The suggestion in your edit seems possibly reasonable. For what it’s worth, I think my main objections (not all of them at all well thought through) are:
Existing NNTP clients are clunky.
Google Groups, the obvious choice for those who want something in their web browser (which I bet will be almost everyone), is horrible. (And, also, is a presumably-not-profitable Google product, and therefore liable to be discontinued at any time.)
Users are used to the existing LW interface and are likely to be put off by anything too different.
NNTP works well (technically) for ephemeral discussions; not so well for things intended to last. (Especially if done via Google Groups, which has thrown away lots of old Usenet posts and I think can’t be relied on not to throw away other things later.) So e.g. any further “Sequences” seem like they would not be well served by this medium.
I disagree that existing NNTP clients are clunky. If anything, I find existing web forum software clunky. SSC is my go-to example because it’s where I ended up in the diaspora fallout. It gets on the order of seventy comments a day and is incredibly unwieldly to navigate. And it’s a single site. In Usenet days, with native clients, I routinely perused groups with an order of magnitude more discussion and had zero trouble navigating—and the same interface worked for all groups. It is this form of convenience I would like to revive. It cannot be done in a browser—but it doesn’t need to be. The end goal is for the browser to be the non-trivial-inconvenience-provoking default, but for native clients to be an option for people who want or need the kind of power they provide.
It’s relevant to the GG and ephemerality objections that while I’m suggesting NNTP, I’m not going to suggest Usenet itself; but rather, a private network, containing only LW-related groups, with infinite retention and programmably dumpable content. i.e. there is no risk of losing anything. Sequences may be an issue, but because of curation limitations, not retention. (also, yes, GG is a godawful sack of shit and Google has atrociously mismanaged their possession of a cultural treasure trove)
I actually think the existing LW/reddit-style interface has the least-horrible UX of web-based discussion software out there. I wouldn’t object to keeping it looking more-or-less the way it does; my problem is with mechanism more than policy.
I disagree that existing NNTP clients are clunky. If anything, I find existing web forum software clunky. SSC is my go-to example because it’s where I ended up in the diaspora fallout
I completely agree that comments on SSC and other blogs are incredibly annoying. I would participate far more in those comment threads if they used something like LW/reddit. I would happily pay money to make it so, but there’s no cause I can donate to that would replace all Wordpress blogs in the world with reddit, or even with something halfway decent like Disqus.
I also think pre-Web discussion systems did some things better than LW/reddit. My own experience is with 90s email, not usenet, but I think they were fairly similar. On the other hand, there are important innovations like editing, voting, and moderation, which classic email and usenet lack. So just going back to one of those systems isn’t a solution in itself. And while user features should be located at the client when possible, these particular features can’t work unless all clients communicate about them, at which point they become protocol extensions—and everyone is forced or at least strongly encouraged to use on the few clients that support your community’s favorite extensions, removing much of the value of a client-neutral protocol.
The suggestion in your edit seems possibly reasonable. For what it’s worth, I think my main objections (not all of them at all well thought through) are:
Existing NNTP clients are clunky.
Google Groups, the obvious choice for those who want something in their web browser (which I bet will be almost everyone), is horrible. (And, also, is a presumably-not-profitable Google product, and therefore liable to be discontinued at any time.)
Users are used to the existing LW interface and are likely to be put off by anything too different.
NNTP works well (technically) for ephemeral discussions; not so well for things intended to last. (Especially if done via Google Groups, which has thrown away lots of old Usenet posts and I think can’t be relied on not to throw away other things later.) So e.g. any further “Sequences” seem like they would not be well served by this medium.
I disagree that existing NNTP clients are clunky. If anything, I find existing web forum software clunky. SSC is my go-to example because it’s where I ended up in the diaspora fallout. It gets on the order of seventy comments a day and is incredibly unwieldly to navigate. And it’s a single site. In Usenet days, with native clients, I routinely perused groups with an order of magnitude more discussion and had zero trouble navigating—and the same interface worked for all groups. It is this form of convenience I would like to revive. It cannot be done in a browser—but it doesn’t need to be. The end goal is for the browser to be the non-trivial-inconvenience-provoking default, but for native clients to be an option for people who want or need the kind of power they provide.
It’s relevant to the GG and ephemerality objections that while I’m suggesting NNTP, I’m not going to suggest Usenet itself; but rather, a private network, containing only LW-related groups, with infinite retention and programmably dumpable content. i.e. there is no risk of losing anything. Sequences may be an issue, but because of curation limitations, not retention. (also, yes, GG is a godawful sack of shit and Google has atrociously mismanaged their possession of a cultural treasure trove)
I actually think the existing LW/reddit-style interface has the least-horrible UX of web-based discussion software out there. I wouldn’t object to keeping it looking more-or-less the way it does; my problem is with mechanism more than policy.
I completely agree that comments on SSC and other blogs are incredibly annoying. I would participate far more in those comment threads if they used something like LW/reddit. I would happily pay money to make it so, but there’s no cause I can donate to that would replace all Wordpress blogs in the world with reddit, or even with something halfway decent like Disqus.
I also think pre-Web discussion systems did some things better than LW/reddit. My own experience is with 90s email, not usenet, but I think they were fairly similar. On the other hand, there are important innovations like editing, voting, and moderation, which classic email and usenet lack. So just going back to one of those systems isn’t a solution in itself. And while user features should be located at the client when possible, these particular features can’t work unless all clients communicate about them, at which point they become protocol extensions—and everyone is forced or at least strongly encouraged to use on the few clients that support your community’s favorite extensions, removing much of the value of a client-neutral protocol.
Of course this deals with the Google Groups objection simply by making it impossible to use Google Groups :-).
That is a feature, not a bug. :-P