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Comment by jwr | Hacker News Reader

I also wish we brought back interesting discussions in a medium that is not corporate-controlled, but I do not long for those crappy forums. I always thought they were a major regression. We had Usenet, and it had easily filterable threaded conversations with a plethora of good readers. The only thing it lacked was good inline image support, but that could have been bolted on. Instead, we started implementing those terrible forums. The necessity to bookmark multiple forums if you wanted to participate in multiple discussions. Bugs, captchas... There were a ton of difficulties with accessing those. And, of course, you had to register for each one with a username and a password.

The internet today still does not have a good discussion medium like Usenet, and I am not sure if it ever will.

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I guess the WWW itself is what you are asking for. You simply can't scale a single community to include all of humanity. You need some way to filter out abusers, and people will vary widely in where they want to place the line of what counts as acceptable behavior. Given that, you need some way to exclude people from spaces they aren't welcome in, and different discussion mediums in order to encourage or discourage types of behavior. This leads to different communities with different expectations of behavior, and that's exactly what we have on the WWW.

Usenet worked because it was small, a very small percentage of the planet used Usenet.

"The internet today still does not have a good discussion medium like Usenet, and I am not sure if it ever will." Several web interfaces to Usenet exist, see https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Web-based_Usenet#Web-based_sit... . I operate one of these at https://newsgrouper.org/ .

Many Usenet groups have been abandoned, or are haunted only by a few cranks, but a few still have worthwhile discussion. A couple of years ago there was a tidal wave of spam, but that mostly stopped after Google Groups disconnected. So the infrastructure is still there, still free of adverts and manipulative algorithms, just waiting for more people to use it.

I'm still connecting once in a while to a local (dialup)BBS that has been running since 1994, no growth but we're still keeping in touch. Same for a forum I frequent from time to time, since 2001. I've recently deactivated my IG, FB, and Reddit accounts, pretty much every mainstream social media platform. The censorship is beyond ridiculous.

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