I didn’t, but I was assuming people would anyway. I was actually hoping for higher-level objections like the problems I listed in the post, but, well. I’ll answer you anyway and maybe edit the post later. Most of these fall under 3.2 and 3.3 in the outline.
is actually the only part of the problem for which no off-the-shelf solution exists. The short version is that the site UX, instead of talking to a database directly on the backend, would talk to NNTP on the backend. Links to arbitrary posts (as a non-exhaustive example) could be as simple as https://newlesswrong/message-id. Top level posts could support some subject-generated shorthand, perhaps.
I actually do want a plaintext-oriented interface, but I know I’m in the minority. You’ve expressed the solution to the markup problem yourself, though: Markdown is already the effectively-default format on Usenet and all extant NNTP clients. In fact it’s the rise of lightweight markup in general and Markdown in particular that convinced me this could ever be more than a pipe dream. There are more powerful forms of lightweight markup that could be used; the key is that the input format must be readable as plaintext for interoperability between the web and native clients to be possible.
I believe that cancels and supersedes can be kludged to support something that looks like editing even if it isn’t. I may be wrong about this; in particular I’m not sure how supersedes interact with reply chains, because they’re unusable for that purpose on Usenet proper.
User management has an established solution, and DMing can be implemented as a LW mailbox (that only takes local messages) or a forwarding address, or both. RSS is probably easy. Server based state is easy for the ‘default’ website (really an in-browser client, covered in 1.1 and 1.7) but may be hard for native clients (but anyone using a native client presumably knows what they’re getting into). Tagging may be hard, I’m not sure. Karma is definitely hard, but may be unnecessary.
The short version of this is that, designed correctly, any author or site can adopt the network without being any worse off than they currently are; that is, cooperate-defect leaves you no worse off than defect-defect. The long version is...pretty much all of section 2, actually.
(ETA: I am answering this in moderate detail not to encourage technical back-and-forth but to demonstrate that I have thought this through)
I think this reduces to problem 5. Namely, you can’t replace lesswrong.com with a completely new NNTP-backed site as your opening move.
Ordinary Markdown is insufficient because it doesn’t do inline images and tables, which are sometimes important for posts. There are more powerful alternatives, and some markdown supersets. But I’ll bet they’re not supported by NNTP clients. At best you’ll find one client (or client plugin) that supports what you want. But forcing everyone to use the same client negates the point of NNTP, and isn’t plausible anyway because we need clients for different platforms including mobile.
This definitely requires proof. In addition to the issue with reply threads, NNTP clients expect to be able to cache articles. Propagation of supersede/replace is at best delayed and at worst out-of-order, and will vary between clients. This is IMO a critical issue, a major LW feature.
I’m surprised that you say “anyone using a native client presumably knows what they’re getting into”. You’re proposing NNTP as a superior solution, but also saying anyone who actually chooses to use NNTP will have a hard time and/or fewer features. And I think this applies to other, more important features and not just server based state.
Adoption, for site owners, will at minimum require a significant time/money investment, and at least trivial inconveniences to web-based readers due to unavoidable minor undesirable UX differences. So moving to the new platform needs to make people better off, not just no worse than before. The same applies to posters/readers: they won’t switch over without a compelling reason, nor should we expect them to.
I completely forgot about karma, but it’s so important that I’m promoting it to a new item. I think karma is pretty good, and some alternatives may be better, but nothing at all is much worse.
Meta: replying in a list-based format is inconvenient and I tentatively suggest making a separate reply for each significant list item.
Agreed that it’s inconvenient. Rather than separate it I’ll cut it down. 2, 4, and 6 all collapse to “client feature sets differ”; this is a meta-feature, not a meta-bug. The downside of client control is that not everybody sees the same thing. The upside of client control is client competition, which has similar benefits to market competition.
Solving adoption is the point of section 2 and is too long to describe here. Note that, as mentioned, I do not actually expect this to be adopted. The world isn’t that kind.
3 is a legitimate problem and will be addressed, but it’s the sort of thing where I need to spin up INN and see how it actually behaves when presented with edit-style supersedes. If there is a weak point in my “this is possible” argument, this is it.
2, 4, and 6 all collapse to “client feature sets differ”; this is a meta-feature, not a meta-bug.
That misses my point. Some features, like voting, can’t be implemented as clientside features, because clients would need to communicate about them (and establish consensus).
I didn’t, but I was assuming people would anyway. I was actually hoping for higher-level objections like the problems I listed in the post, but, well. I’ll answer you anyway and maybe edit the post later. Most of these fall under 3.2 and 3.3 in the outline.
is actually the only part of the problem for which no off-the-shelf solution exists. The short version is that the site UX, instead of talking to a database directly on the backend, would talk to NNTP on the backend. Links to arbitrary posts (as a non-exhaustive example) could be as simple as https://newlesswrong/message-id. Top level posts could support some subject-generated shorthand, perhaps.
I actually do want a plaintext-oriented interface, but I know I’m in the minority. You’ve expressed the solution to the markup problem yourself, though: Markdown is already the effectively-default format on Usenet and all extant NNTP clients. In fact it’s the rise of lightweight markup in general and Markdown in particular that convinced me this could ever be more than a pipe dream. There are more powerful forms of lightweight markup that could be used; the key is that the input format must be readable as plaintext for interoperability between the web and native clients to be possible.
I believe that cancels and supersedes can be kludged to support something that looks like editing even if it isn’t. I may be wrong about this; in particular I’m not sure how supersedes interact with reply chains, because they’re unusable for that purpose on Usenet proper.
User management has an established solution, and DMing can be implemented as a LW mailbox (that only takes local messages) or a forwarding address, or both. RSS is probably easy. Server based state is easy for the ‘default’ website (really an in-browser client, covered in 1.1 and 1.7) but may be hard for native clients (but anyone using a native client presumably knows what they’re getting into). Tagging may be hard, I’m not sure. Karma is definitely hard, but may be unnecessary.
The short version of this is that, designed correctly, any author or site can adopt the network without being any worse off than they currently are; that is, cooperate-defect leaves you no worse off than defect-defect. The long version is...pretty much all of section 2, actually.
(ETA: I am answering this in moderate detail not to encourage technical back-and-forth but to demonstrate that I have thought this through)
I think this reduces to problem 5. Namely, you can’t replace lesswrong.com with a completely new NNTP-backed site as your opening move.
Ordinary Markdown is insufficient because it doesn’t do inline images and tables, which are sometimes important for posts. There are more powerful alternatives, and some markdown supersets. But I’ll bet they’re not supported by NNTP clients. At best you’ll find one client (or client plugin) that supports what you want. But forcing everyone to use the same client negates the point of NNTP, and isn’t plausible anyway because we need clients for different platforms including mobile.
This definitely requires proof. In addition to the issue with reply threads, NNTP clients expect to be able to cache articles. Propagation of supersede/replace is at best delayed and at worst out-of-order, and will vary between clients. This is IMO a critical issue, a major LW feature.
I’m surprised that you say “anyone using a native client presumably knows what they’re getting into”. You’re proposing NNTP as a superior solution, but also saying anyone who actually chooses to use NNTP will have a hard time and/or fewer features. And I think this applies to other, more important features and not just server based state.
Adoption, for site owners, will at minimum require a significant time/money investment, and at least trivial inconveniences to web-based readers due to unavoidable minor undesirable UX differences. So moving to the new platform needs to make people better off, not just no worse than before. The same applies to posters/readers: they won’t switch over without a compelling reason, nor should we expect them to.
I completely forgot about karma, but it’s so important that I’m promoting it to a new item. I think karma is pretty good, and some alternatives may be better, but nothing at all is much worse.
Meta: replying in a list-based format is inconvenient and I tentatively suggest making a separate reply for each significant list item.
Agreed that it’s inconvenient. Rather than separate it I’ll cut it down. 2, 4, and 6 all collapse to “client feature sets differ”; this is a meta-feature, not a meta-bug. The downside of client control is that not everybody sees the same thing. The upside of client control is client competition, which has similar benefits to market competition.
Solving adoption is the point of section 2 and is too long to describe here. Note that, as mentioned, I do not actually expect this to be adopted. The world isn’t that kind.
3 is a legitimate problem and will be addressed, but it’s the sort of thing where I need to spin up INN and see how it actually behaves when presented with edit-style supersedes. If there is a weak point in my “this is possible” argument, this is it.
That misses my point. Some features, like voting, can’t be implemented as clientside features, because clients would need to communicate about them (and establish consensus).