Comment by jasode | Hacker News Reader

Comment by jasode | Hacker News Reader

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>, when the replacements were all worse.

Better or worse has multidimensional factors.

You have to separate out what some techies like vs what the typical web surfer likes. Usenet doesn't have:

1) upvote/downvote and algorithmic ranking -- which is what Digg and Reddit were good at. Typical web surfers like to see the most upvoted stories and most upvoted comments. In contrast on Usenet, it requires a separate newsgroup reader and configuring filters and manual curation. This is too much techie work for regular folks that want a quick dopamine hit of random web content.

2) good spam control. No system is perfect but web forums like reddit and HN have less spam than Usenet.

3) rich text and formatting. The private web-based forums software like vBulletin and PhpBB are good at this. E.g. upload photos, add colorful smiley faces, avatars, etc.

4) no easy way to be "lurker" with Usenet (at least in the 1990s). To retrieve the latest Usenet posts, your newsgroup reader software had to have an "account id". Reddit and HN don't need any sign up just to read posts; just point the browser at a url. Therefore, instant gratification.

Usenet is "worse" in some dimensions when considering multiple dimensions of convenience and usability.

Yes, Usenet is better on some dimensions such as offline reading and non-central ownership. However, I think we can agree that typical web surfers don't care about those attributes.

Well... Spam was not a real thing at the usenet golden age, killfile largely suffice. Today thanks to the experience we have from emails we can easily apply antispam to usenet.

On rich text... Well, while I welcome an org-mode-formatted usenet I still do not see any point in having text formatting capabilities, most of formatted text on the web looks really ugly and it does not help reading. Also if we re-learn to write down text in terms of formatting (for instance knowing that more than 80 columns start to be hard to read, using short URLs etc), with the classic netiquette rules we write down better contents, and perhaps with more attention. Try only to compare readability of modern web-platforms respect of ancient usenet posts in a good client and also compare the "medium quality" of posts. Photos can be a problem often circumvented by base64-encode stuff, fidocad etc, however when you really need to insert an image or video in something you post?

On upvotes, well personally I think gamification in general as a really bad idea and in general anything that pave the way to aggregators a bad idea. To let ideas, thoughts flow without soft-censorship we need to control us, individually, our information flow. That's why I favor RSS/Atom instead of modern aggregators, that's why I dislike HN interface etc.

Generally speaking if you make a business well you have to follow or try to drive client's interests but if you make a free software o technical stuff you have to do what you think it's technically best, didactically best. Think for instance about child educations, or simpler think about Ubuntu's Unity desktop: nearly all of us GNU/Linux users from few years before Unity we start to put "launchers" on left or right side of the screen simply because we feel the need of more vertical space and we know that too long/big launchers list it's practically unuseful like having classic dummy users forest of desktop icons, we all have ha small top bar from Fluxbox to Gnome or Enlightenment. Unity devs see this and "force a bit" their users to choose this superior model. At first it was not much welcomed, now it's "The Standard" of modern GNU/Linux desktop, same for "hit a key, type something, hit enter on first mach" workflow vs classic menu-based searches. That's "education". Usenet is about users, a free software/protocol, not a commercial product.

Of course it have rooms for improvements, but improvements does not means reinvent the wheel in a limited and anti-users way.

What you are describing is how a social web designed for the best interests of users that care should be. And here lies the problem, that people don't care.

> Yes, Usenet is better on some dimensions such as offline reading and non-central ownership. However, I think we can agree that typical web surfers don't care about those attributes.

Plenty of typical web surfers care about non-central ownership. But they care about non-central ownership of the things that they like to do online.

What usually happens instead is someone implements a distributed system that can shuttle data in a way that is functionally equivalent to data shuttling which currently relies on a centralized service. Hooray!

Then they write nice documentation that explains to the typical web surfer how exciting it is to go out of band and whitewash a fence.

Typical web surfers interpret that as brain damage and surf away from it.

Typical web surfers like to see the most upvoted stories and most upvoted comments

Refresh my memory, but upvoting wasn't even a thing until sites made commercial decisions to implement it.

No system is perfect but web forums like reddit and HN have less spam than Usenet

I'd like to see the numbers behind this assertion.

your newsgroup reader software had to have an "account id"

???

A lot of this sounds like hindsight bias and just-so stories to me.

>Refresh my memory, but upvoting wasn't even a thing until sites made commercial decisions to implement it.

I believe most common web forums like PHPBB had voting or something like it. Even imageboards have implicit "voting" by bumping threads with the latest comment to the top.

As an active phpBB and Invision user for years, I recall voting being only available with plugins, and they weren't typically considered upvotes or downvotes but reputation votes for the user. May sound like six of one / half-dozen of the other, but it was still a very different environment.

In addition, bumping was more of a way to get attention to something than to vote. As when asking for help on a specific topic, or to let other users know you edited and added to a thread's initial post.

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