Usenet – Let's Return to Public Spaces
Community and conversation are <i>exceedingly</i> difficult to scale.  Mostly they simply don&#x27;t, and scaling will kill what little that actually does form.<p>The article cites a couple of pieces addressing why Usenet died.  I&#x27;m fairly familiar with one of those as I wrote it about four years ago:  <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;old.reddit.com&#x2F;r&#x2F;dredmorbius&#x2F;comments&#x2F;3c3xyu&#x2F;why_usenet_died&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;old.reddit.com&#x2F;r&#x2F;dredmorbius&#x2F;comments&#x2F;3c3xyu&#x2F;why_use...</a><p>My thinking&#x27;s evolved somewhat.<p>First, as noted, Usenet was <i>small</i> by today&#x27;s standards, with Brian Reid and others&#x27; reports putting total active users at 140k (posting) from 880k with access, as of 1988, and just shy a million in 1995.  Total worldwide Internet usage in 1996 was about 16 millions (through growing rapidly).<p>Those would be failed-social-media-site numbers today.<p>Usenet, like Facebook, formed on and around academic communities, and specifically <i>highly selective</i> institutions.  This created several barriers to entry &#x2F; points of control, which were both highly discriminatory <i>and</i> highly effective at helping dissuade some of the worst forms of misbehaviour.  For a while.<p>The type of organisation of a discussion ... matters a lot.  Usenet&#x27;s fixed groups kind of worked and kind of didn&#x27;t, and we&#x27;ve seen a few additional models come up since.  Ad hoc structures (which Usenet didn&#x27;t support at all), personal &quot;salons&quot; (think a typical blog -- Charlie Stross&#x27;s comes to mind, also some social media hosts, Yonatan Zunger at G+ for those who were there).  Location, time-centred, event&#x2F;project based, and others.  Clay Shirkey&#x27;s concept of fluid organisations (something that can be dated back at least to Alvin Toffler&#x27;s <i>Future Shock</i>, 1970, and &quot;ad-hocracies&quot;) captures some of this.<p>The liability and business-model problems (both upside and risk) are really huge, and cannot be overstated.  I suspect a number of social media &#x2F; user-generated-content site&#x2F;service closures, including quite probably Google+ and Yahoo Groups, have much to do with this.<p>Factors-promoting-growth and factors-promoting-continued-survival differ hugely.  The elements which create a viable and attractive social network are almost entirely <i>nontechnical</i>.  The elements which are required for a social network to <i>continue</i> once it&#x27;s attained (or exceeded) critical mass are <i>highly technical</i> (though also call on a complex mix of other factors, business, social, legal, and more).  Critically:  the lessons and methods that <i>get</i> you successful won&#x27;t <i>keep</i> you successful.<p>Founding cohort is a huge factor for initial success and growth.<p>Starting a new social network with the express goal of becoming the next Usenet, or Facebook-killer, or whatever, is almost certainly doomed to failure.  Even more than starting <i>any</i> social network is.  Probably better is to address the needs of a specific, paying, interested, and motivated community, from which there may be a future growth path.<p>Tim Ferris&#x27;s downsides of fame article posted a few days back makes some really good points about bad actors and scale -- you only need a few dimwits at a million to a billion followers &#x2F; fans before negative encounters start becoming really common.  Human brains simply aren&#x27;t built for mass social network interactions, whether as one of the many or one of the few.<p>Any concept in which nominal success criteria are principally predicated on scale means winner-take-all dynamics, and that there can be at most only one winner.  Maybe a winner and an also-ran or two.  Given numerous factors including several mentioned above, the winner will likely be determined based on starting conditions and a lot of raw luck.  Possibly exchangable for ruthlessness.<p>We&#x27;ve existed in a technically-mediated world in which the winners have tended to be US or Wester-based private corporations.  The next decade or several may see changes to that.  US hegemony of the Internet has been strongly criticised.  Several of the possible alternative hegemons don&#x27;t strike me as notable improvements.<p>Given inherent monopolisation of technical communications, questions of closed vs. open protocols, and of private vs. public ownership and control, should be asked.<p>Changing open standards is extraordinarily difficult.  I&#x27;m inclined to say impossible.  More typically, they&#x27;re supersceded.  Sometimes by other open standards, increasingly of late, not.  The reasons for all of this would make for some extraoridinarily interesting academic research across numerous fields.<p>Agreeing on how to do things is the most underrated technological innovation of the past 200 years.<p>Usenet&#x27;s client-independence is often stated as a benefit.  I&#x27;ve argued that myself.  Given variations in message formats and posting behaviours encouraged by highly different client mechanics, I&#x27;m not so sure of that.  The Web is the worst possible applications development environment, but it does impose, not infrequently by force of law, a consistent UI&#x2F;UX and format.  Supporting <i>both</i> a useful level of behavioural consistency <i>and</i> a diversity of access tools would be a good but challenging goal.<p>In my earlier Usenet piece I talked about the obvious advantages of decentralisation.  I&#x27;ve been using several decentralised networks of late (Mastodon and Diaspora principally).  I&#x27;m not so certain the advantages are entirely obvious any more.  I think the questions &quot;what problems is decentralisation supposed to solve, and what new problems is it creating?&quot; need to be asked.<p>I&#x27;d <i>like</i> to believe decentralisation is a positive.  I&#x27;m not sure I can.<p>And I was wrong about Ellen Pao and Reddit.  She was doing well under an extraordinarily challenging environment, in which communicating basic facts was all but impossible.  My apologies for my earlier comments.