At some point a thrrad becomes irrelevant because of parallel discussions in other threads, being able to easily redirect to a specific point in another thread helps a lot. But that requires an URL, and messages ids weren't used for that purpose.
I only sent like 3 messages, but it was awfully slow. Didn't come away with a good impression.
I ask because we have a known issue in Zulip that the first minute or two of using the product is quite slow for folks with 100K for unread messages because it the web app's client-side data fetching system ends up fetching them all in order to make clicking around the app afterwards extremely snappy.
We've reworked that system over the last few months, and it'll be deployed to Zulip Cloud next week if all goes well. But if you don't have a lot of unread messages, I'd very much like to understand why -- I'd love for you to stop by chat.zulip.org and debug with us a bit if you can spare a bit of time.
(It could be that the Lean community Zulip involves rendering a LOT of LaTeX, for example)
You are right. Lean community had about 3K unread messages for me. After I marked a whole bunch read, and clicked around a bit, speed is now good.
Thanks for making me check.
My only other feedback would be that there is a new user "tutorial" or rather the interface highlights certain aspects of the UI for the new user. The bubbles that pop up for this, are too small and not noticeable on a dark theme. Make them bigger and different color.
Just to clarify for anyone here reading, Zulip can be scaled out, but largely our philosophy is that you should only scale out if you need to, since it comes with extra fiddly operational headaches and is expensive in dollars. We've designed Zulip with an efficient data model and well-indexes queries, and are constantly working as we add new features to maintain the property that only multi-tenant installations like Zulip Cloud should need to scale it out.
In particular, Zulip on a single server with 16GB of RAM can handle 10,000s of users, thousands of which are concurrently active. (That's what we use for chat.zulip.org, for example, and the machine is usually about 96% idle with only half its memory used).
(Keep in mind that Zulip's public access option means you don't need every user to create an account in order to access content).
I don't know your context, so I can't comment on whether zulip would be suitable. But there are very few communities today having complex conversations involving 100K+ people in a single organization/workspace, so I would expect it to be quite rare that autoscaling would be relevant. (Certainly there are Discords with over a million users, like the Midjourney one, but most of those users are just users the product, not having discussions at all; the company famously made the unusual decision to only offer a Discord bot as UI for their product).
https://zulip.readthedocs.io/en/latest/production/requiremen... has some basic guidelines on Zulip's scalability for a single-instance deployment, but those are fairly conservative -- the goal is for folks to be able to deploy with those settings and be safe even if their load profile per user is fairly heavy for whatever reason.
In fact, many organizations had (and some still may have) inhouse groups, often prefixed "local." e.g. "local.events", "local.jokes" etc.
Advantage: threaded discussions, open standard (many existing open source readers e.g. Emacs: M-x gnus)
Doesn't that make Usenet unfit for complex public discussions, at least?
I haven’t seen the lack of voting to be a major problem in newsgroups or traditional web forums. But I’ve come to despise the prevalent dynamics of liking/voting in newer platforms.
But if the truth-seeking you're thinking of is being a culture war truther, that'd certainly explain the woes.
It can be difficult to discuss inside an enterprise because everyone’s already so committed to a particular solution.
People have very strong opinions about crypto, SPAs, and CDNs.
The words they used are social liability, not merely controversial. It's a pretty high bar for how wrong a discussion in an enterprise has to go that it turns into a social liability.
Anyway, you don't have to go all the way there for knowledge to become a social liability. The more you understand about the universe and the human world - hell, the more permission to think you give yourself - the more you realize just how much utter bullshit regular people believe about everything. Homeopathy, weird coaching stuff, fitness and dieting and cosmetics. This supplement will help your health, that fruit will stop some ailment, looking at a microwave when it's cooking will ruin your eyes, etc. Most of this bullshit is fed by content marketers, through magazines, shows, radio, podcasts, and social media.
I have a whole rant about ethics of advertising, but that's for another day; point here is: it doesn't take much truth-seeking before it gets incredibly cringe to talk with most people. You either let them keep believing in bullshit and suffer inside, or speak up and end up being pushed out of the group.
> More generally, while a few people are willing to pay for access to a discussion service, most aren't
Agreed.
Usenet was one of the first systems of its kind, and it's no wonder people look back on it wistfully. It was wild, being able to talk (or argue, or flame, or troll) people all around the world at every hour of the day. Usenet was amazing. So was the Sony Vaio. You wouldn't want to use it today, though.
Usenet is the best forum system out there; everything web thing is just a ghetto/silo.
Where is the equivalent of the Usenet three-month-long thread?
The karma points are not transferable, which ticks off the checkbox under the silo column.
Usenet and e-mail are closely related; there is a reason for Usenet to exist.
There exist gateways between usenet and mailing lists, too.
If you join a new mailing list, your only option for "back issue" content is to go through an archive. Either a web archive, or else mbox files.
Usenet has a pull model. You connect your client to a server that stores articles going back whatever: months, years. You're not subscribed to receive anything spontaneously; if you want to quit Usenet, just exit the program, and that's it.
Numerous newsgroups are available in one place; you can search through them in your client and take a look. Mailing list archives tend to be scattered all over the place. GNU mailing lists here, BSD mailing lists there ...
On Usenet, you never have to use an identity with a real, working e-mail. Not so with mailing lists; they don't work without a reachable e-mail address.
Usenet has spam and so do mailing lists. But mailing lists have actual e-mail spam. Not only are lists sometimes the targets of spam, but spammers harvest addresses.
So, when I subscribe to mailing lists, I use throw-away addresses, unique for each list. This is a dance I do not have to do with Usenet.
When you use different addresses for subscribing to different mailing lists, you have to be careful to also use the matching addresses as your posting identity! (If you use your principal e-mail address by accident, it could get harvested. Or, something else: the posting might not go through to the list at all, due to that address not being a member.)
When a throw-away mailing list identity receives spam and you replace it with a new one, your old identity still exists in ongoing discussions and will be CC:'d in new postings.
You can use a working e-mail address in your Usenet From: header, if you choose to do so, so that you can be privately contacted. Getting a private e-mail reply from a Usenet posting is rare. If that address starts getting spam, it's pretty easy to change, just in your NNTP client setup. The address is not the basis of your NNTP identity, and so changing it doesn't break threads.
It doesn't involve your mailbox in any way. You don't have to register. "Subscribing" to a newsgroup is purely a local configuration, and you don't have to do that to post to it.
When you sum it all up, Usenet is easier to use and more casual than mailing lists. That gives it a different flavor.
Your experience was largely dependent on the server and client you happened to use. I mainly ended up reading threads on Deja News (later Google Groups) because you could at least search for messages that were outside of the retention period of most servers.
That site shows quite different UX for same logical structure as you said.
I would say backend core logic is almost same as usenet reader or mail client for mailing list.
But the real value is quite different.
Text: Mutt, Alpine, and emacs's mailer off the top of my head. There's a listing of other clients here: <https://www.tecmint.com/best-commandline-email-clients-for-l...>
GUI: Sylpheed, Thunderbird, KMail (KDE's Kontact suite still strikes me as one of the best I've encountered), Evolution, and Clawsmail.
My own strong preference remains mutt, and the ability to process huge amounts of complex email reasonably well is still utterly unmatched.
And some additional sources:
https://www.dennisc.net/writing/tech/gmail-aerc
https://www.julioloayzam.com/guides/email-with-aerc/
My simple config and binds that are a little bit more "vim-like":
More often than not, nobody will reply, so all threads are just one or two levels deep. Or in the rare case someone actually replies to an interesting point, it's usually not the original poster. Probably because they had no idea that anyone had even followed up on their post.
Requests for elaboration mostly go unanswered, and comments are made expecting no replies. So people just shoot ideas into the void, with interesting interactions only happening when someone famous comments.
Technically we could be all writing in a giant Notepad file, and adhere to any discussion format.
(My experience is more than 10 years old, though)
In email, top-posting began when Microsoft’s first email client placed cursor and signature at the top of the quoted email instead, and didn’t provide commands to reflow partial quotes, or any of the features mentioned above. It also had no threaded view, which is what makes it practical to only partially quote instead of fully.
Culture is important, but technology can influence it heavily.
Reddit, and the even worse lesser forums, loses pretty much all of that. Browsing reddit, for me, feels more like watching a mix of a river with flotsam drifting by, a busy traffic street, uncoordinated fireworks, and a tornado ripping through a midwestern city. There are no tools to track what you have and haven't read already, or what new comments have appeared. You cannot sort and filter the posts properly, the best you get is a "do you feel lucky?" search, which often shows that "no, you weren't lucky today". On low-traffic subreddits, it IS possible to track new stuff, but you have to do so manually. I offer no solutions, I don't know how to effectively do highquality discussions for 6 or 7 billion people.
That's both a matter of design and scale. Forums larger than ~10^2 -- 10^3 participants aren't really discussions so much as a compilation of hit-and-run pieces. For very large subs (10^5 -- 10^6), discussion is effectively over within a day, if not hours.
A strong contrast are the now-defunct Google+ and (at certain points in its evolution) Ello, and the not-quite-dead-yet Diaspora*, all of which had or have a "notifications" pane in which recent discussions are presented in full, and to which all or most prior participants (so long as they've not muted the discussion) see not only direct responses but new comments. I've seen specific conversations continued for days, weeks, months, and even years, productively, and it's a really good way to noodle at an idea (particularly with a good post moderator) over time.
There are other factors about that which also contribute. All three of these platforms are post-and-comment style (HN can be somewhat like this), where the post author is the moderator of that post (HN is NOT like this). I consider the post author a "host", and think of this as a "salon-style" network. Barring blocking actions (which can have a pretty profound impact, TBH), everyone is mostly seeing the same discussion.[1] All three platforms also showed comments to posts in strict, flat, chronological order. As a long-time user of threaded interfaces (tin, mutt, /., Reddit, HN, etc.) this grated strongly on me for quite a while, but I eventually came to see the model as useful and with merits. It's an option and a tool in the box, though I'll still say it's not appropriate in all cases.
I'll also note that G+, Ello, and Diaspora* all have relatively small limits on discussion, with a post permitting up to 500 comments, so while the platform sizes could be large (G+ claimed over 4 billion "accounts", though highly actives were ~10 million or so), individual discussions tended to be fairly small. I'll also note that the salon-style engagement was fairly rare, many people (and institutional/organisational profiles) treated the platforms as post-only or broadcast, and my experience may well be niche. That said, there were some awesome discussions on all three of these which simply don't seem to gell elsewhere: Reddit, HN, and the Fediverse come particularly to mind.
Specific to HN: it's ... close. Discussions are threaded and moderated (both by mods and members, though by different mechanisms). There's no notification of follow-ups and it's hard to tell when a conversation's really died, or if it's still active. Participation quality is ... mixed, but there are some occasional gems. I do regret that there aren't better tools to surface really-high-quality comments or threads, though there've been some manual processes in the past ("best of" lists). That effort's largely been dropped, for understandable reasons of time and scale.
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Notes:
1. Some day I really should write up my thoughts on blocking. Effectively, it seems to create a geography or topography of the social network, which combined with follows and inter-participant links gives paths of greater and lesser propagation. Blocking by highly-linked nodes in particular can be devastating to reach, particularly in a simple chronological timeline. I'm a fan of the mental-hygiene aspects of blocks,[2] but have to admit that being on the receiving end can occasionally hurt. But beyond that, the effects on how following and blocking shape the overall network and activity dynamics is simply fascinating to me.
I vehemently disagree that Reddit is in any way even approaching equivalent, much less better, than Usenet was.
There's something about the text area, vs an email-like posting box, which encourages low-thought short replies.
I think worshipping Usenet is just a simple case of rose-tinted glasses. Like people telling how awesome old OSs and applications were in the 90s ;)
I'd had my first tastes in the late 1980s, where some uniformity of tools, platforms, and cultures (tin, Unix, and largely uni-based participants) tended to cohere. I've cited on HN Brian Reid's Usenet activity surveys (from John Quarterman's The Matrix,[1] an early exploration of what we'd now consider social networks) several times on HN[2]. As of 1988, there were 381 newsgrous, 1,933 articles/day, 4.4 MiB/day of traffic, 7,800 hosts, and 141,000 readers. That's ... tiny by contemporary standards.
Cultural norms broke down rapidly as Usenet spread first to corporate networks (Lotus Notes email formats remain a massive annoyance etched in my brain), and then the general public. By the mid-1990s, Usenet though far more active and reaching far more people was a pale shadow of its former self in terms of culture and relevance.
The fundamental technical presentation along with the original posting culture was fairly effective. That unfortunately didn't scale. One of my concerns as I look at decentralised networks with multiple clients and server implementations (e.g., the Fediverse) is that a diversity of tools will inevitably result in a broken set of standards and practices. In the case of the Fediverse, the baseline is fairly low, though there are implementations and/or instances which offer some fairly narrowly-supported capabilities, notably raw HTML or Markdown formatting, and equations support (as with ColinWright's Mathstodon).
I'm not arguing against your experience, FWIW. I am arguing that your experience is probably highly time-dependent on when you participated in Usenet, and the era from 1979--1992 is markedly different from that of 1993 onward, though cracks were already starting to show.
I've also noted that HN has survived longer than Usenet's golden age, and with remarkably stable quality. It's not all it could be, but it's not the worst of what's online either, and by a long shot. Despite some frustrations, I still find it useful.
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Notes:
1. <https://archive.org/details/matrixcomputerne0000quar/page/24...>
2. Search shows most, excepting where I've brainfarted "Eric" for "Brian": <https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&que...>
This was basically solved in Usenet, more specifically, in news reader software. You had a clearly arranged threaded view (you could see the thread structure of as many as 50 postings on a single screen), with unread threads and unread postings highlighted, and pressing Tab jumped to the next unread posting. Unread status was per posting/comment, not by time. Many more conveniences for quick navigation, filtering, and so on.
All newer discussion platforms have been a step back in terms of efficiency of use and ability for deep, long running discussions. Initially due to web browser limitations (though nowadays that shouldn’t be much of a problem anymore), and later due to mobile touch interfaces (still poses some difficulties).