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Comment by Uptrenda | Hacker News Reader

You think it's worth getting into Usenet for new people?

Its worth it in the same way that HAM radio is / is not worth it. You do it as a sort of lifestyle choice.

can you explain this a bit deeper?

Facebook and Reddit are better ways to talk to people, but you're already here on Hacker News so it's apparent they don't suit your tastes. If you're concerned about Internet centralization, learning other systems that may be less centralized is great, but you know you won't be using it to talk to people you'd talk to on Facebook. And if you're concerned about the Internet itself, you learn ham radio.

Properly threaded, low-bandwidth, decent signal:noise ratio, text-only discussion? Sounds good to me. Far too little of that around.

It's worth it in order to experience a more efficient discussion UI. The difficulty is in finding newgroups where actual worthwhile discussion is going on.

The problem with ham radio is, that most people are not that interested in the tech itself. In the past, even if you didn't care about tech, you could still buy some radio kit and join the hobby for the "chatting" part. Now, you can get 'chat' everywhere, a lot easier and cheaper to set up, and you also gain privacy (encryption, no real-world indentifiers etc.), although I prefer the "open forum" type of ham radio communication, because well... it's meant to be open.

It's same with usenet... you can get the "chat"/discusson part everywhere now (reddit,...), usually with a bit better UI and it doesn't really offer much more than that. Back in the time, it was the best (and well.. the only) thing to have.. now with alternatives, people move elsewhere, and unless you find a niche you're interested in and a community exists on usenet, you won't have much to do there.

> you can get the "chat"/discusson part everywhere now (reddit,...),

There's no organic discussion happening on reddit. Even the TV show subreddits are tightly moderated these days. If you try and 'discuss' in a way that invites genuine criticism and isn't just mindless cheerleading of the product on offer you'll find yourself railroaded off the site in short order, and the political/real-world/location subs are an order of magnitude more controlled.

You can’t get the efficient discussion UI of usenet clients anywhere, except maybe on mailing lists with a specialized mail client like Mutt. Usenets clients were peak discussion UI. Reddit is a far, far cry from it.

Can you explain for us noobs why that is?

It relies on keyboard navigation, threading, and per-message tracking of read/unread status, and on subject lines. The threaded view with one line per message allows a quick overview over which parts of a discussion one has already read or which are new, or are still unread from the last time. You usually have a split screen where one part of the screen shows that thread tree and the other shows the currently focused message. Focusing a message marks it as read. Common key bindings are pressing Tab to jump to the next unread message, and Space to page-down through the contents of messages. This makes it very efficient to catch up on a discussion (or really, to catch up on all ongoing discussion over all subscribed newsgroups) even after a few days (or longer). And if you reply some time later, you can still expect other participants to pick up your reply and easily see its context.

Replies don’t get lost because the discussion has moved on or the thread is a day old, like they do on HN and Reddit. This enables long-running, structured discussions. There are more usability aspects related to the text editor used, such as editor commands for handling quotes when replying. There are of course the usual(?) forum features of being able to ignore (filter out) specific users, and other features like automatically highlighting/ranking/filtering messages based on other criteria. But the main usability benefits come from per-message read/unread tracking, keyboard navigation, and the compact thread representation.

Note how on HN and Reddit you have threading, but because each message is displayed inline, you see less of a thread at once. You also see only one topic (thread) at once, whereas in a Usenet client you see all recent or currently ongoing threads in the same view as the intra-thread structure. This causes a more shared experience of subscribers of a newsgroup being aware of the current ongoing threads (over days and weeks) than on Reddit and HN. And most importantly, when returning to a discussion thread, on Reddit and HN you don’t see which messages you have already read and which you haven’t, and thus threads die out after a short time, and longer-form discussions are not practical. The experience is profoundly different.

Gopher is the next big thing.

I literally write a briefing paper advising my university to clamp down on the nascent web and continue with gopher which was much more systematic and organized.

Clearly they ignored me as they should.

You're not wrong - the web is very disorganized. This makes it more valuable to shareholders, as they can design sites to present us with whatever extracts optimal value at the present moment. That's how Google gets to interpose itself between us and what we're looking for, and redirect us to SEO spam pages.

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