Usenet, updated in real time as it was thirty years ago | Hacker News Reader

Usenet, updated in real time as it was thirty years ago

olduse.net

131 pointsadambyrtek54 comments

The nostalgia that this makes me feel is unbelievable. Some things about old Usenet are probably lost forever:

1. The feeling that "this matters". Usenet wasn't just one discussion forum among millions, it was The One. 2. The life of the mind - the all-text nature of the old Usenet was somehow incredibly conductive to treating people as pure intellects. "On Usenet, it doesn't matter if you're a dog." Somehow even forums like HN don't capture that feeling today.

Also, a decent newsreader is still ahead of all modern browser-based software by a mile when it comes to following many discussion threads. For me, nothing today compares with trn.

Yeah, I know Usenet is still out there, and I can even be found there sometimes, but it's not the same feeling anymore, not of intellectual wonder and horizons and of being a pioneer. Probably, that's hard to explain to the youngsters who weren't there - wow, the internet has produced its crop of old-timers.

> Also, a decent newsreader is still ahead of all modern browser-based software by a mile when it comes to following many discussion threads. For me, nothing today compares with trn.

You're far from the only one who feels this way. I'm not quite sure why it is, but I think it's because trn's tree is basically drawn "orthogonally" (if I might use that word), with siblings stacked vertically, and children moving off to the right.

A "normal" newsreader uses the standard indented list, which gives the whole thread a "meandering set of diagonals" shape, and has a less strong visual connection between siblings (which is an important connection, because they're all replying to the same parent.)

So I was just looking for a screenshot of trn for people who didn't know what it looked like, and I found this blog entry talking about exactly this (with screenshot):

http://cafbit.com/entry/the_lost_art_of_threaded

Yeah, but it's by no means just that. I was thinking of the simplest things, like messages you've read not showing up again (unless asked for), using a single key to advance to the next message, pressing a key to mark a thread read. The advanced threading and killfile features were great, of course, but the web interface is just so fantastically less convenient for basic stuff - it's unbelievable.

Imagine going to the HN front page, clicking on all the threads you're not going to follow and marking them read or killed (meaning they don't show up again), and then clicking on the threads you want brings you to the last UNREAD messages in those threads. And you press space to go the next unread message. Imagine all forums being like that.

Give me that, and I don't care if you give me a vertical or a horizontal tree display (tho' I prefer the trn way). It seems so simple that I almost can't believe I'm not missing something subtle.

The simple things that you're describing are all in gmail.

Not really, no.

Read http://mail.google.com/support/bin/answer.py?answer=6594 and then tell me which of the simple described features are not in gmail. Be specific so that I can be specific in explaining how it is, in fact, present.

(Do remember that gmail's keyboard shortcuts were designed by people who had used Usenet extensively.)

How about "T K" (mark current message and children as read) and "A T" (go up-thread to original post) in gnus.

If your claim is that Gmail implements most of the "simple" features present in powerful news-readers then it is manifestly absurd.

My claim was that the list of things in http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2622662 are in gmail.

Of course real newsreaders have a lot of features that gmail doesn't.

Have to disagree, even though I'm a big gmail user and I do like it way better than the other webmail systems. A thread in gmail looks more like a pile than a real thread - it's nowhere near as smooth as navigating in a newsreader. It presents newer messages on top, and I sometimes find myself confused when I can't tell if certain text is new or quoted in an old message.

And there is no "kill thread" - you can set up a filter, but that's a longish operation and I don't think it lets you say "I don't want to follow this particular discussion" as opposed to "filter out this subject/author".

It all comes down to gmail being a mail system, not a forum system. And goog's forum system, groups, is pretty sad.

In GMail, you can mute a discussion using the "m" key. (There is also a GMail labs feature that makes it work a bit better.)

Also, within a thread, new messages are posted at the bottom.

You should really read through http://mail.google.com/support/bin/answer.py?answer=6594 to find out what gmail does that you don't know it does. For instance the "kill thread" functionality that you don't think exists is called mute and is available by pressing m.

I stand by my previous comment. Every piece of basic functionality that was requested is actually present in gmail. The aesthetics are not the same, and some things require hitting two keys (for instance y then o to archive the current message and move to the next - keeping the current one from showing up again unless you look for it). But the basic functionality is all there.

Is there a way to get gmail to highlight posts on mailing lists that are replies to one of your own messages to the list? That's one of the main features of newsreaders I miss (HN's threads?id= view is kind of a clunky approximation).

Not reliably, but here is the best substitute that I am aware of.

Click on the icon at the top left, select Email Settings.

Search for Personal level indicators and turn them on.

Save changes.

You'll now have indicators of which emails were sent to you personally, and a stronger indicator of emails sent only to you. When people respond to you they tend to reply to you, so it tends to work out reasonably well.

That's pretty useful, thanks! It seems like they ought to be able to directly mark messages which are reply to one of my messages via message-ids, but this does catch the majority of them.

I didn't know about the "mute thread" capability - thanks. But maybe "the aesthetics" are somehow crucial - I've always had keyboard shortcuts enabled in gmail, but following a modern mail thread (in which most people top-post, in any case) is still not the same as following one of the old usenet threads. Not the same feeling of smoothness or being aware of the flow of conversation and a message's place in it.

I was, in any case, talking about forums, not mail systems. It seems that none of the modern forum software even wants to give me something as super-basic as not showing messages I've already read. Exceptions are few. And it's in forums that I need "kill thread" and "kill followups" (I suppose gmail labs has that, too), not in my email. I have no idea why that is; certainly it's possible to replicate the old software with today's tech, and for all I know the wonderful new forum software already exists, but it's not being used very widely. And here I am in 2011 using phpBB boards and livejournal and HN, and they are all much clunkier and less-featured than tin and trn, when it comes to actually following conversations.

I agree with you.

However http://iwt.mikevitale.com:8080/gaming/board/show.iwt?boardid... is one forum that implements not showing you messages that you've already read. It doesn't have kill thread or kill followups, but that one feature sets it ahead of the pack.

I looked at it now, and it seems like you can mark forums read, but once inside a forum, like http://iwt.mikevitale.com:8080/gaming/forum/show.iwt?forumid..., you can't mark messages and threads read - they all show up. Or maybe I missed something. Anyway, it still gives me the same feeling as virtually every forum - here is a space in which people converse 99% of the time in plain text, and the technology they use to structure and follow these conversations is far more primitive that what we used in 1991 (when threading really came into its own) and very arguably worse than in 1981-1990, too.

And all this while the technology used to zip their messages around the globe and display them is the stuff of fantasies.

There is a very simple reason for that.

In today's world, all of the information for personalization has to be tracked on someone's central server. That's a lot of data per user. If you have a lot of users, that doesn't scale very well. And thanks to the stateless nature of the web, it is natural to have to process that data on every single hit.

Historically with Usenet, all of the information for personalization was distributed along with the data. The information for personalization was generally much less than the data for Usenet. And the processing of the data set was generally done once per forum per Usenet session, followed by much viewing and reading of data.

The result is that when sites like Slashdot popularized web forums, tracking that kind of detailed individual reading history didn't seem like a critical feature. If you've got one or two webservers serving a semi-popular forum (I believe that HN runs off of a single CPU), that feature just isn't going to be seen as a critical need.

I do understand that the current web infrastructure is not made for this, but given demand, it /could/ be adapted for the sort of reading that we are nostalgic about. There are obscure forums that I sometimes read on the portal bsh.co.il - this is an Israeli social work portal. Click on a message in a forum like http://www.bsh.co.il/forums/AllMessages2.asp?Fnumber=10 - there is going to be a checkmark next to the message you clicked from now on, even if you reload the browser (presumably, there is a cookie). This is a small custom-written forum with very little programmer muscle behind it, I doubt it's more than a couple of guys. If they can do it, everyone can do it - and it's a small step to hiding threads completely, etc., etc.

I've concluded that there is just no demand for sophisticated threading/reading software of the type we had in the '90s. If there was demand, there is certainly technology to fill it. If they can run Linux in a browser complete with a little C compiler, they can run the equivalent of trn. As you pointed out yourself, Gmail covers the basics already - why not make it more sophisticated and bring the technology to Google Groups? No demand. Otherwise, one of the sources of innovation in this industry - big corps, startups, or academic/open source, would have filled it. Even if it required extending HTTP/HTML somehow - these extensions happen quickly when really needed.

Look at it a different way.

The features that you are talking about are essential for carrying on extended, complex conversations in a high volume environment.

The high volume discussion forums that we have today are mostly geared towards providing and filtering discussions of topical items for short periods of time, while blocking spam. (Not a big problem on the classic Usenet.)

The result is that we have things like voting systems, but the implicit assumption that any old conversation is automatically dead. (An assumption that is implicitly guaranteed by the fact that the forum becomes unusable.) So that leads to lack of motivation to improve software for this use case.

Yeah, tell me about it - I poked in here more or less by accident (tab still open) and found your reply. Everyone else is long gone, of course.

You're right about topicality being important, but there are tons of forums which I've followed (on history, for example, or on science) where nothing is topical and threads go on for 140 phpBB pages or more. Needless to say, these threads are unusable, especially compared to Usenet. So why not make software for it? People write software for more obscure niches all the time.

Killing a thread is not the same as killing a branch. Gmail linearizes multi-branch conversations. Multi-branch conversations occur more naturally in fora and mailing lists, but it can be useful to ignore a branch.

> The aesthetics are not the same, and some things require hitting two keys (for instance y then o to archive the current message and move to the next - keeping the current one from showing up again unless you look for it).

Looks like you don't know everything about Gmail shortcuts yourself. The same feature is available under '{' and '}' (or '[' and ']', but in this case the behavior depends on the label you are currently in).

I was just skimming through that page to find options. My usual mode is just j/k. But good to know.

Exactly!

Even HN (one of the best web forums, IMO), is still clunky compared to usenet. Usenet made it so easy and efficient to follow topics you were interested in while ignoring the crap.

I think I'd be willing to give up the ability to upvote comments/submissions in exchange for a good usenet interface to HN.

> I think I'd be willing to give up the ability to upvote comments/submissions in exchange for a good usenet interface to HN.

Given that this is HN. I wonder how long before someone implements something like that for fun.

a structure of a thread is informative in itself

http://joey.kitenet.net/blog/entry/thread_patterns/

or a somewhat modernized take

http://blog.whats-your.name/post/2011/06/02/pas-de-titre

Sounds like a weekend project - adapt trn style reading to something that scrapes HN and keeps track for the user of all those things... heck I would pay $5/month for such a webapp.

I remember folk writing such apps for Slashdot.

Since 1997 we've known that HTTP+HTML is the worst way to achieve any task online. It is, however, the most popular.

Wow, that links is interesting. I used to do a bit of Usenet in the early 2000s - some groups are still alive - and while I'd heard of trn, I didn't know that it did anything special. The screenshot dispels my ignorance.

I think one part of this can be attributed to the average Internet/Usenet users back then and typical Internet users of today and to the huge difference in numbers.

What's sad is that there is no serious replacement for usenet in the internet of today. Usenet was a place where top talents of the world used to talk together with amateurs on the more disparate topics. Back then the internet was for an elite, and that sucked as universal access to the net is really important, but at the same time it is sad to see most of the internet reflecting the fact that today it is a "mass" thing.

quora?

Hacker News much more than Quora.

HN is definitely a place for experts to interact with 'everyday' folks in tech. But it doesn't even aspire to be that for any other vertical.

Quora arguably has a marginally lower caliber of tech experts, but much higher for many other verticals including business, journalism, media, etc.

I'm referring to the verticals I know and about which I do ongoing research, which mostly aren't tech verticals. I've checked facts on those issues on Quora, which has been disappointing as a source of information on those subjects.

Well, without more information, I can't really prove you wrong ;-)

But I still contend that Quora has experts in more domains than HN does. Check out the breadth of industries represented on http://www.quoratop.com/. Of course, it's still tech heavy - but it's more diverse than HN.

It's not perfect - but it's a much better candidate than HN.

That list on Quoratop is dominated by tech bloggers and pundits. Not industry experts. Just a bunch of people with tons of followers and hours logged on Twitter and at conferences. When you can converse with core contributors to openbsd, openssh, and ffmpeg, the guy who wrote fucking bsdiff, and the creator of the first worm, that's really impressive.

As a sidenote, this is probably one of the biggest things I miss about HN's old days is how great the discussions were with such legends. The creator of Gmail & Adsense talking with you was a daily, awe-inspiring thing. Not that it doesn't happen still, but a lot of this old guard of commenters comment less and less with new vocal pipsqueaks filling up threads. Not that they don't bring value, but the old guard had a way with words that conveyed thoughts concisely.

But I think your argument stands, there are a lot of different and varied industries and interests represented on Quora. The only problem is that a lot of the questions and answers seem a little fake and dry. Everyone's got their name and reputations on the line, so there isn't much outside the usual rhetoric and repeated arguments. Though I will note once in awhile a gem appears from the trough.

The best sources for serious discussions online seem to have moved from Usenet newsgroups over to the pantheon of topic- or expertise- specific forums; Nuclear Phynance and Wilmott for quants and finance+banking, HN and a few other good forums for tech, CollegeConfidential for education, BodyBuilding for fitness and health, etc. And the huge constellation of niche, smaller forums. Then there are the generalist forums like Something Awful and lots of smaller ones with vague or whimsical/unrelated beginnings or purposes. IRC is still a great medium as well, but heavily tech-focused.

I think Reddit fills a hole here in a lot of areas, especially in the smaller and more focused subreddits.

> Usenet was a place where top talents of the world used to talk together with amateurs on the more disparate topics.

Twitter has adopted some of these functions: it allows anyone to hold open conversations on any topic (albeit limited to 140 characters); enough (important) people are on Twitter and use it with enough frequency to make this possible.

When I hear Twitter being compared to the golden age of Usenet, I reach for my pistol.

Nothing of real substance fits into 140 characters. Which is unfortunate, really, since Twitter is so popular these days.

100% agree, but ironically the most read single post on olduse.net so far actually fits in a tweet: http://identi.ca/notice/75500867

You are aware that "Nothing of real substance fits into 140 characters." fits in a tweet right?

Not even remotely the same.

When I got involved in the early 90s, sci.math (to name a random example) had over 100,000 regular readers. Participants ran the range from beginners who didn't understand Calculus to tenured professors to random kooks. (Sometimes those categories overlapped - eg Alexander Abian.) Conversations regularly were complex meandering affairs where participants frequently kept 3-6 different threads of the same conversation going in the same posts.

I am not aware of any discussion forum today that is online with anything like that readership and range of participants. I'm also not aware of any with that tolerance for complex conversations. (You can do it with email - I have - but when people mix top posting with bottom posting with interleaved posting, it turns into a mess. To do it like Usenet did you must use interleaved posting.)

You see some very cool, informative, deep conversations on Reddit and HN from time to time. The main missing thing is the userbase.

The more important qualifier is "from time to time".

What I miss most about Usenet is that there were always interesting conversations, that were expected to take place over time. Here how many conversations are still going on a day later? A week later?

Twitter has replaced Usenet to roughly the same extent that 4chan has replaced Plato's academy.

Leaving aside the character limit, it's quite difficult to follow a 'thread' on twitter. It's a great broadcast medium for short updates "server X is down" and so on, but not so great for conversations.

I strongly doubt half of those "VIPs" are actually taking care of their twittering/facebooking themselves so at best you reach someone actually working directly for said "VIP".

Here's my announcement post, which is, I hope, worth reading for some context of what's going on in 1981 "now":

http://kitenet.net/~joey/blog/entry/announcing_olduse.net/

Also, if you see a blank box where the newsreader should be, yeah, inviting the whole web in to run tin on my server is not a completely scalable thing. nntp.olduse.net is where it's at.

joeyh's git repo for this neat hack:

http://git.kitenet.net/?p=oldusenet.git;a=summary

This was just posted in the "hacknews" newsgroup. Its resemblance to my day is uncanny.

  Message-ID: <696@Autzoo.UUCP>
  Newsgroups: hacknews
  Path: utzoo!henry
  Date: Fri Jun  5 15:44:20 1981
  Subject: morning crash
  From: henry
  X-OldUsenet-Modified: added From; converted from A-news;   fixed Message-ID; added
  Xref: dummy dummy:1

  Crash this morning, a mass of multiple panics suggesting 
  some sort of catasstrophic failure.  Hardware glitch?  
  Reboot and rebuild (by Laura) succeeded with no problems.

Updated in real time? So I have at least ten years before my embarassing newbie posts arrive.

I want a fork of this that allows me to reply to me. ;)

This is before the Great Renaming, I don't even know the structure...

Wow...this is seriously cool. I like how the old threads are preserved in the newsreader interface. There is also something about having the clock advance in "realtime" that makes it more fun to run that just skimming through the old archive.

Nice work Joey.

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