://rational.app

What is this? This page is a lot of words about the media and negativity and debate with very little information about… whatever this is (or will be?)

I guess it has had the intended effect :-)

Confusion and then immediately moving on?

Rational reminds me of rationalist, which implies reactionary politics.

Yes! Perfect :)

We A/B optimized for that

There is also lemmy - think mastodon but Reddit style

I wish we could download all the data on Reddit in subreddits like we could on Usenet.

The main issue with Usenet was it lacked any form of content moderation.

Betteridge's law of headlines strikes again.

Easier to build something new than to tack on more cruft to the broken usenet model. At this point usenet has little remaining use other than being a low-profile warez distribution channel. It was great in the late 80s and early 90s but does not scale well as a communications medium and we already know better ways to manage the distributed data sharing layer.

> broken usenet model

That's a bold assessment.

It was slowly abandoned because it lacked fun graphics and emojis and all the other frilly parts that casual users love, but I wouldn't call it a broken model. It had (and has) a place.

That's not my memory. My memory is that Google basically bought it (by buying Deja News) and turned it into Google Groups, removing most of what made it great. That was when people really left in droves.

But that was a long time ago. I could be misremembering.

Google bought an archive & a mechanism to post/read. It's not possible to buy usenet, by nature it's a distributed platform.

Right, that's why I said "essentially". My memory is hazy, of course, but I remember that a whole lot of people stopped using usenet after that purchase. Some because they felt sold out to Google, and some because they saw it as a sign that Usenet was going to get absorbed into the borg. A system being decentralized does not make it immune from being that sort of thing. Look at what gmail did to email.

Whether or not that was most people, I don't know. But it was more than a few.

I mean, it was all around the same time. But I would argue it was a correlative effect, not causative. People were already moving on to web based message boards, more and more people were viewing Usenet as a place for warez & not discussion boards, etc. I'm sure there were people for whom that was the final straw, but I can't imagine that being the true nail in the coffin.

Personally I stuck with Usenet until the early 2010's. But it was so low signal that in retrospect I'm not sure why I bothered.

Yeah, that sounds about right. Thanks!

Google bought the Usenet archive from Deja News.

Usenet was/is decentralized. Yes, some things that are technically decentralized still end up centralized. But that's not what was going on or why Google bought Deja News, I don't think. They, at that time, ostensibly, wanted the historical usenet archive, and to make it searchable. Most people using usenet at the time didn't actually have access to a complete archive, just however much their usenet provider had chosen to keep on-hand from whenever that provider started distributing usenet.

I don't think the majority of usenet users were using it via Deja News provider. They could all keep accessing it however they were used to, Google's acquisition didn't change that, Gogle had no way to "remove what made usenet great" (i'm not sure what you are thinking of here being removed) -- if people switched from usenet to google groups (and I'm sure some did), it was because google groups had something they wanted that usenet didn't, google had absolutely no way to force anyone to do that, usenet kept existing the same as it ever did -- on a long-term trend of increasing irrelevancy.

> It was slowly abandoned because it lacked fun graphics and emojis and all the other frilly parts that casual users love, but I wouldn't call it a broken model. It had (and has) a place.

Usenet had graphics and emojis. What it didn't have was the ability for a nascent community to easily set up their own server or newsgroups, not in the same way a nontechnical person could easily get webhosting for their forums. And moderation of Usenet was possible, though again a higher barrier than competing services. What killed off Usenet was the general shift of the Internet towards technologies that can be easily accessed over HTTP, with the primary HTTP access to Usenet (Google Groups) being a barely usable piece of shit.

Also, the Usenet model was that your ISP ran a server that pulled from the global feed. But most ISPs shut down their servers in the early 2000s and forced people to look elsewhere. Sure they could have gone to a public server, but the person would have to find that before they found other options and most did not. They ended up on Myspace, Slashdot, Digg, 4chan, etc...

That was more of what I meant - pubs weren't shiny enough.

Nobody wanted to pay for bandwidth used by the gigabyte in an unlimited fashion by thankless anonymous folks back around 20+ years ago. I'm pretty sure nobody wants to pay for it to be similarly used by the terabyte today.

It was quickly abandoned because the signal to noise ratio went from 1:1.5 to 1:5000 overnight. Nobody gave two craps about emojis (which did largely not exist at the time) or graphics.

I don't think most reddit users care about reddit politics so no

Usenet has no moderation so no. People could use spam it to death

Usenet would be perfect

Thunderbird still supports NNTP.

Ask HN:

How about Reddit minus the overzealous censorship by admins and sub moderators. I think this is easier than recreating facebook or youtube. Reddit can be fixed by changing how mods are appointed. The major problem with Reddit is that there is no way to remove bad or corrupt mods. This has been a major problem with popular subs.

> I think this is easier

Yeah, a lot of people (voat, ruqqus, parler) have thought the same, and found otherwise...

Reply on news.ycombinator.com