I'll often find myself snarkily responding to feature requests with "you know, someone wrote something that does that 20 years ago, but no one uses it."

You and me both, buddy.

But you forgot "Now get offa my lawn!"

Use a standardized API that properly models your data and it's usage, and whaddya know, we already have one in NNTP. Let people put whatever clients they want for presentation on top of that.

Sounds about right to me.

Thinking about it, I doubt that NNTP would have modeled edits or karma. I think posts were write once. And looking around a little, I've seen Reddit called Usenet 2.0. Maybe they've made things better. They've probably extended the discussion model beyond what NNTP had.

And as a practical matter, probably the shortest distance to a new client for LW would be to expose the reddit API service, then use existing reddit clients that can be pointed to whatever reddit server you want.

Could LW expose the reddit API as a web service?