Hacker News Reader

Comment by logifail | Hacker News Reader

> Thirdly was the user interface. Usenet looked dull. In a world of animated GIFs and MySpace colour schemes, Usenet didn't even have avatar images! Sure, the spartan nature meant that you could focus on a conversation - but it didn't feel as modern and exciting as the web did

"Modern and exciting" beat "being able to focus on a conversation" :(

Being able to focus is right at the top of my list of priorities. Surely I'm not the only one?

View on HN

There are subjects where the UI matters.

Eg, I don't see the HN UI ever be used for anything graphics related, because there's no image embedding.

This is fine for many subjects, but greatly constrains others.

It also has social effects. HN makes usernames very vague compared to say, Reddit or Slashdot. Which means that after more than 2 years on this site I still don't know any. The site is extremely impersonal to me, compared to Reddit where I can recognize regulars in some of the subreddits. Whether this is a good thing or not varies, but it certainly affects the dynamics.

Usernames being vague is a feature. Comments should be judged by their content and not by the person who posted them.

Also if you use old reddit usernames in reddit are as impersonal as they are here because of no discernible avatars.

Pseudonymity beats anonymity. People's track records and comment history should be a factor when judging what someone says, unless we expect every comment to be a lengthy thesis.

If I see a comment from someone I know to be a relative expert on a field based on my previous interactions with them, I want to judge it as more authoritative and interesting than a rando who registered two weeks ago and has mostly commented "lol".

> It also has social effects. HN makes usernames very vague compared to say, Reddit or Slashdot. Which means that after more than 2 years on this site I still don't know any. The site is extremely impersonal to me, compared to Reddit where I can recognize regulars in some of the subreddits.

I actually like this approach as it reduces the issue of some users dominating the conversation, thereby overshadowing others. I think it's essential to foster a level playing field for everyone when discussing topics of interest.

Claiming you could focus on the conversation with Usenet is putting on some rose tinted glasses.

By the late 90s Usenet was well into the Eternal September and inundated with spam. Unmoderated groups were a mess. There was also just the simple problem of formatting. IIRC Outlook Express defaulted to MIME/multipart posts which would cause all sorts of weirdness if someone with a text-only client quoted them and the OE user replied. Then of course there was the issue of top and bottom quoting. Many Usenet clients had truly awful UIs so a user could inadvertently quote a message's headers in a reply.

Compared to even a simple WWWBoard the experience was often lacking in terms of focus.

> By the late 90s Usenet was well into the Eternal September and inundated with spam. Unmoderated groups were a mess. There was also just the simple problem of formatting. IIRC Outlook Express defaulted to MIME/multipart posts which would cause all sorts of weirdness if someone with a text-only client quoted them and the OE user replied. Then of course there was the issue of top and bottom quoting. Many Usenet clients had truly awful UIs so a user could inadvertently quote a message's headers in a reply.

I didn't really start lurking and posting on usenet until the late '90s and while those problems occasionally cropped up, they really didn't interfere with the main discussion threads in the groups I was a regular in. I only stopped regularly using it by the early/mid 2010s because all the other regulars in the groups I was in ceased posting.

I mean, I used `tin` as my newsreader until somewhere between 2010-2015. It wasn't quite a hellscape of unusability if one was using a text only client.

I should have clarified the GUI newsreaders. I'd be willing to bet a very small amount of money that around 2000 the majority of newsreaders in use by real humans (not spam bots) were Outlook Express and Netscape.

There were some good GUI newsreaders but Outlook Express was a shit show. I remember OE was what my ISP had NNTP documentation for and nothing else.

> Outlook Express was a shit show

The main problem OE had was the quote wrapping problem that other clients didn't. The other was that it defaulted to top posting IIRC.

Yeah, I think Thunderbird was still pretty popular around then as well

> Thunderbird was still pretty popular around then as well

Thunderbird didn't come out until the early 2000s. The predecessors were Mozilla mail & news and Netscape Communicator. Seamonkey[1] is an offshoot of the former once Mozilla split mail and news into Firefox and Thunderbird.

[1] https://www.seamonkey-project.org/

You're definitely not the only one. I also endorse the idea of function over form, because catering to the masses has historically stood adjacent to 'lowering the bar' (choose any metric for this hypothetical).

Every place that doesn't cater to the masses seems to always be a higher quality community.

Slightly off topic, but dang, if you're reading this, I recommend making HN invite only for a month or two after the incoming reddit fiasco in July 1st. A ton of people on the major subreddits are already parroting things like "Just go to HN, it's basically the new reddit".

I don't think I'm making a hot take when I say reddit has a pretty awful community outside of the tech focused subs. But maybe I'm too concerned - I'm just worried that one of the last comfy parts of the internet will be invaded by plebs and emoji spammers.

There are plenty of good subreddits outside tech. Unfortunately, telling anyone about them risks ruining them due to how easy it is for a subreddit to blow up.

I would have gone with discoverability/UX. Finding and figuring out how to use a Usenet group was a complete pain. Once you’d managed the learning curve and found a group that interested you, it was great. But you can’t beat the discoverability of a Google indexed web forum.

As HN's success shows, there's a significant niche for text-only forums.

How can I focus on a threaded conversation if I can't visually see the difference between the participants? Quickly looking at an avatar is easier than reading an email address.

Having even basic HTML formatting helps lay out a post - which makes it easier to concentrate on it. But that was something eschewed by most Usenet clients and posters.

Similarly, inline images are great for illustrating a point. I don't have to lose focus by clicking on a link and going to another tab to see what's being discussed.

> How can I focus on a threaded conversation if I can't visually see the difference between the participants? Quickly looking at an avatar is easier than reading an email address.

You post this on a threaded discussion forum without avatars, one you've frequented for a decade

Yes - and I find it rather tedious. Why do you think that every other major SN has avatar images? It's because most users find it a better experience.

I also have my own CSS for HN which makes it much more pleasant (for me) and I I've started using https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30668137

The nice thing about Usenet: It's an open stadard and clients could show avatars.

For one simple generic blobs generated based on the sender's address, using some service like gravatar or X-Face header.

You could have your Usenet client to the same thing. Generate some sort of image out of the email address.

On hacker news I mostly never look at the usernames. It is all just hive mind. Unless someone is claiming to have won a famous math contest or something. Or if I am really mad at a post, I might look for additional context in their posting history.

Usenet had avatars: XFaces

https://www.emacswiki.org/emacs/XfacesSupport

I remember them being used by some Usenet posters in the 1990s.

> How can I focus on a threaded conversation if I can't visually see the difference between the participants? Quickly looking at an avatar is easier than reading an email address.

The from column in the thread pane view in my client[1] makes it easy to see the difference between participants, and also gives an indexed view of the entire thread. You don't get that with Hacker News or Reddit.

[1] https://i.imgur.com/i226q2c.png

Reply on news.ycombinator.com