STORY
Usenet Already Seen Crosspost Sadness
Usenet Already Seen Crosspost Sadness
- A comparison between the elegant crosspost handling in Usenet and the annoying multiposting common in modern chat systems.
Already Seen Crossposts
- I realize with some geeky sadness that modern chat systems like Slack, Discord, and Facebook have lost a highly valuable feature we had in Usenet: the "already seen crosspost."
- Back then, when an article was crossposted to newsgroups A, B, and C, reading it in group B meant you would never see it repeated in A or C.
- Modern systems encourage multiposting instead, which defeats this and constantly forces users to read duplicate posts.
These facts are as Randal recalls them, but much time has passed for most of this. If you find a factual error, please email realmerlyn@gmail.com.