Lemma 1: A community of knowledgeable, mature people will be under perpetual assault by entropy.

But at the end of the day, Reddit is where most threaded public conversations moved to.Īxiom 1: Knowledgeable and mature people are repulsed by windbags and vicious people.Īxiom 2: There are vastly more windbags and vicious people than there are knowledgeable and mature people.Īxiom 3: Online moderation / gatekeeping is imperfect.Īxiom 4: Successful moderation depends on a few keystone people. I dislike a lot about Reddit their UI/UX is a contender for the worst in the entire world and they provide a forum for a lot of the most unpleasant people in the world (not quite 4chan bad, but pretty bad). In all seriousness, Reddit is the modern successor. I'm not sure how much Usenet exists these days. Google Groups used to be handy for shadowing a bunch of Usenet groups, but that's gone now. But it doesn't have animated emojis and trophies, so no one would use it now. It wouldn't be bad for internal company use. I do think it's a useful model for private discussions, with plenty of supporting software. There are just too many bad actors to even consider it. And it was unregulated and unmoderated, which is a laughable idea now. Its distribution model required vast amounts of storage and bandwidth even back then, before the days of spam and Internet marketing. I miss a lot about it, but it wouldn't work well today. I used Usenet quite a bit in the 80s/90s, and ran a Usenet/NNTP server for a small ISP for a while. Thankfully those organization usually bless users with capability of installing Slack on their private phones /s Only e-mail is left - in some places at least, because some organization start to have 'why send an e-mail while you could send Slack message'. It might be me, but I start to get feeling that even on StackOverflow conversations aren't what they used to be. Newsgroup are long dead, mailing lists are perceived as archaic, forums are closing down one by one. You might lose window of opportunity to provide important info just because you aren't present at the moment and since Slack is perceived as a low impact tool, those conversations can happen in late evening hours.Īnd yet all the places that (in my opinion) were better to have more fruitful, thoughtful and searchable conversations are slowly winding down. It's hard to search for stuff (usually it takes me 3-4 queries to find thing _I know_ is there) and then it's in lengthy conversational format that takes a bit of time to replay. I've been using IRC for years and I still love it but with recent adoption of Slack it seems everyone wants to push all the communication there and I don't think it works. Sure, the format is slow and somewhat complex, but then it seems like all the places are devoid of non-immediate conversations.Ĭompanies are moving to the Slack, informal groups to the Discord.

I'm longing for the return of the mailing lists.

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