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Comment by alrs | Hacker News Reader

We lost USENET, and it has been replaced by a website owned by Conde Nast.

We had an open and decentralized discussion system that was globally replicated. We had scores of NNTP clients to choose from.

Now it is 2014 and I am lamenting what was lost by editing a post on a webpage. This is a catastrophe.

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The death of USENET was uncontrollable spam, and that it was coopted into a binary media distribution network. For a decentralized discussion forum, the overhead was absolutely massive, and nobody wanted to pay for that and receive no direct revenue.

Websites, while still spammable, are able to control it a bit better, and if you can't figure out any other way to monetize your forum, you can always slap some ads on it.

This stuff doesn't exist in a vacuum. Someone has to pay the bills, unfortunately.

Spam, pain of running a Usenet feed (for ISPs), and copyright liability, among others.

You could avoid most of the binaries by not distributing some alt.* groups, and use existing email filters for the spam. As for making a buck, ISPs could just tack on a fee for running NNTP servers. Alas, we have shitty web forums wrapped in ads instead.

Usenet never stood a chance. It was invented in the days when net access was something of a privilege that could be revoked if a user did not behave in a socially acceptable way. As such, it was acutely vulnerable to spam and abuse. What proportion of Usenet traffic consisted of porn and pirated binaries in the late nineties? Is it any surprise that ISPs ,fearing they might be held accountable for distributing such material, started cutting off their Usenet service?

The good news are: Usenet still exists. There are free NNTP servers that host most non-binaries groups. Many groups are abandoned, but some are quite lively. Every time I visit, I am struck by the fact that no website forum approaches the ease of use of a good threaded newsreader, and I am amused when I see each new generation of coders, ignorant of the past, trying to re-implement an incomplete, flawed replica of what once existed.

Reddit isn't owned by Conde Nast[0].

[0]: http://www.redditblog.com/2013/08/reddit-myth-busters_6.html (See myth 4)

The best characterization might be to say that reddit is a “part-sibling-once-removed” of Condé Nast.

What does this even mean? Someone ultimately has power over Reddit, and it can't be Reddit itself since they sold. So who is it? The blog doesn't answer that.

> Then in 2012, reddit was spun out into a re-incorporated independent entity with its own board and control of its own finances, hiring a new CEO and bringing back co-founder Alexis Ohanian to serve on the board.

Right now, Advance Publications[0], which owns Condé Nast, is the largest shareholder of an independent Reddit.

[0]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Advance_Publications

Check freenet message system. It is open, decentralized and uses a web of trust for spam filtering.

Or Retroshare

<pedantic>No, actually we lost USENET (although it still exists and is used), and it has been replaced by a website owned by DejaNews(Google).</pedantic> But yeah, I'm with you.

Edit, forgot: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Usenet

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