I was in an AI conference yesterday, and there was a bunch of discussion in the chat about Slack channels, Discord servers, etc. So I was literally just lamenting the state of shared discussion forums, and commented that we all need to go back to Usenet and drop all these lame "walled garden" proprietary forums.
I'd like to tell people "install Thunderbird, sign up for a free Usenet provider, and join comp.ai, comp.misc, etc and have fun." But I'm a bit leery of encouraging people to do that since I'm not sure what the state of spam being sent to the various Usenet groups is, or how providers are handling spam filtering (if at all).
That said, there's definitely a place for NNTP / Usenet. It might take some work to fix up some issues, but it would be great to see vibrant / fruitful discussions via Usenet again.
I'd like to tell people "install Thunderbird, sign up for a free Usenet provider, and join comp.ai, comp.misc, etc and have fun." But I'm a bit leery of encouraging people to do that since I'm not sure what the state of spam being sent to the various Usenet groups is, or how providers are handling spam filtering (if at all).
That said, there's definitely a place for NNTP / Usenet. It might take some work to fix up some issues, but it would be great to see vibrant / fruitful discussions via Usenet again.