

The Lost Art of Threaded Discussions (2009) - evangineer
http://cafbit.com/entry/the_lost_art_of_threaded

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Lazlo_Nibble
Unless you've actually used a decent newsreader like trn, It's difficult to
appreciate just how much we've given up by moving most online discussions to
the web. Loss of threaded discussions isn't the worst of it -- many of the
web-based discussion boards I frequent don't even properly track _which
messages you've actually read_ , using a vague "last time you visited"
heuristic instead.

I miss being able to catch up on all my discussion topics using almost nothing
except the space bar.

~~~
InclinedPlane
Usenet was a truly amazing thing. The problem was that it just wasn't
scalable, there was a sweet spot relative to community size that if you
happened to be around to experience was amazing, but as the internet has
grown, and grown, and grown usenet became less and less sustainable. And now
we're trying to claw our way back up to that level by inventing new systems
that handle the scaling problems of communities better, but it's been and will
continue to be a long slog.

~~~
Lazlo_Nibble
Agreed re: community size and Usenet's inability to scale to it (see:
<http://www.studio-nibble.com/lazlo/images/wiredquote.jpg>). My lament is
strictly about the tools used to interact with that community.

Most web discussion boards are just GUI on top of a message store, and the
reading/posting pieces of NNTP are a stable, standardized API for interacting
with just such a message store. If every VBulletin instance _also_ exposed an
NNTP interface to its message content, I think it would be a huge step
_forward_ for discussion-board usability. (Well, once the NNTP-client world
woke back up again. Are there even any actively-developed NNTP clients left
that aren't focused on guzzling pirated media from the _.binaries._ groups?)

