Hacker News Reader

Comment by patrickmay | Hacker News Reader

Those who don't learn from Usenet are doomed to recreate it -- badly.

My ideal discussion forum software would support threading, would remember which messages I've read and which I haven't, would allow me to rate both messages and authors, would provide a personal killfile, and would allow me to use whatever client I prefer to access it. In short, it would be Usenet exposed via a web API. No discussion forum software I've seen so far comes even close in features and usability to what GNUS provided in the 1990s.

View on HN

We are closer to your vision than you might think.

Discourse remembers what you've read and what you haven't. You can "like" posts or "flag" them as poor.

Our API coverage is almost 100% - our rich JS client consumes our own API for just about everything, so we actually know it's working because the client wouldn't work without it.

We also have an (admittedly undocumented) plugin system, where you can install rubygems that add or remove functionality from the core app.

The rating of individual users sounds interesting, can you comment on that? I would like to rate other forum users, and then find conversations composed of users I like.

> Those who don't learn from Usenet are doomed to recreate it -- badly.

Yes, and the reason people (mostly) don't use Usenet is because it was free, meaning you couldn't turn it into a property and make people sign up.

As you point out in your wish list, Usenet had a number of very nice usability features. And, notwithstanding a lot of time and effort, they haven't been duplicated in the modern era.

You don't consider my $5 per month to Supernews to be a good monetization model? ;-)

The clear need that the OP is trying to address suggests that Usenet might be monetizable now. Many web sites aren't going to want to store large amounts of historical text from their user forums. Perhaps there is a market for hosting forums using NNTP under the covers. Each site could provide a default web interface but also allow access via the users' preferred news readers.

Decoupling the GUI from the service is good practice in any case.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com