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I knew that the decentralized structure of Usenet was born from necessity, but I didn't realize how hard it was just to get a modem back then. Can decentralize
by bbanyc 7y ago
I knew that the decentralized structure of Usenet was born from necessity, but I didn't realize how hard it was just to get a modem back then.
Can decentralized services work on the modern Internet? Even setting aside how spam and illegal content destroyed Usenet as a discussion medium, in its late stages it became a playground for kooks and trolls at the expense of legitimate posting. Killfiles didn't work as the bad actors could easily change names and email addresses; get them thrown off one server and they'd just sign up on another one. The only way to ban someone from a newsgroup and make it stick is with a court order - and that happened at least once.
Another post from the same blog details why the troll problem was technologically impossible to solve: https://www.cs.columbia.edu/~smb/blog/2018-02/2018-02-23.html https://www.cs.columbia.edu/~smb/blog/2018-02/2018-02-23.htm...
- greglindahl 7y agoReddit has some similar troll problems, and there are a bunch of bots people have written to manipulate subreddits to nuke trolls. It's a much easier problem for them, though, because Reddit itself is centralized. So a bot action takes place immediately instead of over many hours. The first time I can recall anyone tried widespread cancels in Usenet was Clarinet, and it didn't work very well.