Usenet is flooded with spam to the point of being unusable, and besides, having everyone use the same interface and see images alongside is different from having people use a multitude of different clients that present binary attachments in various different ways.
With a decently sized crowd from HN, there could be a lot of interesting content on a Minichan like site. The crowd would be small enough that I don’t think there would be much point in decentralizing it. Besides, with centralization then mods still have a fighting chance of keeping the quality of the posts up to par, if they felt so inclined.
The value of anonymous discussion is that every thread is a fresh start. You can express yourself about what’s on your mind without be constrained by your own desire to make everything you say fit into some bigger picture of an identity of self. If that makes sense. But also, it is different from making throwaway accounts on sites where all other people are using identities. Admittedly on Minichan there are many people that use names and tripcodes. But the ability for threads to exist where everyone is on an equal footing is valuable.
I’m thinking not so much in terms of discussion itself actually but in terms of creative potential. At their peak, chan style imageboards can be amazingly creative.
Imagine an imageboard with people from HN, where people were producing graphics and music like in the Demoscene, but together and for no purpose other than creativity itself. No names or anything. Just pure unfiltered creativity.
Yeah. I was being snarky without enough context to make myself clear there... Sorry.
> Usenet is flooded with spam to the point of being unusable,
What mechanisms do you see in place to stop this being an inevitable result for Minichan as well? It's a social problem not a technical one...
> With a decently sized crowd from HN, there could be a lot of interesting content on a Minichan like site.
Maybe. pg's recent comment about the amount of time and effort it has taken to curate this community into some semblance of civility suggest even "we, the magnificent HM community" are subject to the Greater Internet Fuckwad Theory as well... (I've had a few "bad days" and needed pulling into line by dang or others over the years...)
> Imagine an imageboard with people from HN
From what pg says, that'll most likely end up closer to 4Chan that HN - without several people in full time (well paid) roles who's job description includes community management/moderation (and who are good at it).
HN is a magical place _only_ because YC values it enough to have people like pg and dang and scott spend as vast chunk of their paid time making it this way. Those of us who benefit from this place owe a debt to pg's vision and YC's commitment, and are lucky it was founded by someone like pg instead of moot. (And at the same time, people who benefit from 4Chan owe similar thanks for diametrically opposed visions there.)
For me, they recur maybe once every 5-10 years or so and last about the same sort of time period?? Here since 2009. Twitter circa 2008 or so. Burningman in the early 2000s. ASR on usenet in the late '90s
Things change, they run their course - and I change and the things I want become different. Some people rant and demand things "go back the way they were", but by then the people who made it "the way things were" have moved on to a new thing, and new people have grown up and started building new things they think are better than the old people had.
Hold on to your dream, but realise that you may have to either chase it around the internet as it moves (and work out how to find it when you one day wake up are realise it's gone from the old place), or make it yourself as part of a team prepared to put in the hard work required to shape it the way you think is right.
(While I personally think 4Chan is a total shit show, I have no doubt moot invested enormous effort in making it or helping it become what _he_ wanted in the world. A whole different sort of effort than pg/deng/scott/YC/others put in here, but I have no doubt moot complained bitterly to his friends how hard it was dealing with things like lawyers and hosting companies and all the other things that become a problem when you decide you need to make a thing like 4Cahn exists in the world...)
https://github.com/Minichan/Minichan
It’s open source and MIT licensed.
Usenet is flooded with spam to the point of being unusable, and besides, having everyone use the same interface and see images alongside is different from having people use a multitude of different clients that present binary attachments in various different ways.
With a decently sized crowd from HN, there could be a lot of interesting content on a Minichan like site. The crowd would be small enough that I don’t think there would be much point in decentralizing it. Besides, with centralization then mods still have a fighting chance of keeping the quality of the posts up to par, if they felt so inclined.
The value of anonymous discussion is that every thread is a fresh start. You can express yourself about what’s on your mind without be constrained by your own desire to make everything you say fit into some bigger picture of an identity of self. If that makes sense. But also, it is different from making throwaway accounts on sites where all other people are using identities. Admittedly on Minichan there are many people that use names and tripcodes. But the ability for threads to exist where everyone is on an equal footing is valuable.
I’m thinking not so much in terms of discussion itself actually but in terms of creative potential. At their peak, chan style imageboards can be amazingly creative.
Imagine an imageboard with people from HN, where people were producing graphics and music like in the Demoscene, but together and for no purpose other than creativity itself. No names or anything. Just pure unfiltered creativity.