What would it take to get trn on the web?

[nancylebov]

It seems to be technically possible now that Javascript is in common use. It would make long discussions easier to read and navigate. I believe that making long discussions more feasible would make the web a better place, and killfiles might be a noticeable win too.

I've mentioned this, and been told that it wouldn't be that hard to write, but it's too boring.

The question has been raised of whether money would make it interesting, and if so, how much. Any opinions?

(I put this in terms of trn because that's what I was happy with. I don't know whether slrn has a huge advantage, or if it would be much more trouble to write.)

Comments

[papersky.livejournal.com]

What for? For comment threads?

[henrytroup.livejournal.com]

By the time I left/abandoned Usenet, the single-forum paradigm was breaking down. The busy groups were just too busy. Not just the noise level of spam/irrelevant but the continual flood of new people re-asking old questions, re-opening topics that had been done to death, and being on-topic but boring or lame.

The moderated groups were much better, but the moderation workload was huge. The last one there I participated in was soc.religion.christian, with one overworked moderator. Instead I moved to Ship of Fools, which on the post-moderated model has a few dozen moderators, several per broad topic discussion board of which there are ten, and thousands of active threads. They're running UBB Classic. They have 15500 members at present. The big commercial systems like LinkedIn and Facebook support forums and questions, but in the fragmented model.

I remember the Usenet years fondly, but I think trn is as obsolete as bang path addressing - and for the same reasons. My email address was once uunet!bnrgate!hwt%bwdlh490 - and I can find older ones in the archive decvax!utzoo!utcsrgv!hwtroup. I don't think that the whole world can have a meaningful discussion. Once we had that illusion, though.

[nancylebov.livejournal.com]

The web has smaller discussion groups, but I still like to be able to have the equivalent of a .newsrc and the ability to navigate comment trees, and I think I'm not the only one. Have you seen anything on the web which supports long discussions as well as trn or slrn did?

Some of the high-comment blogs *do* have energetic hands-on moderation. Sometimes it's paid (Boing-boing, I think, and definitely Ta Nehisi Coates), sometimes it's done as a labor of love (Making Light, Kate Harding's Shapely Prose).

You're backing my theory that the reason *rn hasn't been adapted for the web is that usenet has acquired such a bad reputation that people don't want to do something associated with it.

[henrytroup.livejournal.com]

Slashdot probably comes closest - although I find the "new" Slashdot navigation less useful than the previous generation. There is definite threading support with scoring there. No killfiles, though - and plenty of the people I want a killfile for.

One of the Ship of Fools discussions in "Dead Horses" runs to 85 pages with about 50 posts per page - the discussion started in November 2001 and new posts today! But it's mono-threaded, so it's hard to find and follow sub-discussions. It's run so long that some people actually have changed their opinions (and are still participating.)

[captain-button.livejournal.com]

Back in my Usenet days there were numerous people who felt that keeping everything in one huge sprawling mega-thread with no changes in the subject line was a feature, not a bug.