Whatever your solution ends up looking like, a key feature has to be "I can post a link on Facebook or whatever that people can click on and read in their web browser." If you can't be linked to it's no good.
I (too?) am nostalgic for the good ol' days of Usenet. I'm very very unconvinced that an NNTP-based system could realistically replace Less Wrong. I'm interested in what you have to say, but wonder whether there's value in some kind of brief overview post along the lines of "Here's the one-paragraph summary of why I think this is probably a good idea. Here are one-sentence summaries of the strongest five objections and why they don't change my mind."
(But maybe not; the effect might be to put off people who could have been persuaded with a gentler run-up.)
I do wonder whether you can really need twenty posts to make your case. Perhaps much of the material will be useful in other ways (e.g., to inform future attempts at community-building, collaboration, etc.)?
Nope, that's not what I intended to say. (My apologies for any lack of clarity.) Rather, I think that
This is a subject that strongly matters to me. I too would love to see a return to non-proprietary, open communication protocols, open source software and decentralized hosting - everywhere on the Internet, not just on Less Wrong. This is one of the few capital-C Causes in my area of professional competence that I would happily donate a lot of labor and/or money to, if only I knew of a way to promote it. But I don't, and I don't know of anyone who does.
To argue that the problem can be solved in the LW microcosm would need to either take advantage of LW-specific community features, or explicitly not solve the general problem (e.g. by not scaling, or by admitting that some things would always remain Web-only and non-interoperable). If either one is the case, please mention that explicitly.
Like gjm, I immediately want to jump the inferential distance to the usual unsolved problems. (E.g., how do you handle 'graceful degradation' for people who encounter a necessarily web/http link for the first time, so the community can grow and people with regular blogs can link to it?)
It might help if you add explicit disclaimers saying "please don't bring up issue X, that's for a future post...
I think any proposal based on actual NNTP is probably doomed.
I think any proposal that asks the user to use a client that isn't The Web is doomed (but it looks like you are addressing that in 1.7.)
BUT, I think the notion of redesigning this system around something that is morally just like NNTP is a hugely interesting and not-totally-crazy one; AND even if you completely fail, I think there will be hugely valuable ideas in this sequence for people like me who also think about this kind of thing.
So please write this sequence!
What do you think about the following alternative approach?
Note that despite my cynicism about this as a way to save/improve/fix LessWrong specifically, I would absolutely love a solid reddit-to-nntp gateway, that allowed me to use trn or whatever to read and respond to posts and comments, with similar threading and better state management.
I'd use it on LW and a bunch of other similar places.
I, for one, am very interested in this. I don't see this working because people are resisting change even when presented with clearly better alternatives, and also legacy community.
But, as you say, this is LessWrong, it's worth a try.
I also loved usenet! It fell apart when all the spammers and trolls and idiots turned up. (I think the binary groups are a distraction, plenty of usenet servers just didn't carry them. )
Those are just words for people whose opinions you'd rather not read, so we need some sort of moderation system.
Trusted moderators don't have the time or energy to do that, and don't scale, so we need some sort of group voting system.
Reddit was brilliant for a while, then Hacker News, then Less Wrong.
All three seem to have gone downhill in different ways. What can we lear...
1) I loved Usenet prior to Eternal September, and used it through much of the 90s as well. It's not coming back.
I'm part of another group which tried replacing their disfunctional mailing lists with NNTP, and probably a dozen of us used it for a month or two before we realized that nobody else was coming and went back to the main group.
2) Running code trumps theoretical arguments. Don't write a series of posts, set up your system and see if it works.
From the position of author, the important difference between posting an article here and posting an article on my personal webpage is the control over the discussion.
Posting here is convenient: the whole website is already set up and maintained, I just need to write the text. My article will immediately get many readers, and it will be approximately the kind of readers I want. Even the moderation by crowd is provided for free.
On the other hand, the cost of the convenience is my freedom to make different choices. If I have opinions on the website functiona...
Is this a good summary of your argument?
NNTP was a great solution to a lot of the problems caused by mailing lists. The main ones being:
We are facing similar problems now. A lot of people have their own sites where they host their own content. We either miss out on great content if we don't trawl through a to...
Usenet is just one example of a much bigger trend of the last twenty years: the Net - standardized protocols with multiple interoperable open-source clients and servers, and services being offered either for money or freely - being replaced with the Web - proprietary services locking in your data, letting you talk only to other people who use that same service, forbidding client software modifications, and being ad-supported.
Instant messaging with multi-protocol clients and some open protocols was replaced by many tens of incompatible services, from Google Talk to Whatsapp. Software telephony (VOIP) and videoconferencing, which had some initial success with free services (Jingle, the SIP standards) was replaced by the likes of Skype. Group chat (IRC) has been mostly displaced by services like Slack.
There are many stories like these, and many more examples I could give for each story. The common theme isn't that the open, interoperable solution used to rule these markets - they didn't always. It's that they used to exist, and now they almost never do.
Explaining why this happened is hard. There are various theories but I don't know if any of them is generally accepted as the single ...
Huh? HTTP is certainly an application protocol: you have a web client talking to a web server. The application delivers web pages to the client. It is by no mean an "agnostic" protocol. You can, of course, use it to deliver binary blobs, but so can email.
HTTP is used for many things, many of them unrelated to the Web. Due to its popularity, a great many things have been built on top of it.
The point I was making is this: when a server exposes an HTTP API, that API is the protocol, and HTTP is a transport just like TCP underneath it and TLS on top of it. The equivalent of a protocol like SMTP on top of TCP is a documented API on top of HTTP. The use of different terms confused this conversation.
But that's a bigger and a different discussion than talking about interoperability. HTTP is still an open protocol with open-source implementations available at both ends.
My point is, you can't interoperate with Facebook or Gmail or Reddit just by implementing HTTP; you need to implement an API or "protocol" to talk to them. And if they don't have one - either deliberately, or because their HTTP traffic just wasn't designed for interoperability - then there is no ope...
One conceptual difference between netnews (Usenet, NNTP, etc.) and current bloggyweb systems (LW, Reddit, Wordpress, Livejournal, etc.) is that bloggyweb systems have two kinds of messages, whereas netnews has only one.
The two kinds of messages in the bloggyweb are often called "posts" and "comments". A post is a top-level item. A comment is always attached to a single post. Some bloggyweb systems allow a tree structure of comments descending from a post. But comments and posts are fundamentally different, not only visually but also in ...
Easy entrance is how September happened, both on LessWrong and on Usenet.
My personal bias here is that I see little hope for most of the application level network protocols built in the 80s and 90s, but have high hope for future federated protocols. Urbit in particular since a certain subtribe of the LW diaspora will already be moving there as soon as it's ready.
My analysis saw the fundamental problem as the yearning for consensus. What was signal? What was noise? Who was trolling? Designers of forum software go wrong when they believe that these are good, one place questions with actual one place answers. The software is designed in the hope that its operation will yield these answers.
My suggestion, Outer Circle got discussed on Hacker News under the title Saving forums from themselves with shared hierarchical white lists and I managed to flesh out the ideas a little.
Then my frail health got even worse and I never did anything more :-(
Can't we just add a new 'link' post type to the current LW? Links and local posts would both have comment threads (here on LW), the only difference is the title of the linked post would link to an outside website/resource.
I've often griped about how the web X.0 is still miles behind usenet readers and even mailing list software of the 90s for forum discussions.
I saw some talk about the problem of requiring installation of an NNTP client.
Are there no reasonably sized javascript libraries that can be loaded as an in browser nntp client?
As for the Diaspora, couldn't we just link/insert the blog posts of diaspora authors and discuss?
As someone with no knowledge of NNTP, I'm in favor of this sequence. As far as I'm concerned, much looks like on-topic craft/community material.
If the problem is that our best authors went elsewhere, would it not be a good idea for fans to take their best writing and re-post it here for them? I mean, if they'd actually prefer that not to happen, then ok. But are we sure about that?
What were their stated reasons for leaving? What were their real reasons?
many of the technical challenges of the diaspora were solved problems, and that the solution was
Facebook.
Yes, it's quite unfortunate, but that is what the masses have voted for :-/
A few months ago, Vaniver wrote a really long post speculating about potential futures for Less Wrong, with a focus on the idea that the spread of the Less Wrong diaspora has left the site weak and fragmented. I wasn't here for our high water mark, so I don't really have an informed opinion on what has socially changed since then. But a number of complaints are technical, and as an IT person, I thought I had some useful things to say.
I argued at the time that many of the technical challenges of the diaspora were solved problems, and that the solution was NNTP -- an ancient, yet still extant, discussion protocol. I am something of a crank on the subject and didn't expect much of a reception. I was pleasantly surprised by the 18 karma it generated, and tried to write up a full post arguing the point.
I failed. I was trying to write a manifesto, didn't really know how to do it right, and kept running into a vast inferential distance I couldn't seem to cross. I'm a product of a prior age of the Internet, from before the http prefix assumed its imperial crown; I kept wanting to say things that I knew would make no sense to anyone who came of age this millennium. I got bogged down in irrelevant technical minutia about how to implement features X, Y, and Z. Eventually I decided I was attacking the wrong problem; I was thinking about 'how do I promote NNTP', when really I should have been going after 'what would an ideal discussion platform look like and how does NNTP get us there, if it does?'
So I'm going to go after that first, and work on the inferential distance problem, and then I'm going to talk about NNTP, and see where that goes and what could be done better. I still believe it's the closest thing to a good, available technological schelling point, but it's going to take a lot of words to get there from here, and I might change my mind under persuasive argument. We'll see.
Fortunately, this is Less Wrong, and sequences are a thing here. This is the first post in an intended sequence on mechanisms of discussion. I know it's a bit off the beaten track of Less Wrong subject matter. I posit that it's both relevant to our difficulties and probably more useful and/or interesting than most of what comes through these days. I just took the 2016 survey and it has a couple of sections on the effects of the diaspora, so I'm guessing it's on topic for meta purposes if not for site-subject purposes.
To solve a problem you must first define it. Looking at the LessWrong 2.0 post, I see the following technical problems, at a minimum; I'll edit this with suggestions from comments.
I see these meta-technical problems:
"Solving" community maintenance is a hard problem, but to the extent that pieces of it can be solved technologically, the solution might include these ultra-high-level elements:
As with the previous, I'll update this from the comments if necessary.
As I said at the start, I feel on firmer ground talking about technical issues than social ones. But I have to acknowledge one strong social opinion: I believe the greatest factor in Less Wrong's decline is the departure of our best authors for personal blogs. Any plan for revitalization has to provide an improved substitute for a personal blog, because that's where everyone seems to end up going. You need something that looks and behaves like a blog to the author or casual readers, but integrates seamlessly into a community discussion gateway.
I argue that this can be achieved. I argue that the technical challenges are solvable and the inherent coordination problem is also solvable, provided the people involved still have an interest in solving it.
And I argue that it can be done -- and done better than what we have now -- using technology that has existed since the '90s.
I don't argue that this actually will be achieved in anything like the way I think it ought to be. As mentioned up top, I am a crank, and I have no access whatsoever to anybody with any community pull. My odds of pushing through this agenda are basically nil. But we're all about crazy thought experiments, right?
This topic is something I've wanted to write about for a long time. Since it's not typical Less Wrong fare, I'll take the karma on this post as a referendum on whether the community would like to see it here.
Assuming there's interest, the sequence will look something like this (subject to reorganization as I go along, since I'm pulling this from some lengthy but horribly disorganized notes; in particular I might swap subsequences 2 and 3):
(Meta-meta: This post was written in Markdown, converted to HTML for posting using Pandoc, and took around four hours to write. I can often be found lurking on #lesswrong or #slatestarcodex on workday afternoons if anyone wants to discuss it, but I don't promise to answer quickly because, well, workday)
[Edited to add: At +10/92% karma I figure continuing is probably worth it. After reading comments I'm going to try to slim it down a lot from the outline above, though. I still want to hit all those points but they probably don't all need a full post's space. Note that I'm not Scott or Eliezer, I write like I bleed, so what I do post will likely be spaced out]
