The Lost Art of Threaded Discussions (2009)

cafbit.com

10 points·evangineer··3 comments

Unless you've actually used a decent newsreader like trn, It's difficult to appreciate just how much we've given up by moving most online discussions to the web. Loss of threaded discussions isn't the worst of it -- many of the web-based discussion boards I frequent don't even properly track which messages you've actually read, using a vague "last time you visited" heuristic instead.

I miss being able to catch up on all my discussion topics using almost nothing except the space bar.

Usenet was a truly amazing thing. The problem was that it just wasn't scalable, there was a sweet spot relative to community size that if you happened to be around to experience was amazing, but as the internet has grown, and grown, and grown usenet became less and less sustainable. And now we're trying to claw our way back up to that level by inventing new systems that handle the scaling problems of communities better, but it's been and will continue to be a long slog.

Agreed re: community size and Usenet's inability to scale to it (see: http://www.studio-nibble.com/lazlo/images/wiredquote.jpg). My lament is strictly about the tools used to interact with that community.

Most web discussion boards are just GUI on top of a message store, and the reading/posting pieces of NNTP are a stable, standardized API for interacting with just such a message store. If every VBulletin instance also exposed an NNTP interface to its message content, I think it would be a huge step forward for discussion-board usability. (Well, once the NNTP-client world woke back up again. Are there even any actively-developed NNTP clients left that aren't focused on guzzling pirated media from the .binaries. groups?)

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