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Comment by buddylw | Hacker News Reader

Holy. Talk about nostalgia -- I used to read these all the time when I was a kid in the 90s. I had no idea the internet Oracle was still around!

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I came here wondering if someone had finally created a ML version so you could choose your answer from AI or meat popcicle responses.

can you explain in simple words.. what exactly is the internet Oracle?

You send an email to the oracle asking a question (usually funny, but sometimes very personal). The oracle will return somebody else's request (in an anonymized form), and you reply to it. The result is publicly readable, and a whole culture developed around it. Try it!

See https://internetoracle.org/about.cgi

It's interesting how over time standard riffs and memes developed for message responses, "the you owe Oracle x" which I'm always reminded of when I see "the ol' switcharoo" on Reddit.

I always thought Zadoc the Priest stories tended to be lazy but maybe it was a victim of it's own popularity and it got hard for everyone to keep up.

It was one of my favourite sites back in the 90's and I used to take the time to vote on digests each week. Tempted to look back at some early ones to see if they stand the test of time...

It's ... sort of a text-mode chatroulette, but with presumed roles of the asker (supplicant) and responder (Oracle), a protocol for asking (#INCLUDE grovel) and answering questions, and a presumption that what is being submitted is in fact a question, with a voting mechanism for best responses.

Best question-response pairs were curated weekly and at longer intervals, in a digest. Those were absolutely delightful to read.

TL;DR: Like "Ask HN", but very, very, very different.

You owe the Usenet Oracle a pint of maudlin.

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