I think it would be possible to use slrn or trn as a model, now that JavaScript means it’s possible to update a page about as fast as telnet—but I haven’t seen anything like that.
I don’t know whether there’s a technical reason it isn’t feasible, or if usenet is too low status to replicate.
When I bring this notion up, the most common reaction is that no one wants to read unmoderated discussions.
What’s lesswrongian for “concrete-bound mentality”?
Trn is the best method I’ve seen for making long discussions usable on-line.
The .newsrc (a record of your preferences and what you’ve read) is the most crucial part.
Usenet was set up (at least by the time I was reading it) to be read on a telnet screen. Your computer probably has telnet, and you’ve probably never heard of it. Telnet screens were ASCII-only, and they could load pretty fast, even on a 56K dial-up connection.
The result was that it made sense to display one article (post) at a time, and that meant that a record could be kept of which posts you’d read, and that meant you’d never see the posts you’d already read unless you’d asked for them. [1]
This meant that you’d never have to hunt around for new posts in a big discussion.
LW could have something like that feature just by adding “recent comments” at the original post level, instead of just having it for all the original posts simultaneously.
However, trn had more than that. It had commands for navigating up and down the tree structure of a discussion, and the ‘t’ command for displaying the tree structure. That was only useful for medium-sized discussions—a browser-based system could do much better.
When you opened a newsgroup (discussion community), it displayed a list with the authors and subjects of each post you hadn’t seen before, and you could mark which ones you wanted to see.
I didn’t use killfiles (marking posts to read satisfied me), but they added a lot of flexibility. You could tell the .newsrc to never show you anything by a given poster ever again. You could “thunderplonk”—never see anything by that poster, replying to that poster, or mentioning that poster. You could never see posts with specific words in the subject lines, posts which had been sent to more than some number of newsgroups.
Killfiles could also be used to make sure you did get shown articles with specific features, but there was less drama about that, hence the name.
Slrn added scoring to trn.
[1]I don’t think there was any way to keep such a record efficiently for browsers until JavaScript came into common use.
Can you write up a précis on the nature of slrn and trn for the benefit of the post-September crowd? Edit: I think it might be difficult to appreciate the suggestion not knowing how it will work.
The main reading screen in trn had a two dimensional graph of the thread at the top of the screen (one node per reply) which you could navigate with the arrow keys—easily going to the parent post, the first reply post, or the next or previous reply to the same parent post. There were keys to move up & down a page or a line of the current post. Space moved you to the next page of a post, or if you were at the end, on to the next unread post/reply, in thread order. Multipage posts were marked as read only once you’d got to the bottom. There was another key to mark them unread, or to skip the current item without having to read all the way to the bottom. The top level post in a thread was technically similar to the replies, unlike the blogging distinction between articles and comments.
There was a previous screen where you could select which threads to view, they could be listed one per line (lots of other options too).
You could enter commands to select or skip posts matching a subject or author, and if desired, everything underneath them in the tree. You could save these commands to run every time.
The parts about being able to see the structure of the thread at a glance and being able to quickly glance over a list of threads to see what’s interesting sound a lot like why I like Bungie.org’s WebBBS forums so much. At B.org I can say “This branch looks dumb” and immediately skip to the next one; at LW I often have to scroll through posts one at a time to find the end of a branch, and I often just give up.
Thanks; I’ll probably start using that. That can still “[leave] an interesting thread at the mercy of its ancestors”, though, which I don’t think WebBBS or (apparently) trn does.
slrn and trn had some nice features, but I think overall the benefit from the Usenet model is that it decoupled the presentation and user interaction, which was done by decentralized clients, with the storage and propagation, done by decentralized servers. The fact that the clients could evolve independently really let them become very good at what they did, rather than the “almost good enough” of most web discussions.
I, also, miss the decoupling you mention. On the other hand, the user interface design has influence on the community by way of what-is-visible and the length of wieldy posts; e.g. mail/Usenet encourage long posts with quoting.
I suspect such systems were most effective in a techie society like the old USENET, but I could imagine it might be done still. There should still be a browser interface, however.
Thank you for asking. I’ve been complaining about how much better trn was for years (and, more recently, saying that JavaScript would make browser-based trn possible), and no one had ever asked for the details.
There should be a Clay Prize for solving the problem of threaded messages on the Internets.
I think it would be possible to use slrn or trn as a model, now that JavaScript means it’s possible to update a page about as fast as telnet—but I haven’t seen anything like that.
I don’t know whether there’s a technical reason it isn’t feasible, or if usenet is too low status to replicate.
When I bring this notion up, the most common reaction is that no one wants to read unmoderated discussions.
What’s lesswrongian for “concrete-bound mentality”?
Trn is the best method I’ve seen for making long discussions usable on-line.
The .newsrc (a record of your preferences and what you’ve read) is the most crucial part.
Usenet was set up (at least by the time I was reading it) to be read on a telnet screen. Your computer probably has telnet, and you’ve probably never heard of it. Telnet screens were ASCII-only, and they could load pretty fast, even on a 56K dial-up connection.
The result was that it made sense to display one article (post) at a time, and that meant that a record could be kept of which posts you’d read, and that meant you’d never see the posts you’d already read unless you’d asked for them. [1]
This meant that you’d never have to hunt around for new posts in a big discussion.
LW could have something like that feature just by adding “recent comments” at the original post level, instead of just having it for all the original posts simultaneously.
However, trn had more than that. It had commands for navigating up and down the tree structure of a discussion, and the ‘t’ command for displaying the tree structure. That was only useful for medium-sized discussions—a browser-based system could do much better.
When you opened a newsgroup (discussion community), it displayed a list with the authors and subjects of each post you hadn’t seen before, and you could mark which ones you wanted to see.
I didn’t use killfiles (marking posts to read satisfied me), but they added a lot of flexibility. You could tell the .newsrc to never show you anything by a given poster ever again. You could “thunderplonk”—never see anything by that poster, replying to that poster, or mentioning that poster. You could never see posts with specific words in the subject lines, posts which had been sent to more than some number of newsgroups.
Killfiles could also be used to make sure you did get shown articles with specific features, but there was less drama about that, hence the name.
Slrn added scoring to trn.
[1]I don’t think there was any way to keep such a record efficiently for browsers until JavaScript came into common use.
The .newsrc also let you switch clients, while keeping the same records of what had been read.
Can you write up a précis on the nature of slrn and trn for the benefit of the post-September crowd? Edit: I think it might be difficult to appreciate the suggestion not knowing how it will work.
The main reading screen in trn had a two dimensional graph of the thread at the top of the screen (one node per reply) which you could navigate with the arrow keys—easily going to the parent post, the first reply post, or the next or previous reply to the same parent post. There were keys to move up & down a page or a line of the current post. Space moved you to the next page of a post, or if you were at the end, on to the next unread post/reply, in thread order. Multipage posts were marked as read only once you’d got to the bottom. There was another key to mark them unread, or to skip the current item without having to read all the way to the bottom. The top level post in a thread was technically similar to the replies, unlike the blogging distinction between articles and comments.
There was a previous screen where you could select which threads to view, they could be listed one per line (lots of other options too).
You could enter commands to select or skip posts matching a subject or author, and if desired, everything underneath them in the tree. You could save these commands to run every time.
The parts about being able to see the structure of the thread at a glance and being able to quickly glance over a list of threads to see what’s interesting sound a lot like why I like Bungie.org’s WebBBS forums so much. At B.org I can say “This branch looks dumb” and immediately skip to the next one; at LW I often have to scroll through posts one at a time to find the end of a branch, and I often just give up.
You can click the “[-]” link at the top of any comment to hide it and all its replies.
Thanks; I’ll probably start using that. That can still “[leave] an interesting thread at the mercy of its ancestors”, though, which I don’t think WebBBS or (apparently) trn does.
That does sound like a better user interface.
slrn and trn had some nice features, but I think overall the benefit from the Usenet model is that it decoupled the presentation and user interaction, which was done by decentralized clients, with the storage and propagation, done by decentralized servers. The fact that the clients could evolve independently really let them become very good at what they did, rather than the “almost good enough” of most web discussions.
I, also, miss the decoupling you mention. On the other hand, the user interface design has influence on the community by way of what-is-visible and the length of wieldy posts; e.g. mail/Usenet encourage long posts with quoting.
I suspect such systems were most effective in a techie society like the old USENET, but I could imagine it might be done still. There should still be a browser interface, however.
Thank you for asking. I’ve been complaining about how much better trn was for years (and, more recently, saying that JavaScript would make browser-based trn possible), and no one had ever asked for the details.
My brother rediscovered USENET not long ago, and had been much impressed, so...