On Tuesday, April 8, 2003, at 03:39 PM, Hallam-Baker, Phillip wrote:
Usenet was a flawed design from the start. The lack of a moderation
system was a problem long before canter and siegel. A scalable version
of slashdot without the single point editorial control and monomaniac
topic selection would be completely do-able.
I don't think USENET was ever a "design". Early on, it was a quick hack
between a couple of interested friends, and from then on, much of the
work on it, IMHO, was simply patching it to keep it going once it
scaled beyond it's current capabilities. That it scaled this far is
amazing, but where it is was never in anyone's mind when it was
started, either. By the time things like authentication were seen as
needed, the horse was out of the barn and in the next county. To say it
was a flawed design does Tom, Jim Ellis, Steve Bellovin, and the other
early folks involved in it a dishonor, because what they built was
never intended to turn into what it was. I wish we'd been smart enough
to just throw it out and rethink it back about 1983 or 1984, when we
had a chance of actually pulling a stunt like that off. Even by the
time of the great renanming, a redesign of that scale was impossible
(just look at how much fun the conversion to IPV6 is today....),
practically speaking.
But it does give one a sense of just how practical the "throw it out
and start over with e-mail" designs might be, if you think about it.
Even if one would rather not...
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