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Comment by anigbrowl | Hacker News Reader

The sad thing is that if Google had had the foresight to build in decent browsing, filtering etc., and polish up NNTP a bit, they could own the vast internet message board space, and we would be reading this on alt.hacking.ycombinator or suchlike.

It's not that people aren't interested in chatting to each other on the internet, I waste depressingly large quantities of time reading and posting in 5-6 different forums, this being one of them. There's still one usenet group I read regularly, but it's degraded to 50% spam and embittered ranting from an unhappy kibo clone.

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There've been a bunch of companies that have tried to do just that - EZBoard comes to mind.

The problem is that individual communities almost always want to control the look & feel of their forums. So as they start growing, they eventually outgrow the hosted, consistent UI and get something like vBulletin that they can customize themselves. The biggest ones end up ditching third-party forums entirely and writing custom software that's integrated with the rest of their site.

Forums are not a natural monopoly - there's no economic reason for one company to "own" them. We have the option of creating a Google Group that's basically alt.hacking.ycombinator with a prettier name. Several hacking groups do just that. But this community is big enough that it has special needs, so news.YC arises naturally anyway.

I would much prefer to have all my web message boards available through a single interface, in a single program.

I haven't seen any web message board UI that truly brings something new to the threaded-discussion style that pretty much all the old Usenet clients used.

Which is a shame, really, because I'd much prefer to read blogs via an NNTP reader (I suspect, anyway).

I'd much prefer to read blogs via an NNTP reader

If you use Thunderbird RSS reader to read blogs, you pretty much get the Same look and feel. I was used to Thunderbird NNTP client, when I started adding blog subscriptions to Thunderbird, the transition was seamless

"... they could own the vast internet message board space, and we would be reading this on alt.hacking.ycombinator or suchlike. ..."

alt.games.programming used to be one such place.

In the States, Verizon and Comcast have stopped including Usenet because of kiddie porn concerns (or it might have been an excuse), that's probably 70% of why it's moribund.

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