| It's been tried, numerous times. Usenet still exists. Outside very small pools, it's dead, or a spam wasteland. Peter da Silva, an early heavy user (the first and fourth most prolific poster one month in the late 1980s / early 1990s, according to a reply he made to me at G+), created, and still runs, Usenet II. Which is also a wasteland. The client-independence is a benefit only up to a certain degree. Consistent characterset (8-bit ASCII largely), no binaries / multimedia (uuencoded excepted), and consistent forms of address and reply (mostly), kept things sane. But even between the tin/rtin and emacs newsreader camp, quoting styles differed. I don't recall if it was @gumby or others (and I'm positive one case was someone else, involved in xemacs development), but even one emacs-variant style of reply-quoting turned disruptive when trying to nest multiple levels deep. ("Doc, it hurts when I do this." "Don't do that then.") These aren't insurmountable obstacles. But they are obstacles to be mounted. On which deciding is likely the hardest part. |