Hacker News new | past | comments | ask | show | jobs | submit login

Every time I'm forced to use a forum for something, I wish usenet hadn't succumbed to spam & binary warez. Many of the clients from 20 years ago have more (useful) features than modern forums.

It's probably about time to reinvent it again, tunneled over Websockets with a Flat Responsive html5 Retina-Aware Interhyperface or something.




Any reinvented Usenet should be client agnostic, otherwise it is just going to eventually succumb to the same problems that we already have with web forums.


In which case it will eventually succumb to the problem of RSS - the biggest client will decide to drop it in favor of moving to a proprietary system.


(Well I suppose that is what you get for using a webclient that you are not paying for....)

What is the alternative here though? Instead of making it client agnostic, make it not client agnostic? How does that not make the situation even worse? Being client agnostic means that it doesn't matter if one particular client is discontinued. That is practically the entire point of being client agnostic...

Any solution that will be viable in the long-term needs to be decentralized and client agnostic. Otherwise you are not reinventing Usenet, you are just reinventing web forums poorly.

Edit: Aaaah, I need more sleep.


@jlgreco

I was actually just griping.


I've always wanted to see a nested-discussion system with upvotes/downvotes that does the kind of seamless no-F5 updating you see on facebook.


Wouldn't that mean that as you're reading a comment it could suddenly start moving up or down the screen? That'd make it pretty hard to read the stuff tailored for shills/fanboys/antifanboys...oh you may be onto something..




Guidelines | FAQ | Lists | API | Security | Legal | Apply to YC | Contact

Search: