What's sad is that there is no serious replacement for usenet in the internet of today. Usenet was a place where top talents of the world used to talk together with amateurs on the more disparate topics. Back then the internet was for an elite, and that sucked as universal access to the net is really important, but at the same time it is sad to see most of the internet reflecting the fact that today it is a "mass" thing.
> Usenet was a place where top talents of the world used to talk together with amateurs on the more disparate topics.
Twitter has adopted some of these functions: it allows anyone to hold open conversations on any topic (albeit limited to 140 characters); enough (important) people are on Twitter and use it with enough frequency to make this possible.
When I got involved in the early 90s, sci.math (to name a random example) had over 100,000 regular readers. Participants ran the range from beginners who didn't understand Calculus to tenured professors to random kooks. (Sometimes those categories overlapped - eg Alexander Abian.) Conversations regularly were complex meandering affairs where participants frequently kept 3-6 different threads of the same conversation going in the same posts.
I am not aware of any discussion forum today that is online with anything like that readership and range of participants. I'm also not aware of any with that tolerance for complex conversations. (You can do it with email - I have - but when people mix top posting with bottom posting with interleaved posting, it turns into a mess. To do it like Usenet did you must use interleaved posting.)
The more important qualifier is "from time to time".
What I miss most about Usenet is that there were always interesting conversations, that were expected to take place over time. Here how many conversations are still going on a day later? A week later?
Leaving aside the character limit, it's quite difficult to follow a 'thread' on twitter. It's a great broadcast medium for short updates "server X is down" and so on, but not so great for conversations.
I strongly doubt half of those "VIPs" are actually taking care of their twittering/facebooking themselves so at best you reach someone actually working directly for said "VIP".
I'm referring to the verticals I know and about which I do ongoing research, which mostly aren't tech verticals. I've checked facts on those issues on Quora, which has been disappointing as a source of information on those subjects.
Well, without more information, I can't really prove you wrong ;-)
But I still contend that Quora has experts in more domains than HN does. Check out the breadth of industries represented on http://www.quoratop.com/. Of course, it's still tech heavy - but it's more diverse than HN.
It's not perfect - but it's a much better candidate than HN.
That list on Quoratop is dominated by tech bloggers and pundits. Not industry experts. Just a bunch of people with tons of followers and hours logged on Twitter and at conferences. When you can converse with core contributors to openbsd, openssh, and ffmpeg, the guy who wrote fucking bsdiff, and the creator of the first worm, that's really impressive.
As a sidenote, this is probably one of the biggest things I miss about HN's old days is how great the discussions were with such legends. The creator of Gmail & Adsense talking with you was a daily, awe-inspiring thing. Not that it doesn't happen still, but a lot of this old guard of commenters comment less and less with new vocal pipsqueaks filling up threads. Not that they don't bring value, but the old guard had a way with words that conveyed thoughts concisely.
But I think your argument stands, there are a lot of different and varied industries and interests represented on Quora. The only problem is that a lot of the questions and answers seem a little fake and dry. Everyone's got their name and reputations on the line, so there isn't much outside the usual rhetoric and repeated arguments. Though I will note once in awhile a gem appears from the trough.
The best sources for serious discussions online seem to have moved from Usenet newsgroups over to the pantheon of topic- or expertise- specific forums; Nuclear Phynance and Wilmott for quants and finance+banking, HN and a few other good forums for tech, CollegeConfidential for education, BodyBuilding for fitness and health, etc. And the huge constellation of niche, smaller forums. Then there are the generalist forums like Something Awful and lots of smaller ones with vague or whimsical/unrelated beginnings or purposes. IRC is still a great medium as well, but heavily tech-focused.
I think Reddit fills a hole here in a lot of areas, especially in the smaller and more focused subreddits.
