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The History of Digital Spam
- bediger4000 7y agoSeems to have totally missed Usenet spam, where the term "spam" originated. Usenet seems to have been totally overwhelmed by spam, to the point of uselessness, and I suppose the reasons are complex. Also seems to have missed out on fax spamming, which at one point threatened to render faxing useless. Noted sociopath Sanford Wallace was key to both fax and Usenet spam overwhelming the medium, which is something. I think that without those two cases, this article is not very complete. Apparently legislation helped the fax spam problem some, but has been useless in helping the email spam problem, and wasn't even attempted for Usenet spam, so there are experiments that worked and failed for different media. Since email spam has almost rendered that mode of communication worthless, there's probably some merit in considering a "lifecycle" of parasitic advertising communications. The article also doesn't seem to consider the fact that almost all spam is advertising. The perverting effects of ads on the medium in question should be considered.