How do we manage identity and reputation on the internet? I don't recall that being a particular problem in the Usenet era. One's identity wasn't particularly

How do we manage identity and reputation on the internet? I don't recall that being a particular problem in the Usenet era. One's identity wasn't particularly important unless you were representing an organization, or if you were yourself famous. One's reputation was built on your body of work, the accuracy and integrity of your content, and the helpfulness of your presentation. What killed Usenet? What delivered its most severe and ultimately fatal wound was the downward spiral of signal-to-noise ratio. The biggest contributor was spam, which completely overwhelmed unmoderated newsgroups. Another was the "endless September" effect of the massive influx of Outlook-using, AOL-trained new users with no respect for, ir interest in, the community civility of most existing audiences. FAQ reading before posting became dismissed as old-fashioned. "Top-posting" over relentlessly recopied content replaced thoughtful, contextual quoting. Duplicated questions that had been answered many times before (and white answers were easily found) crowded out new content and wore down longtime contributors. Finally, the difficulty in profiting from traffic sent many content providers into their own SEO-happy walled garden. So, instead of, say, one well-curated FAQ article about how to root a given phone model/network combination, you get seventy different recipes on YouTube and proprietary forums... many with their own unique, fatal oversight that lures the novice into bricking his or her device. Yay, progress. I started participating in 1986. Sadly, I don't even remember which year I abandoned my last newsgroup.