Item — HN Reader

It definitely is one of the great victories of the commercial internet (in “mobile” 2023 sans web for the most part, mind you).

BBS like systems and forums had been successfully in use since the early 70s. Usenet is more than 40 years old by now IIRC? Very similar function and open by design.

Even without falling into “Endless September” rose tinted glasses I would argue that we really, really could do a whole lot better in 2023 and going forward.

I guess someone must work on Ted Nelson’s ideas at least (Xanadu, etc)?

2 comments

Reddit most closely reminds me of ezboard:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ezboard

Or proboards:

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/ProBoards

But Reddit is really bad at long on-going conversations unless it has enough to support its own subreddit.

Car maintenance forums are something I feel doesn’t work well on the Reddit system.

Or anything you’d want chronological or heavy in-like image/video embedding

Too bad so many older car forum posts are useless outside of their text now.

Everywhere you go its just large swaths of photobucket/cardomain embed failures for the forums that didn't do image hosting.

How so? I thought they had terrible monetization?

That's generally a good thing, from the user perspective.