Is HN available (e.g. "comp.culture.hn") on USENET? It would be nice to have the Web forum be interoperable with a USENET group.
The pull model (consume based on your topic/activity) of USENET newsgroups fits forum discussions much better than the "visit all pages you care about daily" Web model, IMHO.
The usenet model also is much better for reading because it tracks what you have already read. If I come to this article tomorrow I'll see all the comments from today that I already read, and someplace mixed in there are new comments that came after I finished reading. Some of those comments are very insightful, but no web forum I've seen has any concept of "you already read this so we will make it easy to skip that by default".
Technically USENET doesn't have that concept either, but all the software I have ever used to read it does, and that is what counts. (unfortunately all the software is local only so I can't switch between my phone and my desktop for reading - then again I haven't looked at USENET in 25 years so I don't know what is current)
It's sad that the threaded reading capabilities of most computer-mediated communications systems are actually worse nowadays than they were in the heydays of Netscape Communicator and trn.
The best solution there would be using some sort of web based hosted solution, which may well not exist. Thinking something like how TT-RSS replaced Google Reader. Basically, self hosted Google Groups, back when Google Groups was synonymous with web based usenet.
Shouldn't be too crazy to cobble together, if it doesn't already exist -- just an nntp client on top of a lamp stack.
There is a hacker news API so somebody could set up an NNTP server with an HN newsgroup. Looks like it's already been done, at least for personal use. If a newsgroup is read-only and only on one NNTP server, does it count as usenet? Is that like the sound of one hand clapping?
The pull model (consume based on your topic/activity) of USENET newsgroups fits forum discussions much better than the "visit all pages you care about daily" Web model, IMHO.