Usenet – Let's Return to Public Spaces

Re:Usenet – Let's Return to Public Spaces by modo_mario on Thursday February 13, 2020 @09:36AM (#22318004)

I think they're not wrong either. I was rather invested in what used to be a small subreddit that is now huge. It's a shitshow now sometimes but back then most of the posters were regulars and could recognized each-other. Moderating was a lot easier and context and what have you could be taken into account. I know i could trust one person's expertise, that another often would take a specific stance, another that was always an asshole but very careful to stay on the edge of getting banned and what was technically allowed generally got downvoted. There was space for public meta discussions about sources (not)accepted by the community that actually had an impact, etc

Experiencing the transition has made me value small communities much much more.

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Re:Usenet – Let's Return to Public Spaces by RubberMullet on Thursday February 13, 2020 @10:29AM (#22318423)

The Evaporative Cooling Effect[0].

[0] https://blogs.cornell.edu/info2040/2015/10/14/the-evaporativ...

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Re:Usenet – Let's Return to Public Spaces by tapland on Thursday February 13, 2020 @08:08PM (#22323037)

Thank you for that! It's what I've been trying to word regarding some subreddits back in 2011-2012

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Re:Usenet – Let's Return to Public Spaces by rdiddly on Thursday February 13, 2020 @10:55AM (#22318680)

Small communities - you might as well say community communities. Not picking on you, just agreeing, to the point of asserting that "community" can't exist past a certain scale. Dunbar's number and all that.

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Re:Usenet – Let's Return to Public Spaces by jcims on Thursday February 13, 2020 @11:03AM (#22318756)

Unsubscribing from any subreddit over ~50K users (incl defaults) really improves the reddit experience.

The one problem specifically with reddit and other 'frontpage' type communities is that they don't surface where the actual conversation is in the way vbulletin or other forum software does. With the old reddit code, however, you could go to https://old.reddit.com/r/subreddit-name/comments and see a comment view of the entire subreddit. This would bring the current conversation to the top regardless where it is in the standard view. Really improves the experience for smaller subreddits that don't have much traffic otherwise.

Unfortunately they seem to have removed the feature in the new code. You can still use it in old per above however.

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Re:Usenet – Let's Return to Public Spaces by u801e on Thursday February 13, 2020 @06:56PM (#22322595)

> With the old reddit code, however, you could go to [...] and see a comment view of the entire subreddit.

Depending on the newsreader, you could essentially get the same thing by having the thread with the most recent comment move to the to of the thread list. Then, expanding the thread would show new comments in bold font to distinguish then from ones you've already read or previously downloaded.

Being able to see new posts is something that's lacking in reddit and HN (though reddit does provide this feature on subs you moderate or have reddit gold).

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Re:Usenet – Let's Return to Public Spaces by jcims on Thursday February 13, 2020 @11:13PM (#22323901)

The tried and true thread model from usenet, email and vbulletin-style forums leads to long-standing topical conversations that easily stretch days and weeks, commonly months and sometimes years.

The continuous fountain of content model at reddit/hn/digg/etc is good for retinal adhesion but not so good for exchange of ideas.

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Re:Usenet – Let's Return to Public Spaces by ghostpepper on Thursday February 13, 2020 @11:43AM (#22319121)

This is a very cool feature in the old reddit code (stupid they removed it) that I would never have thought to use in this way.

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