Links to the FAQ (or the FAQ itself) were posted at regular intervals to newsgroups.
Not a fan of having lots of repeat posts like that! They're yet another form of noise to deal with, along with spam.
Newsreaders had "killfiles"[1] which could have regex-based matching and scoring. This would allow you to have filters like "ignore posts where person X uses the words Y and Z".
Local scoring/filtering seems like a non-starter to me. The advantage (and disadvantage) of up/down-voting is that it harnesses the "wisdom of the crowds". This can be pretty awful in very large forums such as the most popular subreddits, but can be pretty great in smaller communities (such as small subreddits) or those with strongly-defined community norms such as HN.
With an entirely local system you're going to end up creating a very elaborate bespoke protocol to manage and distribute this information or you're going to force individual users to handle everything themselves (with no wisdom of the crowds). Either way is less than ideal and seems to lose much of the advantage of NNTP: simplicity. Might as well go all the way and create an entirely new, federated protocol with support for moderation and up/downvoting and sidebars/pinned posts as well.
> Not a fan of having lots of repeat posts like that!
IIRC it was typically once a month. If you were going to post in a new group it was customary to read the FAQ and/or lurk for a while.
> The advantage (and disadvantage) of up/down-voting is that it harnesses the "wisdom of the crowds".
If you want a forum built around a collaborative effort to decide which posts are "good" and which aren't, then that is indeed very different from a newsgroup, where the front-line method of filtering is "skim new threads and posts and ignore what you're not interested in". I think this is mostly a matter of personal preference, although I will say that skimming was much faster and easier with a newsreader than a typical web forum UI. Here are a couple examples[1][2] of Forte Agent, for instance. (Sorry about the low resolution in the first one.) Keep in mind that the posts have already been downloaded, so navigation via keyboard shortcuts is instantaneous.
But it's also true that Usenet worked best with A) a lower volume of posts, and B) posters who put effort into proper threading and quoting.
> Might as well go all the way and create an entirely new, federated protocol with support for moderation and up/downvoting and sidebars/pinned posts as well.
That seems to be the holy grail these days. Not sure if anyone can actually pull it off, but I look forward to seeing what happens.
If you were going to post in a new group it was customary to read the FAQ and/or lurk for a while.
But it's also true that Usenet worked best with A) a lower volume of posts, and B) posters who put effort into proper threading and quoting.
In an ideal world, every new poster would read the FAQ and lurk for a while, then make their best effort to fit into community norms when they start posting. Usenet was born in that idealized "first age" of the internet. But now we are in the Eternal September age (and the age of highly automated spam). We really need highly sophisticated tools of moderation and norm enforcement.
We also need it to be as easy as possible for new, unsophisticated users to get up to speed so they can start contributing. Installing an app from one of the official app stores is just about the most you can ask of new users before you risk bouncing them out the door. News readers (and potentially other tools for managing killfiles, distributed moderation, etc.) are a very big ask. You'd essentially be restricting the community to hard core, tech-savvy folks. And that's a real shame, because some of my favourite subreddits are for non-tech hobbies, where I'd find it unusual for users to have a lot of tech knowledge.
> We also need it to be as easy as possible for new, unsophisticated users to get up to speed so they can start contributing.
If you actually want to replace Reddit, I suppose. But this, too, is a matter of preference. Growing the userbase as quickly as possible is a business concern, and isn't necessarily better for the community itself.
> Installing an app from one of the official app stores is just about the most you can ask of new users before you risk bouncing them out the door ... You'd essentially be restricting the community to hard core, tech-savvy folks.
I think you are overestimating how sophisticated these systems are and underestimating what users are capable of. Plenty of people who were not hard-core tech-savvy IT experts participated in Usenet. There were many, many non-technical newsgroups, and they were quite popular.
All that being said, the blunt truth is that Usenet failed to scale. I think it got a lot of things right (and that we've thrown a lot of baby out with the bathwater in the last 25 years), and certainly we could stand to revisit that in an era where people are groping towards decentralization again. But while it might work for small forums, Usenet cannot support 800 million active users as-is.
If you actually want to replace Reddit, I suppose. But this, too, is a matter of preference. Growing the userbase as quickly as possible is a business concern, and isn't necessarily better for the community itself.
Yes, I actually want to replace Reddit. I want to have communities where people are into hobbies OTHER THAN computing.
I think you are overestimating how sophisticated these systems are and underestimating what users are capable of. Plenty of people who were not hard-core tech-savvy IT experts participated in Usenet. There were many, many non-technical newsgroups, and they were quite popular.
They had no other choice back then. I don't think you'll ever see the success of something as sophisticated as Usenet be duplicated, ever again. Non-technical users will just move to Facebook or Instagram or Discord.
Not a fan of having lots of repeat posts like that! They're yet another form of noise to deal with, along with spam.
Newsreaders had "killfiles"[1] which could have regex-based matching and scoring. This would allow you to have filters like "ignore posts where person X uses the words Y and Z".
Local scoring/filtering seems like a non-starter to me. The advantage (and disadvantage) of up/down-voting is that it harnesses the "wisdom of the crowds". This can be pretty awful in very large forums such as the most popular subreddits, but can be pretty great in smaller communities (such as small subreddits) or those with strongly-defined community norms such as HN.
With an entirely local system you're going to end up creating a very elaborate bespoke protocol to manage and distribute this information or you're going to force individual users to handle everything themselves (with no wisdom of the crowds). Either way is less than ideal and seems to lose much of the advantage of NNTP: simplicity. Might as well go all the way and create an entirely new, federated protocol with support for moderation and up/downvoting and sidebars/pinned posts as well.