Hacker News new | ask | show | jobs
by pmoriarty 1318 days ago
I so miss killfiles and scorefiles, and it's mindboggling how 30+ years after Usenet clients had them they're still virtually non-existent in any social media readers that I'm aware of.

Usenet clients gave their users so much power, it's almost criminal that modern news readers have yet to catch up to them several decades later.

4 comments

> Usenet clients gave their users so much power

And there's the problem: when you give users power, it's harder to sell their eyeballs to advertisers.

Third party killfiles exist for Twitter. I was made aware of this via one particular topic. https://twitter.com/erininthemorn/status/1566988180678758400...
> I so miss killfiles and scorefiles, and it's mindboggling how 30+ years after Usenet clients had them they're still virtually non-existent in any social media readers that I'm aware of.

Indeed and I don't think people realize how great these were. There's some kind of fallacy you often read when you mention that, which to me can be summed with the following bogus reasoning: "Usenet got killed by the Web, so anything Usenet and Usenet clients had were wrong ways to do things".

Killfiles/scorefiles were better than any system I've used since then. Nothing even comes close.

The analogs to killfiles do exist in some clients: https://tidbits.com/2015/09/04/how-to-mute-unwanted-tweets-i...