Every web-based message board has a better interface than the Usenet newsreaders did, if only because web message boards have more affordances for features than newsreaders do.
> Every web-based message board has a better interface than the Usenet newsreaders did
This is a fascinatingly different opinion I can't wrap my head around.
To me it seems self-evident that every web-based or proprietary app message board interface is immensely worse than even the most primitive usenet reader of the 80s.
I'm with you. I really despise web based apps and I really loved having a native app experience with usenet. Google groups was a UX regression and I really would just love to have a native news reader again.
When I read comments like this, I assume the person writing it didn't spend much time in conversations on Usenet. It sucked. Replies would randomly go missing. They'd take hours to arrive. Nothing was searchable or findable. Replies would expire out in some arbitrary amount of time --- every server did this differently. There was no meaningful formatting. Because there was often no moderation at all, groups would get crudded up with spam. There was no sorting of messages; you just had to build an intuition for whose responses were worth reading, and scan threads for them. Every message had to stand alone, like an email, so things were often top/bottom quoted, and you had to pick through all the chaff to find morsels of new content.
Imagine Hacker News, if instead of Hacker News, you had only Gmail's interface and Gmail threading. That's what we put up with.
I spent a lot of time on Usenet. I miss it a lot, in the same way I miss, like, trip-hop. It was a thing of its time. I don't so much want to engage with it now.
It was great, at the time, because there was nothing else like it. But there's no Usenet group I can think of that doesn't have a message board equivalent today that blows it completely out of the water. I think a lot of people are nostalgic for Usenet because they miss the feeling of discovering worldwide communities; today, they're a dime a dozen.
> When I read comments like this, I assume the person writing it didn't spend much time in conversations on Usenet.
You should not assume, does not lead to good conversation.
I've been nonstop on usenet since the late 80s, still am. I used to run a site for my university. I was a heavy poster and reader through the 90s. My usage volume has decreased, but still sometimes post. Read daily. Usenet rocks. Wish it had more participation, as it used to have. It is so much better than anything else we've come up with.
> you had only Gmail's interface and Gmail threading
Ugh, no, gmail threading is abysmally terrible. Something like trn is far superior.
Tell me how you can do any of these things in a so-called modern forum/chat app:
- Say I want to killfile tptacek? Ok, some apps allow blocking people, HN doesn't.
- Say I want to upscore posts from tptacek that mention crypto but downscore anything that doesn't. Impossible on any "modern" app that I know of.
- Say I want to pipe every post through my custom bayesian scoring filter. Impossible on any "modern" app that I know of.
- Say I want to pipe every post through a custom app that scans for key phrases I want to be alerted on, send those to my email.
I could go on and on. The sites and apps we are forced to use today are lacking 99% of the functionality that was trivially possible back in the 90s.
These are all things you can do with HN, which has one of the simplest and most limited interfaces of all the Internet message boards. Just like with NNTP, you have to write software to do it, but it's straightforwardly doable. People have done several of them!
I guess you're thinking that one could curl down the text and then process it locally as much as one wishes, feed it to some custom reader and consume it that way. Which you're right, is possible, but not exactly within HN at that point.
And HN is the simplest use case. Tell me how I do any of the above things with messages people insist on sending via whatsapp or facebook or any such walled gardens that go out of their way to prevent interoperability?
Give me SMTP and NNTP, open standards with infinite flexibility where I own and control the experience.
Usenet with full access to a big server was fun. With just NNTP access, it was diminished. 3 to 6 hops out in UUCP/WWIV/FIDOnet land it was a different animal. Still of use but high friction.
I assume you were taking something less than full feeds, because on a full feed reader server, just keeping up with the inode demands for all the messages was a challenge; grepping would have taken for-fucking-ever.
