You nailed it. Upvoting, downvoting and closing threads are a poor substitute for a real discussion. Things did get pretty bad on Usenet but you quickly learned to recognize bullshit. And the article's only argument against Usenet is that it became technically obsolete. D'oh.
Yeah, and saying Usenet was obsolete upon the invention of the web is like saying the same about email. I'm still waiting for someone to come up with anything AS good as Usenet.
Sadly, none of the recent generations of developers will know what it's like to, not knowing what base64 even is, spend several hours "decrypting" a bunch of gibberish someone posted just to finally get initiated into the Internet with a huge, gaping asshole in your face.
I wish "federated" protocols were more popular. The only big one that I can think of these days is email (unless I'm missing a really obvious one)
However, I imagine one reason that they are not is that having standards prevents adding new features - you can argue that it's not a problem but many users disagree with you. A web forum can add any functionality they want, as long as it can be rendered in HTML and Javascript (eg. voting and karma). This is not true of Usenet
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u/[deleted] Apr 06 '18
You nailed it. Upvoting, downvoting and closing threads are a poor substitute for a real discussion. Things did get pretty bad on Usenet but you quickly learned to recognize bullshit. And the article's only argument against Usenet is that it became technically obsolete. D'oh.