[buddylw]

Holy. Talk about nostalgia -- I used to read these all the time when I was a kid in the 90s. I had no idea the internet Oracle was still around!

[dwd]

I came here wondering if someone had finally created a ML version so you could choose your answer from AI or meat popcicle responses.

[sasebot1]

can you explain in simple words.. what exactly is the internet Oracle?

[dredmorbius]

It's ... sort of a text-mode chatroulette, but with presumed roles of the asker (supplicant) and responder (Oracle), a protocol for asking (#INCLUDE grovel) and answering questions, and a presumption that what is being submitted is in fact a question, with a voting mechanism for best responses.

Best question-response pairs were curated weekly and at longer intervals, in a digest. Those were absolutely delightful to read.

TL;DR: Like "Ask HN", but very, very, very different.

You owe the Usenet Oracle a pint of maudlin.

[kimi]

You send an email to the oracle asking a question (usually funny, but sometimes very personal). The oracle will return somebody else's request (in an anonymized form), and you reply to it. The result is publicly readable, and a whole culture developed around it. Try it!

See https://internetoracle.org/about.cgi