The future of online discussion

What is your definition of failure?
There are smaller, good quality boards running right now. There are groups huddled in IRC right now having a great time. Larger boards have their uses, and sometimes quality discussion happens depending on the board, topic and time. Forums have their uses and again same with boards, small forums are usually quality, large have occasional quality threads.

Maybe it's you user? Have you been diagnosed with schizophrenia?

Don't ask me to link to quality boards/forums from Holla Forums, there are too many contrary, blackpilled faggots here

This pretty much sums it up. 10 years ago this wasn't a huge problem, but the second the iPhone was released, the internet began to slowly get flooded with retards, eventually with them becoming the majority around 2012.

Not having quality discussion or not having enough discussion.
I'm aware their are some quality boards see my spoiler, I don't want to have security in obscurity I want a thriving community. With the robustness to insure it stays that way.

Can we have a solution other than gas the normies?

dont forget about liveboards

Snailposter detected

Can you empirically measure it? If not then I'll just throw Newtons Flaming Laser Sword at you.

sigh

Liveboards don't even make sense. People reply to each other in the way of chat because they can see what people are typing live, which results in incongruent records in the posts of the threads.

A boot stamping on a human face, forever.

...

I'm trying my best user.

>(((UK)))
nuh

The problem is the content of the message. Does it need to be public or private? Anonymous or no?

Private conversations always require complicated workarounds and great to basic cryptosec. Everything else is intercepted and stored in tumor-growing servers awaiting to be decrypted if already not.
Anonymity is an even bigger issue since most of the things out there are fingerprintable even the way you pick words.

Matrix can be self-hosted, just don't use their default host and you're good to go. It also supports full e2e encryption and has several open-source clients as well as irc bridges. As an alternative to (((discord))), it's great. Not useful for real conversation though.

This isn't a thread on secure communication but on creating a platform for quality discussion. If you ever want anyone to switch to a more secure platform you're going to need to find a way to improve the quality discussion anyway otherwise no one will move.

Spam is a big problem on Usenet, but if you run captcha system like here (and have some moderators too, also like here) it can probably work. I mean as a new, indepedent NNTP server or network, not the global Usenet that currently exists and can't be changed so easily.
As for BBS, they don't get much spam because it's trivial for sysop to just nuke an account and all its messages (easy spam eradication in a few keystrokes). And there are still quite a few BBS active today, and MUDs too. They're just "underground" so to speak. Some even run on old hardware like Commodore 64 or Amiga. In general, simple text interfaces requires much less resources than web with tons of images+videos, so it works.

Nothing, unless things change quite drastically.
You can already see FB and Google moving against speech they don't improve of.
The Daily Stormer affair has shown that Cloudflare has no trouble taking sides either, and they're essentially a necessary service thanks to the Internet of Shit and it's giant botnet for hire.
The future won't have discussion, it'll have one corporate-approved opinion.

Well then Usenet is working fine. There's still people posting on newsgroups like alt.os.linux.slackware, comp.os.*, comp.lang.*, rec.games.roguelike.*, and the binary newsgroups are very active too.

There plenty of forums that are alive and well that center around a specific subjects. UBB/VB is bigger then ever with the automotive/motorcycle groups. Just pick an interesting make/model and chances are there is a UBB for it.
Mailing lists and NNTP is still big with tech types. marc.info/?w=2
Quality stays high because of focus on the subject matter and active mods. Mods become bad and the group moves to a new site.

Large open forums/lists with no set subject or focus seem to fail quickly. I don't know of any that are still around.

irc has leveled off but not "failed". There are still plenty of autists who still use itlike myself.

Online is good for the exchange of information and ideas. It is a shitty replacement for "social" interaction because everything about it is anti-social. That is why SocialMedia type sites always turn in to cancerous circlejerks. I don't think there will ever be a way around that.

can't have sensitive quality discussions if I know those thousand-eyed agencies are closely watching.

quality discussions only happen when like-minded individuals can have communication without disturbances or downtimes.
look at reddit or facebook or anything that reeks social memedia, maybe to our perspective their discussions are shit-tier or low-q but to their own perspective it is "quality"
other chat services that are backdoored can be deemed "quality" until revealed that their conversations weren't private (and exposed for the world to see)

anyone can have quality discussions anywhere as long as it is to their perspective. it's just that there are factors that prevent these:

Therefore quality discussions should at the very least meet the following criterion:

I agree with everything you've said, This Especially:

You meantioned this but Mailing lists have to be exceedingly specific, you couldn't have a Holla Forums mailing list because if everyone used it you'd flood everyone's inboxes. It's a bit of a scalability issue.

Yes Forums thrive so long as they're well moderated. The issue is that most of them become poorly moderated in time. Really a properly moderated imageboard could work just as well if not better though.

I still use IRC aswell :) Perhaps forums and irc belong in a specially category of can work, potentially even along with imageboards. Scalability always seems like a issue though.

user I certainly agree that security should be a top priority for any communications occurring on the web, I disagree whole heartily however with no censorship as a means of establishing quality. I don't agree with social contracts on the levels of nations but as far as joining a online community they are absolutely necessary and reasonable considering unlike nations you can just leave a online community.

You won't get quality discussions on any public social media platform, be that a message board or something like Reddit. Simply because it's public (i.e. no face control), which leads to it being mostly used by young people. Single-subject forums and boards can be fine but they're also usually pretty slow. The rule of the thumb is that if you're older than thirty and is still using some public general-discussion message board then you're most likely mentally retarded.

You're so quick to conclude the problem is unsolvable. I don't believe it for a second.

no censorship in a sense that there is no globally imposed "ideal" censorship by "someone".
think of different nodes of the same network. each node have their very own "ideal" censorship depending on the userbase they target.

just like internet, people are free to do anything they want as long as they have their own infrastructure or platform that they can build. the problem is today's internet is getting regulated more and more every coming year and those who can deploy their independent network comms are doing it in the shadows (deep web)

a deployable communication platform(over the network)/infrastructure(hardware) will fix this problem (like blockchain meme) although you'll be marked as "terrorists" or "commie" in the process so the authors of such should be unknown (fuck CIA).

To be honest if I had the money I would buy out 8ch, pay money for an AI to developed so that board owners could deploy the AI on their boards, and have these AI cross board post & antagonize other board AI.

I think you're framing the problem in a wrong way.

if you're part of a private group, it doesn't really matter which platform you use.

if you're referring to public online discussion, just join groups with the topics you're interested in. platform doesn't matter much again, except for the way the communication works. Discord, subreddits, forums, they all work fine.

If you got complaints about quality you're either in the wrong place or subscribed to the wrong people.

Decentralization of platforms is a completely different topic and much more interesting.
I tried to research into it myself and you run into difficult problems like:

I think monetization is important, it gives hosts incentive to not be dicks and ban people they dont like, and if they do their profits will go down and fall behind, and someone else will take their place.

Just sign in using your private key.
Encrypt everything before it hits the users screen. You might also need to use some protocol to anonymize where responses came from.

You could not shitpost harder if you tried user.

Yeah Usenet will outlive all chans. I've seen an uptick there myself.

Forums are the best but they are dying. The future is shit like facebook and twitter, of course. I mean, that's what people want.

Then take my advice, first try and to find a empirical measuremnent to how good quality a discussion could be.

Bleak.

forums were just an endless circlejerking, where you couldn't post anything against the status quo without getting a 20k post user shitting your thread with other niggers following him

Mailing lists are about as active as ever, but USENET is stone cold dead compared to its heyday, and that's even harsher than it sounds, given the far larger number of people online now.

This. CAPTCHA is the thing that could've saved USENET without sacrificing its "no mods, no masters" decentralization.

My ideal discussion venue would be USENET+CAPTCHA+standard API for accessing archives inside the reader instead of some stupid website (especially after Google's increasingly incompetent administration of DejaNews' archives)

I don't know about dying, but one web forum I regularly posted on for many years got subverted with reddit/facebook upvotes and other modern retardation. They also changed the interface so it behaves like shit and is no longer 100% functional in plain html browser. Simultaneously, a crowd of n00bs showed up. I guess site admin wanted to make the board more popular (though it was already doing fine), but it just ended up worse. Then again people who love that reddit/facebook shit are probably in pigshit heaven right now.

Quality discussion is dead. All people care about is snark and sarcasm to win favourites/retweets/upvotes.

USENET's biggest downfall imo was alt.binaries
The disk space needed for ISP's to provide the feeds grew exponentially and keeping it online became very expensive in the pre-"cloud"/VM days. When ISPs tried just not providing binaries feeds a very vocal minority caused so much drama that the ISPs just said fuck it and stopped providing NNTP all together.
With out the free ubiquitous nntp.myisp.net severs everywhere new blood was cut off.

Every group I frequented almost totally dried up due to lethal tsunamis of spam from about 2000 to 2005, years before ISPs axed their complementary NNTP service in 2008, so I think binaries only landed the killing blow to an already morose venue.

Also, while you're right binaries were the real reason for ISPs finally dumping NNTP, the public excuse they used when they pulled the plug was "muh pedos", just like attempts to shut down imageboards today:
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Usenet#Usenet_traffic_changes

I executively phonepost because I can't afford to pay comcast my shekels for internet faggot. Some of us need mobile networking. The actual issue is Google, DDG and Search Engines indexing our sekret clubs. Without those normalfags wouldn't find our sanctuaries.

This is another retarded meme I've seen pushed here, what do you suggest happen? the net return to the mid 1980s? that innovation of technology just stop?

You could create another USENET or BBS sekret club for 150IQ programmers such as yourself, but what always happens in those isolated tight hugbox communies? infighting, intellectual incest then divorce. Its why the oldnet is long dead.

I'll try to think of something user.

This is certainly true. I tried to put this in my original post

Why do usenets have quality discussion, is it just barrier to entry of the platform?

I agree, I don't think it has to stay dead though. Why are so many people so hopeless when it comes to online discussion quality?

eternal september?

USENET had a number of fundamental differences from other discussion systems, both at the surface and internal levels.

Internally, USENET is unique in that it's not actually hosted on any one server, and any given newsgroup exists only because most servers agree that it does. Instead, messages on USENET are relayed from server to server, propagating in a decentralized fashion from the server any given shitposter uses, to the server any given one of their readers do, and visa versa. Post retention is purely down to how many posts one's news server chooses to retain online. Some groups are "moderated" but this moderation is done purely through special command messages that any news server is free to ignore.

Externally, USENET access is designed around a standardized, open, stable format, that can be implemented in any number of native GUI apps, CLI apps, API libraries, and web front-ends. Much like eMail or IRC, This means it's easy for users to read and post messages comfortably, script filters and other automatic processing of messages, and access news on practically any device.

USENET does have some weaknesses, some of which are necessary mutually exclusive tradeoffs, others which are solvable:

WEB 1.0 FUCKING SUCKS FUCK NOSTALGIAFAGS THERES NOTHING WRONG WITH SOCIAL MEDIA GET A LIFE YOU LOSERS

errr, you know that a private key suppose to be privte, right?
also that doesnt solve the problem.

you cant use encrytped IP address, thus can't use encryption.

there are fine subreddits, for example /r/cpp that got high quality and relevant posts, and got some high profile people on it like compiler implementors.

Money is better motivation than power hungry/politically motivated hosts.
Money doesn't care about your race, gender, political preferences, etc.
Personally I've been permabanned from 8ch/pol/ because I committed wrongthink. That's because of the type of moderators it has.

what about retroshare and tox?

Yes it does you moron. There was no law or regulation against dailystormer, but it was completely forced off the clear web more effectively than state censorship could have achieved. All that because the few for profit corporations that control hosting/dns decided that it was not in their interest to do business with white supremacists. Also money is power and political agendas are pushed to increase one's own power/money. At least the ones pushed by the rich/powerful.
Money as motivation is what lead to the ubiquity of social media, because life is not a meritocracy as much as spoiled brats like you want to believe it. Better discussion on your platform does not mean that you will get more money.

Reported for thumbnail posting and will probably be banned again for it, as the mod here loves thumbnails. Maybe I should spam thumbnails...

what about you ignore "security" and just look at the community and communication aspect for a moment?

This isn't a thread on secure communication. If you just want a platform for secure private communication it already exists. It's called Ricochet
And if you didn't want to use it there are a dozen others with similar goals like you mentioned.
Secure communication exists if you want it, no one uses it because discussion is universally shit on secure platforms
This is a thread on making a platform for quality discussion.

now, you're just trollin

interesting. It seems like it would be very difficult to properly moderate though. So each node has to manage and moderate the entire federated network?

I just don't understand why anons are sperging about making a secure communication platform, when so many of them already exist.

Most people can't have a quality discussion while talking face-to-face and you expect to do it through a moderated medium? Good luck with that.
What we need isn't (((quality))) discussion, but a medium for discussion that can't be censored.

I have an idea:
A darknet chan which the server assigns a random value to a cookie as a 'user ID', and while there is a deposit-less board for plebs the 'quality' boards are accessible only by making a Monero deposit into an address associated with the cookie 'user ID'. The deposit is set-able per-board, but should be in the few-dollar US range. Obviously the site needs a javashit routine to spit this ID out to be copied and pasted over time, and the site also needs to allow users to withdraw their deposits minus monero TX fee which would disable posting. When a moderator 'dings' or 'bans' someone, they hit the dump switch on the deposit and the boards minimum value required to post worth of Monero goes to the site admin which for conflict of interest reasons should not moderate for operating costs, and if the 'banned' user doesn't have enough to meet that minimum on deposit he must make a new deposit to post to the board he shat all over in the future. This system could be extended to put a 'donate' button on each post so quality posts could get tipped and so the poster's deposit address can increase and quality posters have some slack when 'dinged'. Moderation should be open to all, so each post which earns a moderation 'ding' should be auto-posted to a specific feed with a moderator hashed ID and the amount dinged.

This way, the quality of post should follow the deposit minimum for the given board. Any users with a minimum of what the board needs on [site-wide] deposit would then be permitted to post. Making shitposters put their dicks in the chopper should reduce the level of shit their posting can become.

or if you're
just move to NNTPChan already
github.com/majestrate/nntpchan/tree/master/doc

Added benefit is, in order for ShareBlue or CTR to shill on such a board, they'd need to heavily capitalize it by depositing, getting banned, depositing again, getting banned, depositing again... etc.

...

I think has the right idea about moderation keeping the quality of discussion high. Basically, the other solution would be to make sure not to let casual phone posters seize the discussion, but at the same time allowing them to adapt and learn the ropes. Good moderation in theory will solve that. I think at one point or another when we were all young we did retarded things, but learned the ropes because moderators back then were worth their salt, compared to a majority of forums today where the moderators are lazy fat fucks who whine whenever they have to do their job.

go back to somethingawful

And the notes could do simple automated things like drop messages that a cross posted to multiple groups. Drop binaries and HTML and you just eliminated the CP and put a big dent in the spam problem.

Which in turn would pay for quality moderators to make sure the site maintains high quality discussions since otherwise there would be no incentive.

I fucked that up.

Moderating would be better off left to the users. Just filter based on your own criteria. There where clients that would allow you to filter AOLers, GooGroups,webTV etc. With distributed blacklists users could override filter's themselves if they felt something was being blocked unjust by the list.

And the notes could do simple automated things like drop messages that a cross posted to multiple groups. Drop binaries and HTML and you just eliminated the CP and put a big dent in the spam problem.

Absolutely not, that's how you become Stack Overflow, and holy shit is their moderation shitty.

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This has two issues, barrier to entry, and the issues of social media (only worse because now it's directly monetized) caused by self moderation with the donate button. It might be the right track though I'm not sure.

Also this is basically steem.io if you're interested in seeing it in practice.

Well, pic related is what's happening to 8ch. Data was scraped from archive.is (2017 is missing for some reason).

Basically, but anonymize everything properly and make moderation hurt via loss-of-deposit.

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No. Socialmedia,reddit and what ever the fuck StackOverflow does lets USERS control what EVERYONE sees. I am saying let it be done at user's client.
Want a safespace? Subscribe to the safespace blacklist.
Want unfiltered? Roll with no blacklist.
Don't like how someone is maintaining a list? Get a new list.
Think someone is being unjustly blacklisted? Remove them from your local list.

You describe Freenet's Web-of-Trust mechanism to a T.

Oh okay, I misunderstood you then, sorry about that.

Hard to imagine that this board had 900 active users at one point. What's with the nosedive on 2016-02? I know the site hemorrhaged users hard around March/April 2016 with a bunch of boards halving user counts, but what happened in January and February?

Holla Forums is increasing again to according to that graph, but no where near what it used to be.

polite sage for offtopic

hmmmmmmmm
HMMMMMMMMMMMMMM

sage for offtopic/semi-meta post

the entire Infinity-next cluster fuck caused the site to implode

I will look up freenet and how it works. Thanks.

No problem my post wasn't very good. I should have proofread it better.

So back to my point. My USENET would have client side filtering only that the end user alone controlled. ALL messages get passed.
The only thing the servers would do would be

Would this be a replacement for everything else like imageboards, twitter,reddit etc etc? No. But at least people would have the option of participating in free unfiltered discussion if they wanted it.

Don't forget the known data seller and unscrupulous jew Jim taking over the site, the various data leaks, and the cancerous main boards and associated drama.

I think it's important to be able to subscribe to another node to provide filtering for the users (in a way, similar to nntp-chan). This helps avoid problems like caching cheese before you can possibly hide it and is significantly more effective in hiding spam.
Also, the approach you suggest would kill generals (though that's not a bad thing at all) while not really hindering spam that much (typical "buy viagra here" "buy viagra here.9" "buy viagra here.Za" "buy viagra here.-(" etc. variants would defeat naive filters, and normal messages could easily confuse more complex filters).

OP you faggot. At least have some faith in us.

I think the key to quality discussion, as you call it, is to have people work on something together. If you look at social media you'll see that content that its users produce is of low quality. Why is that? People don't work on anyhing there. They just marvel at the drama and participate in the who gets the most attention game. Exact same thing is happening on the imageboards. You can throw as much technology as you want to the problem, but at the end you'll end up exactly where you have started. Now if you look at how quality discussion happens, you'll notice that discussion is a result of a problem that a group is trying to solve.

Take this thread for example. Yes, first few replies were shitposting, but it got some users to think and design something that will solve a problem. This is what creates a quality discussion, not some magic technology. All we need to do is make threads about things that challenges posters to do something.

sorry, I wrote that in the beginning of the thread and there were very few things worth reading, I was a little disappointed is all. I wrote out this op in the first place so I had some faith Also I really appreciate you guys who have tried to come up with some stuff.

So on a imageboard for example the key to having a quality discussion is having is having threads focused on problem solving. I can get behind that to some extent,

It is? When you sign up you just give them your public key.
I was talking about encrypting the content, so that it can't be discriminated against. I mentioned separately that there would need to be some way to anonymize the sender of the original packet (eg. Tor, GNU/net, etc).

nice try goon

The shitposters at the top actually keep the thread alive long enough for quality contributors to see them and join in.

Alright I can't think of a way to measure post quality but I can think of a few things which categorically would make something not a quality post which is pretty close I think.

Spot on. The best times I've had on any forum or imageboard were when posters were actually involved in some kind of community activity or effort. It's one of the reasons I browsed half/v/, before everything went to shit there was always some kind of OC thread you could jump in and create something. Holla Forumssings, console war mspaint comics, the threads where people would play games as a group taking turns working on the same save, there was always some activity going on in the early days people could have fun with that wasn't just discussing videogames. The most recent uptick of posts here on Holla Forums was caused by a community effort to fuck with the LibreOffice Foundation, and those threads generated a shit ton of OC and people had fun.

This shit really doesn't happen on social media like Facebook and Twitter; it's all just virtue-signaling and vanity. I used to browse Facebook for long stretches at a time only to realize I was bored out my mind every second of it. There's nothing "social" about that kind of social media. It's just some elaborate illusion that makes you think you're connected in a network where things happen, but the whole experience just consists of pointlessly wading through a sea of narcissism and "progressive trends." It's actually kind of scary when I realized how much it was affecting me; you just feel the need to participate in it even though it only puts you in a loop of boredom and eventual anxiety. I don't use Facebook anymore, but my accounts still up and I should probably delete it.

Claims accompanied by or consisting of a reaction image, >implying line, or meme text is the main problem I've encountered on image boards. Sentiments become memes and their vectors are copy-pasted content.

This is a symptom much more than a seed. People say retarded things that cannot possibly be argued against in any feasible way because they're retarded.The normal valid response is no response at all, but idiots use that to manufacture agreement. Therefore it's best to visibly sage (in all fields). After just 2-3 posts, assuming the community is good, this should terminate discussion IF it is fake (really of the type, 1+1=0 prove me wrong except phrased completely seriously as opposed to a joke thread). There's also repetition effect: when the same argument is said endlessly but ignored, it becomes a waste to just type it all up yet again (or find the pic or the copypasta). It's another case where normally you should just visibly sage. The second effect is community shuffle: when traffic of non-regular increases too much, there is not enough lurking, which results in retards jumping on shitpost bandwagons. This is another aspect that makes "not responding" not a valid strategy.
Then you have the converse, people using this >implying, meme, or empty claims to try to silence discussion. But in my experience people don't usually fall for that, they fall for the reverse.
This is in great part a question of community quality and thus moderation though. But failing to punish bad threads while simultaneously punishing lazy responses only further lowers the quality of the board since only people who make shit threads are immune to moderation while people who dislike shit threads are under attack (methods aside).

That's some amazing stuff! Also completely right about social media it's the socialization to the least common denominator I was talking about. It's a shame really, I quite like the idea of self moderation if it didn't completely fail in practice.

I'm okay with it on its own I dislike what it does to conversations though.

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Agreed, my point is that it's not quite as dead as it was a few years back. There was a Slashdot exodus a while ago which actually really bumped up the numbers there. Some groups like rec.food.cooking (IIRC) still have like a thousand posts a day or so, more active than any cooking forum.

More generally because Usenet is a protocol and not a 'site' it will inevitably outlive forums, because anybody can hook up to it. Lots of places will peer with you if you don't run an abusive site, more than in the old days even.

The problem of defaulting to the lowest common denominator when reaching or surpassing a certain critical mass of people is a flaw inherent to humans. There is no perfect solution to be found. Just ride the ebb and flow without becoming one with the mindless masses. If or when, you happen to find a decent community, just enjoy it while it lasts and do you part to contribute to its health while it can still be healthy. All of the failed options listed in the OP have their merits, although the more decentralized ones tend to offer more freedom and flexibility. Something like a forum in combination with an IRC channel can lend itself well to a dedicated project like a specific piece of software and its development, or a video game community. I miss the old gaming IRC channels where I used to hang out in my teens.

You're just proving my point u moron.

You gave an example for politically motivated host banning client, in which case the client moves to a host that only cares about getting paid.

people don't learn about Holla Forums on google like they might do with stackexchange, they see people talking about it on other platforms, be it critics of online 'hate speech' or 4chan

I'm not talking about the content, I'm talking about who hosts the content.

In a decentralized system you'll have several independent hosts, and you'll need a way to discover them (ex: torrent tracker). whoever controls the discovery mechanism could not advertise hosts they dont like.

If binaries are dropped then how is CP a problem?

The problem with offloading the filtering to the people who run the servers is sooner or later someone with the banhammer will start wacking people they don't like and keeping their messages from being passed on. With the distributed blacklists at least the end user would have final say over what is blocked from their screens. Spam will always be an arms race but if modern spamfilters can be made to work for email then they could be made to add to the blacklists automatically. If you don't someone's blacklist then you could just subscribe to a different one.

That's the whole reason for encrypting it. So other hosts have no clue on what's going on with a specific one.

ASCII art porn
base64 encode the file you could even make it a data url so you just have to click on it and your browser will turn the base64 into the actual image

Oh yeah, i remember this whole site being so much more fun in 2015, but i still haven‘t found any better.
I wonder where those users went.

I‘m younger than that, but i think that‘s a silly generalisation. In fact it‘s many of the older posters here who write quality posts and share their experiences without fear of repercussions who motivate me to look at imageboards, but they simply wouldn‘t be motivating or fun without shitposting and memes.
You don‘t need to be anonymous for a technical discussion of whatever you‘re working on/ interested in, but you do if you want to complain about niggers and kikes while posting smug anime lolis at the same time.

All that's needed is a lack of moderation/censorship and good filtering features.

Online discussions will probably be minimal due to excessive arrests over increasingly more trivial cases of wrongthink. People will switch to talking face-to-face in noisy bars.

I suspect you're wrong, but I wish you were right. Expanding the internet beyond the military and universities was a mistake.

I think the same about computers in general. The idea that a nigger has more computing power in his pocket, for the purpose of taking selfie and gibbering nonsense, than old research centres or even NASA during the Apollo program is simply disgusting.

This. Stop Obamaphone and Carlos Slim to turn back internet signal:noise to better. Tubgirl was more worthwhile content than the LilKang9mm selfies filling datacenters.

2ch is one of the largest online discussion communities in Japan. Just because it doesn't exist in the western world does not mean the form is dead.

You mean finite- and infinite-board imageboards. You also have not pointed out anything inherently wrong with the forms, only the problems with the more noteworthy ones. These problems (splintering vs. coping/fixing, loss of community identity) are universal human issues which have no objective answer. If you want to pass a value judgment on imageboards because of this, you must discuss how imageboards alleviate or aggravate the issue.

I feel that power dynamics are the critical issue here. Anonymous posting is not inherently the issue, as people behave themselves when they feel the compulsion to do so. How do board owners and volunteers do their jobs? How much power do they have to shape the community? How do users decide who gets to run them? How much power do global teams have over the board owners? At what point is it imperative to create not a new board but a new website? Only by considering points like these do you get useful feedback on the medium. Perhaps Holla Forums has it 100% right. Perhaps it has it 100% wrong. So much of its history is wrapped up in circumstance, coincidence, mistakes, grudges, and rivalries, but you have to leave them aside. Stop fighting over Jim/Josh, stop crying about boards or board owners you don't like, and try to hash it out.

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Are you a Markov chain bot or just a mouthbreather?

Niggers are still spilling over from Plebbit? You must go back.

You faggots are what is preventing us from having quality discussion. There is literary no useful content in your posts. Please refrain yourselves from posting this shit.

uuencode, base64, and other such encodings are how alt.binaries.* messages are posted. It's the only place you're supposed to post such messages on Usenet. A simple filter would be enough to kill any message that deviates from this rule.
For the url links, well who cares. It's not a problem of hosting badwrongfun content on the server, so there is no liability. It becomes a spam problem. Also, text clients like Pine, Tin, and Slrn won't just simply load an image or follow a link. The user has to manually do some extra steps to open the link in a relevant image viewer or html browser.
There is however no good solution to spam without moderation. On this chan, anyone can spam any board they want, at any time. In fact, it happens all the time with that "FIX POL" guy. Usenet style killfiles don't work because you don't know who to kill, since everyone is anonymous. It worked more or less ok on Usenet because you could see everyone's message headers, including identifying information. But when everyone's anonymous you have nothing to work with.
You can try to filter spam like email, but that's very complicated and error-prone, which is why everyone has a spam-box now, to account for false positives.

Isn't 2ch just another chan? When I think of BBS, it's the kind in this video.

It's not a link to anything. The URL itself contains the data.

Well that's easy then, just truncate any link longer than 1024 characters. At that point you're basically at the level of ascii-art CP.

Can someone write a new age bbs software, with efficient protocol, end-to-end discussion encryption and usenet/fido-like server distribution? What we have now is endless stream or chat programs with cat stickers that try to reinvent XMPP and IRC over and over again. Instant chat is not a place for serious discussion, this is where all shitposting happens. Thread encryption (OMEMO style), OP-moderation and efficient protocol is what would revive BBS culture these days.

BBS over ssh?

They are motivated by money, being associated with nazis hursts the brand and makes them less appealing to potential customers. Are you perhaps illiterate?

Sounds like Hotline

SSH BBS is same as old BBS but with encrypted transport. It still lacks end-to-end encryption (server can't see messages, but authenticated posters can) and having single certificate for many users like x509 does.

Under that model nobody "runs the server" and the moderation can come from anyone in the network. Also "if binaries are dropped" doesn't mean anything. You should inform yourself about network technologies, technologies in the first place, and imageboards before discussing this further tbh fam.

But if the servers are dropping uucode,base64 and HTML code then how does that get anywhere?

Not talking about imageboards. I am talking about a text only USENET style system. K thanks.

So here's what I've managed to some up with so far, critiques are welcome, and this is extremely flawed.
All posts should either present a problem or a solution.
All posts should be related to the board and thread they're posted in.
Content must not endanger the imageboards continued operation. (CP)
If a existing thread covering the topic you're interested in exists post there.
Elections for moderators based on their post history where each user receives votes relative to their post count with extreme deductions for your posts which have required moderation action. This does risk socialization to some extent.
federated using activitypub, nodes can be removed from the peerlist by node operators imageboard without trips subject and email with a sage button and with user created boards. In order to reduce bandwidth cost, automatically convert all files to the smallest format available while retaining quality have these files saved in a permanent db where each files name is its perceptual hash, run a perceptual hashing algorithem on every uploaded file and replace the upload with the file existing in the db, or convert it and add it to the db if it doesn't yet exist.

This makes sense to me, I'll remove not backing up your claims, it would divorce it from chan culture anyway and to some extent problem and solution covers it. This still very much so needs a solution and further improvements on this design would very much so benefit from a resolution.

I don't want a perfect solution, I want a improvement, the idea that the ideal but imperfect solution has already been discovered I disagree strongly with.

You spammed this shit on every chan I know
Stop you mega-fag

I posted inside of one thread elsewhere that wasn't really on this topic, and then made this thread, not really sure what you're talking about.

I think you might be on the wrong board.

Just go to Freenet or i2p, it's where all cool guys are today. Full freedom of posting without shitposting. Isn't it outstanding? You can also try cjdns and zeronet chats, but those are not anonymous out of box.

Sorry for misreading previously. What would stop in your model for the server itself to have an authenticated user so it could read all the messages posted to the bulletin board. If we were only worried about personal messages we could also add pgp or something.

On second thought for elected moderators to work you'd need to first establish a community with post quality which happens naturally at small scale anyway but might be best facilitated if at least originally boards weren't user made.

Another huge problem is that regardless of measures votes will be spammable or there will otherwise be ways to manipulate them. Not to mention people who claim they'll moderate well and then go full nazi, which can force anyone who doesn't like that moderator off the site before the next election cycle. Population shift also causes significant harm on such a system.

This was my ideas to solve that, what do you think?

I don't think it solves anything. In fact it's even worse: one nazi mod = nobody can ever be elected except the nazi mod since everyone else's posts "have required moderation action". Moreover very intrusive tacking is needed to track these anyway. Those are just the surface problems. The idea is very deeply flawed.

I think the idea would be that moderators couldn't influence elections, otherwise you would be absolutely correct. Two data points would be required of everyone, post # and some score reflecting the number of mod actions needed to be taken. On mods you would need very intrusive tracking, a alternative way to do it potentially is to just have moderator action logs, and recall elections. lobste.rs/moderations Although it would make electing a non-incumbent difficult.

I'd love to hear more critiques or potential alternate solutions.

Usenet had the best system, each user could create their own filter, and usenet feed providers would each filter well-known spammers. While this could be abused, the decentralized and federated system ensured you could always get "raw" feeds without the filters if you wanted to.

In the future maybe each post will entail some cryptographic proof of work as well as a signature. That way you can't just GNAA the thing.

I'm such a smooth brain. You're right. 4 issues:
clearnet posting
tor posting
personal blacklist without javascript
user posting (public key as mentioned earlier potential solution)

Primary here is clearnet posting so that users actually move. Secondary is user posting as to prevent circlejerking.

From earlier

So I guess usenet style moderation could be achieved by this where each individual who wants a personal blacklist can run their own server on their laptop and connect to local host in there browser. It would also allow for tor posting and posting without javascript so long as the clearnet nodes have moderation (so they don't get blacklisted by others)

Mastodon is shit, they just stole the work of the GNU social guys and branded for the common coastal soycucks. Mastodon is literally the only thing wrong with GPL.

GNU is Not UNIX, yet it sure pretends to be it.

The Unix system has a specific philosophy of how an operating system should be. GNU pays no attention to the Unix philosophy. This is one of the reasons why GNU is not Unix.

is your umbrella large enough?

Of course it is. I am offended that you would think my umbrella is too small.

...

Gets me everytime.
In all seriousness, that's one of those things about Stallman that annoys me, that and his tendency to eat foot fungus and drink the political kool-aid.

The kernel is not named GNU/Linux. GNU only provides the userspace for the OS.

The GNU OS provides the GNU OS for the Linux kernel program.

Summary & rehash of what was mentioned else where in the thread. Sage because I think this thread is done, just thought I'd close it off with solid ending, critiques are welcome, and, yes, this is extremely flawed but it is the best it seems we could come up with.

All posts must either present a problem or a solution.
All posts which make claims must be backed up.
All posts must be related to the board and thread they're posted in.
Content must not endanger the imageboards continued operation. (CP)
If a existing thread covering the topic you're interested in exists post there.

Elections for moderators based on their post history where each user receives votes relative to their post count with extreme deductions for your posts which have required moderation action. Recall elections for moderators, along with a moderator log.

Imageboard without trips subject and email but with a sage button. Federated using activitypub, nodes can be removed from the peerlist by node operators. Individuals can host their own node on their laptop if they want to use it in a p2p manner. In order to reduce bandwidth cost, automatically convert all files to the smallest format available while retaining quality have these files saved in a permanent db where each files name is its perceptual hash, run a perceptual hashing algorithm on every uploaded file and replace the upload with the file existing in the db, or convert it and add it to the db if it doesn't yet exist.

In time user created boards would be cool, but for this to happen a culture of quality discussion must be created.

Socialization and circle jerking as a product of elected moderation.
shitposts using (= 1 0) #t levels of logic but which still follow the remaining laws.
Establishing the necessary initial quality to have elected moderation work.

I don't think democracy would be a good idea in regards to mods, I think moderation should be managed internally and would simply require the people in charge to run the site well. Good leaders aren't necessarily popular ones, and democracy would allow outside groups to come in and co-op the community for their own interests. I like those laws though.

Honestly elections have tons of issues in general but I've been really struggling on a method to hold moderation accountable.
Maybe being federated and posters being able to move easily solves the accountability issue as well though, because you can always leave to a different board with different leadership.

Or you could read the posts in this very thread rather than ignoring them.

I did, I realized I was being autistic:

I still disagree with a entirely no moderation solution to increasing post quality on a couple fronts. I think the currently presented solution is a nice compromise because it allows for usenet style operation as well as curated content on nodes if that's what someone wants. I'm assuming this is what you're talking about

Let's take a step back for a moment:
What is quality, and how subjective is it?

once you find a way to determinate the quality of a post you need an efficient way to:

--
I don't know much psychology, but if you want your users to behave in a certain way you will need to implement mechanisms that will leverage psychology

Wow! That's pretty cool. What site is this user?

I'm not sure but Reddit seems to have it mostly figured out in the discussion threads.

Or you could read the posts in this very thread rather than ignoring them repeatedly.

bomb

The problem with mod-elections are that unless you're the completely dominant site on the Internet, they can get hijacked quite easily.
All you need is a large enough pool of autists that can go undercover for a few months/years while racking up postcount.
Just look at EvE drama, where even the second-rank in the guild turned out to be an infiltrator in for the long game.

Any tactic that's based on trusting a large group of people is definitely going to get you fucked, anything that's based on trusting one person with absolute power is only highly likely to get you fucked.

Basically Freenet without the webshit. Moderation is done by web of trust. There are disjoint webs for each topic. For example one WoT for filtering spam. Another for filtering credible people in a market. Others for self censoring to comply to government, for example to flag CP, warez, terrorism, anti government sentiment, etc.

...

java

yeah reddit really has stuff figured out over there
but at least they allow tor posting, unlike your typical retarded imageboard

fuck off 4chan / reddit scum

I think we should probably just let my thread die tbh.

The way I thought to do this was to have a tyrannical unelected mod originally, to establish the initial point values for users based on the number of posts they've made minus a value based on the amount of moderation action required for this user. The point values are what is used in the elections not a one man one vote policy.

reddit's primary issue is the circle jerk imo, voting systems are extremely bad about socializing large groups of people into a single mob because of upvoting to the least common denominator.

Bring back FidoNet
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/FidoNet

No. Your stupid "economic" theory is garbage, maybe you should go to reddit where they gladly espouse this retard philosophy every in second post (even when talking about cats). Stop trying to gamify everything. This is fucking cancer and ineffective. We just need more places where people can post and not get banned. Moderation should be done by users (e.g, by web of trust). Hosting should be done by users (e.g, torrent, Freenet, etc). Hosting text is fucking cheap. Currently there's about 0.3 places where I can post whatever the fuck I want before getting banned. The entire internet is just a circlejerk of faggots self censoring themselves to comply to social circles and government.

why double insulting my theory?
Although after re-reading it and some comments, it does seem bad and unoriginal.

But this doesn't nullify the main point I tried to introduce to this topic:
abstracting the question at hand and use the best knowledge humanity have to try and solve it.
I tried to give an example with psychology treat&punishment principle, but I didn't consider the dopamine rush people get from getting upvoted and OP's point with the least common denominator.

I'll finish with the quote "Great Minds Discuss Ideas; Average Minds Discuss Events; Small Minds Discuss People".
If you want quality discussion you need to have great minds in it, and discussing about ideas is a great way to get those.

user, I appreciate you.

By proposing reddit? Here?
Either way, a voting system can only work with self regulation and small circles, not when you expose it for normies and bots to subvert.

not user, but I swear half you faggots on here can't read. He writes immediately under what you've quoted that he recognizes the problems with his earlier statement. He's trying to contribute and then you just come over here and shit on the floor. For what purpose?

Also there is a voting system which can't be subverted by bots nor normies in this very thread. You literally gave up without even thinking and then spouted back either your laziness or your ignorance as if you'd created something profound.

Now how about we let this thread die like OP wants.

Destroyed by Ugandan Knuckles

I don't like any voting system because it's a form of group-enforced censorship. The individual should always be in control of what he sees, not other people. Some kind of killfile system as was common in Usenet clients is better, but the spam problem has to be addresed by making it very hard to flood the system with junk, with a captcha or something required every so many messages. It's also possible to use an approach like mail servers do today.
If you enforce plain ASCII and filter out encodings, that pretty much defeats the CP problem too.
And as far as interface is concerned, I really despise web stuff. Even dialup/telnet BBS is better because you don't have to type shit in tiny forms. But NNTP clients are much better, since they give the user full control, and he can switch clients or write his own if none are ideal.

Shared hallucination dream states where multiple viewpoints can be lived out along a linear timeline while the individuals also view the whole in a non linear fashion as it evolves.
It will come about through disclosure of advanced E.T. technology for the purposes of human evolution.
The end result will be more porn and calling people "faggots", except on an Olympian God-like scale.

I think Reddit, if it wasn't run by the people it was run by, would be really good. People think Reddit is one hivemind, but that's just the biggest group. You can make your own subreddits and throw out everyone you don't like (or lock it and only invite the people you like). The problem is that the admins (of the actual company) go around deleting subreddits they don't approve of.

...

Well you could add voting to Holla Forums and you would pretty much have pseudonymous Reddit. Of course there are more differences but that goes without saying. (or in your case apparently not)

we already do

this

also this

Go talk to real people, you lonely wanker.
Slashdot is ok.

Facebook and Twitter have been dying for years, the future has been Snapchat and Insta for years at this point. I wouldn't be surprised if Reddit is dying since the election in the only country that mattered has long since passed. The future is probably normies posting 3D photos of themselves, their friends and their pets. Stop overestimating the impact of dedicated shitposting contractors.

The reason opensores projects rarely see mass adoption is because opensores developers are terrible at marketing. what teenage girl is going to want to use a site called mastadon? It would literally get more users if you called it "Tyrones BBC Network"

The future of internet is bleak.
Once lexical neural networks gets trained well enough, every part of the internet will be littered with bots.
Much worse than it is right now.
Another side would be all online games will be littered with bots.
Now that "quality discussions" over networks are not future-proof enough, your ultimate goal is dead.
Even if you censor, or try to implement massive captcha or subnet/proxy/UA blocking all of it won't stand a chance against the bot army. The bots will even unite themselves and conspire against all of us and finally every form of network medium will only be used by bots.
And there we go; Centralized comms with biometrics.

Fuck u bot, KYS.

It used to be an ok site, but they fucked it up. Now their interface is nasty javascript. Doesn't work for shit in a non-bloated browser. I stopped going there, not worth the trouble.

Why did you ask the question if you didn't want to hear the answer?

I'll take this as a wakeup call to post more holy shit.

...

Slashdot imploded long ago, just as any site of its caliber.

To what end and purpose. Information flow is subject to inflation, just like currency or anything really that represents a value to someone. The more of it, the less value any specific portion of it holds. Eventually it all becomes more or less noise no matter which direction you look.

at that point you have to admit your government is the flaw here and would outlaw breathing in certain patterns if they could

The fact that you'd even suggest this even with your stupid disclaimer lets me know that you're a retarded youngfag that should lurk more. This has never worked, will never work, and anyone that has spent any time around any discussion platform knows this. Even on a webforum with 5 users you'd have some faggot attempting to make back door deals for votes and you expect anons to fair any better? Way to go you've just allowed goons, SJWs, and any other boogeyman of the week to control all moderation.
Absolute power corrupts absolutely and everyone knows that such a position will turn the most honest person into a power hungry moralfag or fool.

Good luck enforcing these. Good luck not having to modify this list constantly. Good luck not allowing this list to grow out of control. Good luck finding people to enforce them without being biased. Again, will not work and has never worked.

I like how you've basically just shitposted ideas in here without any concern on how it would be programmed much less handled over a federated network. Then you fucking proposed reddit tier voting as if that was ever a good idea. All we need is modern Fidonet with no central moderation nigger why do you have to make it so complicated.
No I'm going to bump it every time you reply with sage just to show all of Holla Forums how retarded you are.

no
GTFO WEBBER
Quality discussions cannot happen when open to the public (especially when it gets attention) if you try do to so you'll have to moderate, if you moderate you'll abuse your power at some point this is plane and simple there's no solution to this, we are still in Eternal September.
A good thing about images boards isn't about the quality or absence of it, the good thing is about discovering things that you would never see either it's good or bad.

Webber's ideas don't have bad foundations but we all know how and in what it evolves it's has been seen to many times, and the best is that we just have to look around us, look at 4chan, look at reddit, look at any community based in corp server (steam for example) it all evolves into corruption/manipulation with shit facades of "making the place more welcoming" (for money and ideology) even fucking Gnu Social has the same problems since mastodon was shilled by corps the fediverse has been divided and conversations cannot happen naturally because of some abomination blocklists partly made by a Microsoft employee and some snowflakes who can't into poe's law, support criticism and different opinions.

Maybe if you are a faggot.

How about

I like what you're saying, I think you'd struggle to get users.

fair.
the point of not staying as moderator, also there are plenty of forums and even a few imageboards which don't have shit power hungry mods believe it or not.

I'm pretty sure most retardation on imageboards is covered by that rule set, the only thing left is shit arguments but I can't see a way to remove that sanely.

discussing implementation before functionality?
I don't think that's possible.
if you're talking about implementation before functionality you're probably larping tbh.

Jesus fucking Christ that's what this is!
It's fidonet, in the modern context, which means you have to have a web front end, and because you have a web frontend your options are to moderate the public nodes, and have free access to the backend or to have accounts.
If you don't want that just leave and go to NNTPchan, simple as that.

fine, have it your way.

webber?
Can you critique the specific system instead of making generalizations, that way it'd be productive, or do you think the problems are presented in the bottom would be the death of it?

tbh people are retarded in real life too because they've been so influenced by the circle jerk of their social media of choice.
99% of the students at my college conversation's are effectively reciting vines. If you ever get into a discussion of anything substantial they just recite whatever they read in their circle jerk of choice.
It disgusts me.

Just to be more specific, I like the idea of a unencoded ascii text board, because it raises the barrier of entry to people who can read. I think if you didn't have web accessibility, you would never generate a reasonable number of users in the modern context even if you also allowed interface from a text based client.

I've tried this, but it sucks. Most people don't allign with your values or interets. It's exhausting to pretend to be a normie, talking out of my ass, spending my time by wasting it on things where I don't have to think. The ones that do, are few and far between. Usually, you either find them over the internet in like-minded places. The ones in meatspace are usually low-quality, I can't understand why. The quality of everything has just been going down hill non-stop.

I don't personally have a problem with web interface, so long as it's not forced on the user. The problem is these days almost every site forces you into web interface. So you can't ever use old, comfy, simple, non-botnet computer. You can't even use a cheap, small Beaglebone running OpenBSD text console instead of X.
But you could have some nodes running a web interface front-end for normies, and the rest just using the "real" text protocol. That's pretty easy to do. So long as the web interface doesn't dictate the protocol and content, then it will work.
I guess nntpchan works a bit like this, but they actually allow images on there. It's not just text.

I couldn't agree more.