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I'm too young to have been a part of Usenet, but it seems to me that there's no good way to recreate the space described in the article without keeping most peo

by bmgxyz 7y ago

I'm too young to have been a part of Usenet, but it seems to me that there's no good way to recreate the space described in the article without keeping most people out. My understanding is that the "Golden Age" of Usenet was possible mainly because only the people with the proper resources, knowledge, interest, and opportunity could even get to it in the first place. When you select a group of people from the general population with those traits and assets, of course you'll end up with a group that's more or less self-policing; the population will be small and largely homogeneous. It's hard to have conflict when your neighbors are almost identical to you, at least on a large scale. In my estimation, the larger and broader a group is, the more it'll approximate human culture and interaction as a whole. It shouldn't be a surprise when the negative parts of those things (e.g. war, strife, hatred) emerge, just as much as the positive things (peace, fellowship, love).

giancarlostoro 7y ago
It's funny because I think this is true of most online communities I've joined. People will say on here things like "HN has changed now that its big" or "HN is not how it used to be", and I'm sure some would say the same of 4chan as well, and reddit, and probably even Facebook.
- prepend 7y ago
  4chan was once pretty funny. I remember when they did fun things like hack Time polls [0] before they got too big and went off the rails. [0] https://techcrunch.com/2009/04/27/time-magazine-throws-up-its-hands-as-it-gets-pwned-by-4chan/ https://techcrunch.com/2009/04/27/time-magazine-throws-up-it...
  - giancarlostoro 7y ago
    This was around the time I left 4chan, when the gore stuff got out of control. The snuff films were being posted and other nasty things.
- iso1631 7y ago
  Usenet never survived Eternal September https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eternal_September https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eternal_September
  - crankylinuxuser 7y ago
    No, it never survived the late 90's campaigns against the RIAA trying to stop piracy at the ISP level. Thats when all the big ISPs yanked support, especially after alt.binaries was sharing damn near everything. And they were big bandwidth sinks due to the distributed model usenet has, so it was easy for ISPs to yank the carpet and look at the immediate gains.
    - ape4 7y ago
      Yeah, no binaries would be a start for a new Usenet
      - crankylinuxuser 7y ago
        The problem is that binaries are transferred in a non-binary manner. Base64 was the preferred way. Except it was also used to push images back and forth as well for pertinent conversations. For any method of communication, you can transfer content that someone else tries to prevent.
        chalst 7y ago
        Upper bounds on per-user bandwidth would work. Implementing this is nontrivial, but it's an essentially easier problem than spam.
        kick 7y ago
        Who cares about piracy? It exists over HTTP, too, and in a far greater volume than a modern USENET-equivalent could ever hope to achieve, and it's not like ISPs need to be sucked up to anymore: they've already taken their ball and went home on this matter, proverbially-speaking.
- inviromentalist 7y ago
  The cycle- >New users, new ideas. > Mods ban these new ideas because they don't comply with existing culture > Mods get heavy with their justice >Core users are mistaken for newbies, and face mod wrath > Core users migrate to new websites Guess where HN is on this timeline
  - microcolonel 7y ago
    HN is kinda dying as a community, though moderation isn't the whole story. There are also some long-standing bugs, and misbehaviours of the voting system. Being able to downvote replies without any refutation, to me, seems like a massive mistake; it just teaches people not to say anything interesting, because they won't get a response anyway, even when they're wrong in a subtle or interesting way. The formatting available to users is maybe close to the right amount, but the implementation is broken (for example, it doesn't end URLs when it sees >, so you end up with broken URLs when you go out of your way to protect them). It could probably also do with proper first-class block quotations, people end up putting them in <pre> blocks or italics, and it's not always clear.
    - 300bps 7y ago
      HN is kinda dying as a community As someone who’s been on HN for about 9 years, it’s funny to read this. I don’t see how it’s gotten any worse during my time here. I think HN’s community is fantastic but you either get it or you don’t. I really enjoy the signal to noise ratio and I’m happy that silly comments and jokes are downvoted or moderated. I read HN with showdead on and personally I think the moderation is spot-on.
      - microcolonel 7y ago
        I get HN's community, and I enjoy it. That said, I often think twice about posting anything meaningful; I know I'll get a bit frustrated when I put myself out there in good faith, and people have nothing to say, but downvote anyway. I know that some very bright and lovely people have been totally turned off of the place by this, and this behaviour of the system doesn't really help anything. > I read HN with showdead on and personally I think the moderation is spot-on. I too use showdead, I think the moderation is generally good (though I think at times I've been handled somewhat unfairly). The times when there's a dead post that I don't think should be dead, it's usually from a person who has worn out his welcome with other comments. This is why I say moderation isn't the main problem, contrary to the parent reply.
kingste 7y ago
I am old enough to remember Usenet. All you needed was an Internet connection, a usenet client, and access to a usenet server. Most ISPs provided usenet access just like they provided an e-mail address at the time. So it was no more difficult to be involved in usenet than it was to have e-mail. In modern terms, usenet would be reddit if it was distributed (so anyone willing to set-up their own server could run a node and let people connect to it). But for end-users it was as simple as having an e-mail account and a client application on your computer.
- WesleyLivesay 7y ago
  During the "Golden Age" of Usenet, which I believe many people to consider to be pre-Eternal September, the number of Americans with any form of internet access was just a fraction of the population. I am finding varying figures online, but they seem to hover at <15% of the population of the United States. Given the costs of that access and the costs of the computers. It was both a very small and a very specific type of person that was accessing Usenet at the time.
  - dredmorbius 7y ago
    I've been digging up numbers over the past few years. In 1980 there were 2 million computers in the US, doubling every 2 years. By 2000, there were 168 million computers, only 6 doublings rather than the 10 the 1980 estimate would have provided. That suggests about 16 million users as of 1990, possibly 24-32 million by 1992. As of 1995, total worldwide Internet usage (then largely in the US, though also Europe) was 16 millions. As of 2019 it's 4.5 billions. https://www.internetworldstats.com/emarketing.htm https://www.internetworldstats.com/emarketing.htm (From an earlier HN comment: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21783812 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21783812) Brian Reid's Usenet Usenet usage reports as of 1988 reported about 140k active Usenet users, from a population-with-access of about 880,000. Usenet was small. (Some of these stats also cited in in one of the links (which I wrote) from TFA.)
    - 300bps 7y ago
      Yeah I got my first modem in 1985 (hence the username). Anyone outside of academia was all BBS, not Internet back then. I’m shocked to hear Usenet even had 140k active users in 1988.
jwing 7y ago
"Eternal September" is slang that originated on Usenet to describe just this phenomenon. You can read more here if you like: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eternal_September https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eternal_September
- ghaff 7y ago
  That was probably the beginning of the end even if it held on for quite a while after that. (And a lot of other changes were happening at the same time.) Especially outside the alt. hierarchy, which was always more of a free for all, real names usually associated with university, company, or government email addresses and a culture built around a certain exclusivity tended to keep flame wars and and other disruption to a manageable level.
- tunesmith 7y ago
  That was the original "Me Too" movement. I remember all those Me Too posts popping up everywhere. (AOL users were notorious for block quoting long parts of text they agreed with, and reposting with Me Too! above. It's like "This." but less hip, if that's possible.)
somesortofsystm 7y ago
USENET became irrelevant the day the OS vendors decided to include a web browser in their OS distributions. If they'd included an NNTP reader, we'd be still using USENET to this day.
- ZiiS 7y ago
  IE3 came bundled with "Microsoft Internet Mail and News" later "Outlook Express" with full NNTP support.
  - somesortofsystm 7y ago
    >IE3 Yeah, exactly. By that time, the web hype knob was already at max level.
    - jaywalk 7y ago
      Disagree. The Internet was still mostly a curiosity when IE3 was around, but people were becoming aware of it. I'd say things really took off in the IE5 timeframe.
  - smhenderson 7y ago
    Not sure what version they're talking about on this page[0] but it's dated 1994.Netscape had NNTP support as far back as then apparently... [0] http://home.mcom.com/home/guided_tour/news.html http://home.mcom.com/home/guided_tour/news.html
    - somesortofsystm 7y ago
      '94 is mid-web ignition, imho. The point is, the web ate all the other info-sharing protocols, except for mail (which does look worse than ever, but still works) .. and as a result its near-impossible for a new user to easily share their content from their own computer to the rest of the world ..
      - 7y ago
mfer 7y ago
Technology both represents and influences our culture. For example, usenet and other forms of Internet posting in the past were more long form. They types of thinking and discussion were different. These days it's much shorter leading to shallower comments. Thinking in longer form vs short form influences us. Usenet itself may be a thing of the past but some of the useful elements can be reincorporated going forward.
endorphone 7y ago
Usenet always had a dramatically diverse group of participants. However each peer -- how you connected, likely through your university -- had an authoritative position over participants, and was the singular authenticating partner[1]. So if you were a shitbag, so to speak, your university could do something about it, which can be as simple as removing usenet access which left one with no alternatives. And given that you only had one usenet account, any newsgroup could ban you without one being able to just pop up again. It started to fall apart when the nodes on the network included every ISP, etc. When people who have no authority over the participants, and no real punitive avenue if they broke conventions, it started to fall apart. Even if you got banned from that node, there were thousands of other nodes to jump to and continue your abuse. [1] When you went to some university, the account they provided you was your authentication on Usenet. You had that single account and it was your sole key to the network.
- Majromax 7y ago
  > When people who have no authority over the participants, I don't think it's exactly a matter of authority. A university wouldn't care about someone merely being a troll in Usenet; they'd have to be breaking a law or otherwise acting egregiously to attract disciplinary action. Instead, I think it's a matter of reputation. A smaller community is one where everyone is likely to be familiar with everyone else on an individual basis, and a community with a technical barrier to access imposes a transition cost on someone wanting to take their ball and go elsewhere. In my opinion, both of these things act together to change one's target audience and engagement style. In such small Usenet-style communities, a user is speaking to that community at large. In larger forums with less individual reputation and lower barriers to access, the forum instead becomes more of a performance place: people are speaking to a subset of like-minded supporters. Twitter is a great example of a very large forum with a near zero-barrier, where I can shout at an adversary while speaking to like-minded people.
- luckylion 7y ago
  > Usenet always had a dramatically diverse group of participants. How so? It was universities, tech people in corporations and a few folks that just had PCs as a hobby. In short: upper middle class (because those things are expensive), educated (because it really wasn't as simple as it is today) and with time on their hands. There may been some diversity in political leanings, but on the fundamentals, education, social class etc?
krilly 7y ago
4chan partially solved this problem by using inside knowledge to identify 'newf*gs' and push them out. Triforce, fingerboxes, etc. The weirdly complex boardculture was self sustaining because new people couldn't even keep up with the conversation without lurking for a year or so. And then of course, the newcomers started taking the abrasive and politically incorrect culture at face value.
- jandrese 7y ago
  My impression is that 4chan did a Mother Night on itself. They started with ironic Hitler memes and edgy teenage shit, but eventually people took that seriously and all that were left were edgelords and nazis.
  - krapp 7y ago
    I know it's comforting to believe that there were never any real racists on 4chan until relatively recently, and that it was all naive shitposters and kids making edgy memes, but it's far more likely that actual racists have always hidden behind the pretense of 4chan's ironic culture and anonymity, and have always been active there.
    - 83hajfjeijg 7y ago
      racists, racists everywhere! go to a /pol/ meetup and get back to me - it's still edgelords and trolls. they just got a lot better at trolling and exploiting mainstream media for lulz
    - jandrese 7y ago
      In the olden days you could read between the lines to see people mocking the very culture their post was supposedly glorifying. Later this nuance disappeared as the board was overrun with actual Neo-Nazis.
  - kick 7y ago
    4chan still has a lot of good boards. People have an impression that 4chan is exclusively /pol/ and /b/, but a lot of it's fantastic.
wil421 7y ago
Everyone thinks there was a golden age in a lot of platforms where a small group enjoyed a short amount of time together. When I started lurking around HN in 2010 they were saying the same thing, Reddit was identical, AOL, Internet forums, Usenet, BBS etc...
- modo_mario 7y ago
  I think they're not wrong either. I was rather invested in what used to be a small subreddit that is now huge. It's a shitshow now sometimes but back then most of the posters were regulars and could recognized each-other. Moderating was a lot easier and context and what have you could be taken into account. I know i could trust one person's expertise, that another often would take a specific stance, another that was always an asshole but very careful to stay on the edge of getting banned and what was technically allowed generally got downvoted. There was space for public meta discussions about sources (not)accepted by the community that actually had an impact, etc Experiencing the transition has made me value small communities much much more.
  - RubberMullet 7y ago
    The Evaporative Cooling Effect[0]. [0] https://blogs.cornell.edu/info2040/2015/10/14/the-evaporative-cooling-effect-in-social-network/ https://blogs.cornell.edu/info2040/2015/10/14/the-evaporativ...
    - tapland 7y ago
      Thank you for that! It's what I've been trying to word regarding some subreddits back in 2011-2012
  - rdiddly 7y ago
    Small communities - you might as well say community communities. Not picking on you, just agreeing, to the point of asserting that "community" can't exist past a certain scale. Dunbar's number and all that.
  - jcims 7y ago
fallous 7y ago
It was less the barrier to entry than a combination of limitations in the rate of new members in a subgroup (you may get burst of new members in September but the total number added over the course of a year was manageable) and a process of cultural (with regards to expectations of behavior and discourse) assimilation, made easier by the fact that there was no prior cultural expectations on the part of new members. Remember that usenet newsgroups numbers in the tens of thousands, usually focused on a very specific interest. New members joined either to gain knowledge, be among those who share an interest, or occasionally to troll. Trolls were easy enough to add to .ignore files, and the others had a desire for the benefits the newsgroup offered and thus were inclined to respect whatever rules were in place in order to receive that benefit. The general model of a usenet group is echoed on the web with message boards, absent the unified means of distribution and discovery.
DanBC 7y ago
> of course you'll end up with a group that's more or less self-policing ...don't forget that the supposed golden age of Usenet included a bunch of assholes, and that you could usually call or email their sysadmin at their university / work and get that person to have a quiet word.
ArtWomb 7y ago
For pure institutional memory from primary source. I went to the archives and read a lot of the posts on comp.infosystems.www.announce circa 1990-1994. Origins of Mosaic. Glory days at CERN. And that day had its share of cranks. Perhaps 25% of the populations ;) But even the cranks had a certain elan. The made up private research centers in the email sigs were optimistic: Paragon Institute of Cyber Consciousness, and such Whats interesting about IRC, with xdcc peer to peer file transfers, it already acted as a distributed peer brokerage back in the mid 1990s. Trying to bootstrap a laer like that today requires enormous overhead
Giornito 7y ago
Golden age often comes from a nostalgia driven perspective of what life seemed to be at some point. In many cases it involves individuals who had similar views and beliefs which made them feel more comfortable around each other. In other cases, it is just the brain looking for things that made someone feel good, even if it only accounted for a short picture of what the good/service/experience really was.
shadowgovt 7y ago
I think you are correct, and inconveniently, the principle doesn't apply to only USENET. The public square serves a vital purpose in public discourse and society at large, but it isn't actually where great ideas are born; it's where they're tested. Traditionally, salons and small groups are where great ideas are born and polished before being presented to a public. Otherwise, you're fighting a low signal-to-noise ratio that hampers motion.
- dredmorbius 7y ago
  Warrens and Plazas. Both are necessary. Neither is superior. They are complements. I'd hived the idea from elsewhere, and this piece discusses it in the context of trying to form a new community (largely failed), but the ideas may interest: https://old.reddit.com/r/MKaTH/comments/4ntf5p/public_private_warrens_plazas/ https://old.reddit.com/r/MKaTH/comments/4ntf5p/public_privat...
  - dredmorbius 7y ago
    Almost certainly from Ribbonfarm: https://www.ribbonfarm.com/2010/10/27/warrens-plazas-and-the-edge-of-legibility/ https://www.ribbonfarm.com/2010/10/27/warrens-plazas-and-the... The Evaporative Cooling Effect is also a useful notion. http://blog.bumblebeelabs.com/social-software-sundays-2-the-evaporative-cooling-effect http://blog.bumblebeelabs.com/social-software-sundays-2-the-... Archive as site seems down: https://web.archive.org/web/20101012105003/http://blog.bumblebeelabs.com/social-software-sundays-2-the-evaporative-cooling-effect/ https://web.archive.org/web/20101012105003/http://blog.bumbl...
- javajosh 7y ago
  What is the modern equivalent of a salon? Coffee shop?
  - hairofadog 7y ago
    I think this forum right here is pretty close to the modern equivalent of a salon.
kazinator 7y ago
> I'm too young to have been a part of Usenet. Usenet exists. I read daily and post regularly. Just came here after a little Usenet session.
- u801e 7y ago
  I would, except the groups I used to post in are essentially dead.
  - taborj 7y ago
    I've run into this as well. On the flip side, they were only "alive" because people -- like me, like you -- posted to them. So they're dead, but like Lazarus they can be resurrected by commanding them to be alive, through the simple mechanic of using them, and encouraging others to come participate.
    - floren 7y ago
      I'm up for it! Where do you like to post?
      - taborj 7y ago
        I frequent alt.ham.radio, comp.sys.cbm and comp.os.vms (which is quite active). I lurk on some others that are generally used for notifications, such as alt.bbs (and alt.bbs.ads). I'm always up for more newgroups to hold my interest. Another poster mentioned comp.misc is active, so I'll probably start checking that one out as well.
        floren 7y ago
        Thanks, I've subscribed to the ham radio groups (don't really do anything with commodore or VMS [anymore]). Do check out comp.misc, it's got some regulars and things can be a bit curmudgeonly but it's quite active and not spammy.
    - pferde 7y ago
technofiend 7y ago
Post-golden age Usenet: see Eternal September [1] on Wikipedia. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eternal_September https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eternal_September The zeitgeist definitely changed as the general public gained access. Prior to wide availability conversations were close to Hacker News posts in that people were mindful to be constructive and meaningfully contribute to conversations. But that was only in the macro - there were still pockets of poor behavior and even groups dedicated to different standards, notably the alt tree was meant to be looser and groups like alt.flame were no-holds-barred. Similar to modern-day memes, one of the alt.flame threads inspired a tshirt (which I still have, somewhere) sporting the quote "Go jump in a goddamn volcano, you f.... cave newt." And like memes of today you need some cultural literacy to get the reference, much less for it to be funny.
- amyjess 7y ago
  And keep in mind that HN is only able to be the way it is because of constant, vigilant moderation. The Internet has simply grown too large over the past couple of decades for any unmoderated public space to not be taken over by people who don't care about community norms, individual bad actors, organized invasions, and psyops. Usenet could handle the first two in small doses: people who don't care about community norms will eventually learn or leave, bad actors will get bored of trolling, and persistent individuals can be killfiled. But both of those two flooding in in large groups can kill a community. If bad actors harass and attack every new person every time they post something, the community can't grow. and enough people in a community who disregard the existing norms will simply cause the Overton Window to shift, establishing a new normal. And a killfile isn't a large-scale solution: when you have to have a triple-digit killfile just to get past the noise and actually see the useful discussion, the community is dead. Usenet on the other hand has never been resilient against coordinated activity. The Meow Wars were one of the most deleterious things to ever happen to Usenet back in the day, and I'm sure it contributed a lot to people abandoning Usenet for moderated web forums. Now that the Internet has had 20 more years to further develop invasion techniques, and the invading forces are even larger and more malignant than ever, unmoderated communities can't survive unless they're invisible. Even heavily-moderated communities have trouble handling incoming raids from 4chan and 8chan. And then you have the subtle psyops, groups stealthily infiltrating others in order to promote an agenda. Imagine a coordinated effort to have new people join a newsgroup for a TV show and slowly push the Overton Window towards normalizing antisemitism. This is hard to detect and root out even in a place with moderators (see: Stormfront's psyop in /r/videos), and unmoderated spaces are completely helpless against this kind of assault.
anyonecancode 7y ago
"In my estimation, the larger and broader a group is, the more it'll approximate human culture and interaction as a whole. It shouldn't be a surprise when the negative parts of those things (e.g. war, strife, hatred) emerge, just as much as the positive things (peace, fellowship, love)." Yes and no, I think. Physical space has some constraints that counter this in a way online spaces don't. Take a place like NYC, for instance, where there are so many people, from so many parts of the world, that it arguably begins to "approximate human culture and interaction as a whole." What you see here is that people start to subdivide the space and agree on expected behavior -- in public spaces, like the subway, people by and large try to reduce interactions. Then there are public spaces that are pseudo-private, like bars or cafes or restaurants, but each have their own understood rules -- at a bar you can start to talk up a stranger, at a restaurant you don't just walk to a random table and join in a conversation. There are also many private spaces -- apartments, or your own room in an apartment shared with roommates. Contrast that with the typical online space, where it's not just that there are lots of people, but also no constraints. It's the equivalent of going on to a subway and yelling at someone about politics... I don't think the problem with the modern internet is scale so much as a failure to build some constraints into its design. Everything is public at a very loud volume.
- Psyladine 7y ago
  >Take a place like NYC, for instance, where there are so many people, from so many parts of the world, that it arguably begins to "approximate human culture and interaction as a whole." Except people are a product of context, so putting them into a new context creates a new breed, the new yorker, of which no human being aspires to.
  - anyonecancode 7y ago
    Substitute any decently large physical collection of people for NYC. Same overall point I was trying to make applies.
- jasode 7y ago
  >I don't think the problem with the modern internet is scale so much as a failure to build some constraints into its design. Can you speak more concretely what you mean here? Are you talking about technical "constraints" into protocols such as "http" or "TCPIP"? Or constraints into DNS? Or constraints on HTML markup language? What would an "internet technical architecture designed to prevent negativity" actually look like? Is there an example repo on github or a computer science research paper showing the algorithms that would satisfy this ideal?
rdiddly 7y ago
Throw in "commerce" (on both lists)!
alexgmcm 7y ago
I learned Usenet in 2009 as a Uni freshman because the University blocked p2p software and monitored http traffic to stop people downloading loads but for some reason my Usenet usage wasn't detected. I mean that's over a decade ago now, but it seemed like it was still pretty big back then - albeit just for piracy.
flyinghamster 7y ago
Spot-on. I was on Usenet for a bit in the 1980s, and loved it. After I was out of school, though, it was effectively unavailable to me until internet access opened up in the 1990s. In the meantime, though, there was a similar but smaller network that operated in a similar fashion: FidoNet's Echomail system. For younger readers, FidoNet was a network of dialup BBS systems (usually single-user) with a central list of nodes distributed weekly. Echomail was an add-on that worked in much the same manner as Usenet; a message posted in a forum would be propagated to other systems sharing that forum. Strictly speaking, both still exist today, but like Usenet, FidoNet is a shadow of itself, and most FidoNet nodes are using the internet instead of dialup modems these days. I recall FidoNet having a lot fewer problems with spam and bad actors than Usenet, though, mostly because troublesome nodes could and did get de-listed.
drpgq 7y ago
There's probably something to the average user IQ declining towards the overall population mean as a site becomes more popular.
- bmgxyz 7y ago
  You may be right, but for what it's worth I caution you against equating being early and being smart.
  - yoz-y 7y ago
    Also intelligent people can be toxic, unwelcoming and plain rude too.
DrScientist 7y ago
I remember back in the early 1990's as the web took off people bemoaning the fact that the oiks from AOL were bringing the tone down. Back then studying for a PhD was almost the defacto minimum requirement to have access. Few undergrads outside computer science had access. As an illustration, back then, once I got into a usenet discussion with some called Martin Rees ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Martin_Rees https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Martin_Rees ) on the nature of science.
rubsh99 7y ago
IMO humans keep developing ornate epistemologies that have nothing to do with utilitarian needs of the public, and keep ramming them down the masses throats. An open literal trade network of materials is one thing. Deference to the godheadeds romantic notions that a minority rule of that trade network is proper order is nonsense. It’s WWE as a political platform. Yet at scale we keep deferring to the romantic until the utilitarian aspect is kept from the growing masses, we refuse to accept the literal growing population, so a new romance comes along to expand access to utilitarian life and then it’s gamed over a generation until... well you get the point. Chimp tribes have been observed killing their alphas. Utilitarian life became more normalized for the tribe at large. Humans might consider figuratively doing the same. Emotionally disempowering such nonsense. It does nothing to limit our capacity for great ideas. Einstein was not an Alexander the Great literally. We need to be modeling neurons, which is exactly what rule of law/religion/monarch does so let’s not get all “oh that’s scary mind control”, we’ve long accepted it’s required without having the science to see how literal that truth is, to disempower unaccountable empire building. Personal property is one thing. Unaccountable manipulation of social agency at scale is inequality, and despite many of us here making bank in tech, the daily cadence should be in our control as individuals. And it’s pretty clear to me the messaging has effectively made it so it’s not. Talking heads on MSNBC going on about socialist death squads, keeping the ship on course. Then Fox News of course. Don’t look behind the curtain! I saw this in the 80s/90s too. Who is all in office still? What a shock the narrative isn’t feeling much different 30 years later.
LaGrange 7y ago
> I'm too young to have been a part of Usenet, but it seems to me that there's no good way to recreate the space described in the article without keeping most people out. Hahahah no. So the biggest problem of usenet wasn't really the throngs of the "Eternal September" people (I hate the expression, btw). It was that nearly every Usenet group had its resident troll with too much time on their hands and an extreme obsession. So you'd post about, say, plans to build a 2nd railway track between Chachówek and Radom, and you'd get some dude go at you about how useless that would be and how improving transport between Warsaw and Radom would destroy the public infrastructure of the entire country. This is not theoretical, I've stumbled on usenet archives from _a few years ago_ recently and have seen the dude still going. And it was everywhere. Operating systems? Some journalist going off about how Mac's better than Linux in Every. Single. Thread. General "whine about the world" group? Some random libertarian to tell you that actually it's you who sucks. It wasn't many people, but they were active enough to ruin everyone's day. You could mute them, but unless you muted every thread that included them (and nearly every did) you'd still be exposed to them. And, because I happened to meet a few of them personally: if you further restrict the space by means, credentials and "interest", all you're going to get is a higher concentration of these people.
- pmoriarty 7y ago
  "So the biggest problem of usenet ... was that nearly every Usenet group had its resident troll with too much time on their hands and an extreme obsession." This is what kill files were for, which every half-decent news reader of the time had (something that's still lacking in most contemporary web forums). So trolling wasn't really a problem, because you could easily filter out the trolls. Same with spam, especially once Bayesian spam filtering was invented. No, the real challenge that Usenet faced was the World-Wide Web. People were enamoured with the new shiny, with hypertext, and with embedded pictures and styling, which Usenet did not have. Web forums were also a lot easier to use. You didn't need to download or learn to use a news client. All you needed was a web browser, which everyone already had and knew how to use. Also, web search results on your topic of interest usually pointed you to forums, not to Usenet newsgroups. If Usenet was better integrated in to the web, it might have stood a chance.
zouhair 7y ago
> I'm too young to have been a part of Usenet Indeed you are[0] [0]: https://timeline.com/flame-wars-early-cyberbullying-1c509aa5ffad?gi=13e0b5bb82f7 https://timeline.com/flame-wars-early-cyberbullying-1c509aa5...
- zozbot234 7y ago
  These conflicts didn't really matter because nobody used real names anyway. Online identities were very much expected to be disposable, if necessary. Real names and real-world reputation wpuld only enter the picture in more "serious" spaces where moderation actions and social expectations were correspondingly a lot higher. Modern social media merged the "real names only" expectation of the most academic Usenet groups with the conflict-orientation of alt.flame.flame.flame and www.4chan.org. Disaster is the predictable outcome of this, often with non-trivial real-world consequences.
  - zouhair 7y ago
    There were still a lot of flame wars between known people.
dejawu 7y ago
I've been toying with the idea of running some "chatroom experiments" - chatrooms each with different functional gimmicks, one of which would be capping the user count allowed in each channel. I think reddit's robin [0] was onto something really cool and I wish they'd explored it more in-depth. [0] https://www.reddit.com/r/joinrobin/comments/6398yp/what_was_robin/ https://www.reddit.com/r/joinrobin/comments/6398yp/what_was_...
Animats 7y ago
There's no good way to recreate the space described in the article without keeping most people out. Right. Anonymity plus the ability to create an unlimited number of accounts guarantees spam. Originally, to have a USENET address you had to have an account on a time-sharing computer of moderate size, or run your own node. Both were hard to create in bulk, which kept the noise level down. What can we use now? Facebook real names? RealID? Proof of work?
toohotatopic 7y ago
>there's no good way to recreate the space described in the article without keeping most people out. I have to disagree. You don't have to keep them out, you just have to provide an option to mark and filter them. Then, it's possible to see the full spectrum of comments and interact with everybody. However, if discussions become too big, the filters can be used to remove the noise. Creating such a system will be brutally eye-opening for some people but it will inevitably come. The minimum viable product will be the Chinese social graph. If China plays its cards right, they have the tool to overcome Eternal September.
vkou 7y ago
> In my estimation, the larger and broader a group is, the more it'll approximate human culture and interaction as a whole. It shouldn't be a surprise when the negative parts of those things (e.g. war, strife, hatred) emerge, just as much as the positive things (peace, fellowship, love). Given how vicious and downright nasty politics can get in incredibly homogeneous small towns/organizations/communities, I don't think the size of a community has all that much to do with this. As soon as everyone is not friends with everyone, people start behaving in incredibly shitty ways. If the community does not police that behaviour, the resulting interactions become quite visibly toxic. If the community does police that behaviour, then they are still toxic, but in a less-visible manner.
dredmorbius 7y ago
In large part agreed. People see Usenet and the wide-open access to all. What they fail to see, especially for its crucial first formative decade (1980-1990) was the very formidable gates that did exist: institutional access through selective research universities, and a handful of tech firms and government agencies. It was a bit like Disneyland's legendary E-Ticket -- once inside the gates you could wander freely and sample at will. But there was a price to be paid to enter: technical ability, inclination, and most of all access to the institutions. Those institutions also provided a brake on some of the worse forms of abusive behaviour -- individuals could be identified, sanctioned, and removed from the system. The small number of site administrators (initially literally a handful, later still capable of fitting within a single conference room or lecture hall) also reflected a balance of centralisation and decentralisation which seemed to mostly work. Much of what was good and bad about Usenet derived from these gatekeepers, and that is a point very often missed in subsequent treatments or discussions.
- jfalcon 7y ago
  Don't forget that Usenet itself has its own safeguards as in the news.admins and the newsgroup moderators should that particular newsgroup have it enabled. Otherwise, it was and still is the wild west in terms of content and quality.

by bmgxyz 7y ago

giancarlostoro 7y ago

It's funny because I think this is true of most online communities I've joined. People will say on here things like "HN has changed now that its big" or "HN is not how it used to be", and I'm sure some would say the same of 4chan as well, and reddit, and probably even Facebook.

prepend 7y ago
4chan was once pretty funny. I remember when they did fun things like hack Time polls [0] before they got too big and went off the rails. [0] https://techcrunch.com/2009/04/27/time-magazine-throws-up-its-hands-as-it-gets-pwned-by-4chan/ https://techcrunch.com/2009/04/27/time-magazine-throws-up-it...
- giancarlostoro 7y ago
  This was around the time I left 4chan, when the gore stuff got out of control. The snuff films were being posted and other nasty things.
iso1631 7y ago
Usenet never survived Eternal September https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eternal_September https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eternal_September
- crankylinuxuser 7y ago
  No, it never survived the late 90's campaigns against the RIAA trying to stop piracy at the ISP level. Thats when all the big ISPs yanked support, especially after alt.binaries was sharing damn near everything. And they were big bandwidth sinks due to the distributed model usenet has, so it was easy for ISPs to yank the carpet and look at the immediate gains.
  - ape4 7y ago
    Yeah, no binaries would be a start for a new Usenet
    - crankylinuxuser 7y ago
      The problem is that binaries are transferred in a non-binary manner. Base64 was the preferred way. Except it was also used to push images back and forth as well for pertinent conversations. For any method of communication, you can transfer content that someone else tries to prevent.
      - chalst 7y ago
        Upper bounds on per-user bandwidth would work. Implementing this is nontrivial, but it's an essentially easier problem than spam.
        kick 7y ago
        Who cares about piracy? It exists over HTTP, too, and in a far greater volume than a modern USENET-equivalent could ever hope to achieve, and it's not like ISPs need to be sucked up to anymore: they've already taken their ball and went home on this matter, proverbially-speaking.
inviromentalist 7y ago
The cycle- >New users, new ideas. > Mods ban these new ideas because they don't comply with existing culture > Mods get heavy with their justice >Core users are mistaken for newbies, and face mod wrath > Core users migrate to new websites Guess where HN is on this timeline
- microcolonel 7y ago
  HN is kinda dying as a community, though moderation isn't the whole story. There are also some long-standing bugs, and misbehaviours of the voting system. Being able to downvote replies without any refutation, to me, seems like a massive mistake; it just teaches people not to say anything interesting, because they won't get a response anyway, even when they're wrong in a subtle or interesting way. The formatting available to users is maybe close to the right amount, but the implementation is broken (for example, it doesn't end URLs when it sees >, so you end up with broken URLs when you go out of your way to protect them). It could probably also do with proper first-class block quotations, people end up putting them in <pre> blocks or italics, and it's not always clear.
  - 300bps 7y ago
    HN is kinda dying as a community As someone who’s been on HN for about 9 years, it’s funny to read this. I don’t see how it’s gotten any worse during my time here. I think HN’s community is fantastic but you either get it or you don’t. I really enjoy the signal to noise ratio and I’m happy that silly comments and jokes are downvoted or moderated. I read HN with showdead on and personally I think the moderation is spot-on.
    - microcolonel 7y ago
      I get HN's community, and I enjoy it. That said, I often think twice about posting anything meaningful; I know I'll get a bit frustrated when I put myself out there in good faith, and people have nothing to say, but downvote anyway. I know that some very bright and lovely people have been totally turned off of the place by this, and this behaviour of the system doesn't really help anything. > I read HN with showdead on and personally I think the moderation is spot-on. I too use showdead, I think the moderation is generally good (though I think at times I've been handled somewhat unfairly). The times when there's a dead post that I don't think should be dead, it's usually from a person who has worn out his welcome with other comments. This is why I say moderation isn't the main problem, contrary to the parent reply.

kingste 7y ago

I am old enough to remember Usenet. All you needed was an Internet connection, a usenet client, and access to a usenet server. Most ISPs provided usenet access just like they provided an e-mail address at the time. So it was no more difficult to be involved in usenet than it was to have e-mail. In modern terms, usenet would be reddit if it was distributed (so anyone willing to set-up their own server could run a node and let people connect to it). But for end-users it was as simple as having an e-mail account and a client application on your computer.

WesleyLivesay 7y ago
During the "Golden Age" of Usenet, which I believe many people to consider to be pre-Eternal September, the number of Americans with any form of internet access was just a fraction of the population. I am finding varying figures online, but they seem to hover at <15% of the population of the United States. Given the costs of that access and the costs of the computers. It was both a very small and a very specific type of person that was accessing Usenet at the time.
- dredmorbius 7y ago
  I've been digging up numbers over the past few years. In 1980 there were 2 million computers in the US, doubling every 2 years. By 2000, there were 168 million computers, only 6 doublings rather than the 10 the 1980 estimate would have provided. That suggests about 16 million users as of 1990, possibly 24-32 million by 1992. As of 1995, total worldwide Internet usage (then largely in the US, though also Europe) was 16 millions. As of 2019 it's 4.5 billions. https://www.internetworldstats.com/emarketing.htm https://www.internetworldstats.com/emarketing.htm (From an earlier HN comment: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21783812 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21783812) Brian Reid's Usenet Usenet usage reports as of 1988 reported about 140k active Usenet users, from a population-with-access of about 880,000. Usenet was small. (Some of these stats also cited in in one of the links (which I wrote) from TFA.)
  - 300bps 7y ago
    Yeah I got my first modem in 1985 (hence the username). Anyone outside of academia was all BBS, not Internet back then. I’m shocked to hear Usenet even had 140k active users in 1988.

jwing 7y ago

"Eternal September" is slang that originated on Usenet to describe just this phenomenon. You can read more here if you like: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eternal_September https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eternal_September

ghaff 7y ago
That was probably the beginning of the end even if it held on for quite a while after that. (And a lot of other changes were happening at the same time.) Especially outside the alt. hierarchy, which was always more of a free for all, real names usually associated with university, company, or government email addresses and a culture built around a certain exclusivity tended to keep flame wars and and other disruption to a manageable level.
tunesmith 7y ago
That was the original "Me Too" movement. I remember all those Me Too posts popping up everywhere. (AOL users were notorious for block quoting long parts of text they agreed with, and reposting with Me Too! above. It's like "This." but less hip, if that's possible.)

somesortofsystm 7y ago

USENET became irrelevant the day the OS vendors decided to include a web browser in their OS distributions. If they'd included an NNTP reader, we'd be still using USENET to this day.

ZiiS 7y ago
IE3 came bundled with "Microsoft Internet Mail and News" later "Outlook Express" with full NNTP support.
- somesortofsystm 7y ago
  >IE3 Yeah, exactly. By that time, the web hype knob was already at max level.
  - jaywalk 7y ago
    Disagree. The Internet was still mostly a curiosity when IE3 was around, but people were becoming aware of it. I'd say things really took off in the IE5 timeframe.
- smhenderson 7y ago
  Not sure what version they're talking about on this page[0] but it's dated 1994.Netscape had NNTP support as far back as then apparently... [0] http://home.mcom.com/home/guided_tour/news.html http://home.mcom.com/home/guided_tour/news.html
  - somesortofsystm 7y ago
    '94 is mid-web ignition, imho. The point is, the web ate all the other info-sharing protocols, except for mail (which does look worse than ever, but still works) .. and as a result its near-impossible for a new user to easily share their content from their own computer to the rest of the world ..
    - 7y ago

mfer 7y ago

Technology both represents and influences our culture. For example, usenet and other forms of Internet posting in the past were more long form. They types of thinking and discussion were different. These days it's much shorter leading to shallower comments. Thinking in longer form vs short form influences us. Usenet itself may be a thing of the past but some of the useful elements can be reincorporated going forward.

endorphone 7y ago

Usenet always had a dramatically diverse group of participants. However each peer -- how you connected, likely through your university -- had an authoritative position over participants, and was the singular authenticating partner[1]. So if you were a shitbag, so to speak, your university could do something about it, which can be as simple as removing usenet access which left one with no alternatives. And given that you only had one usenet account, any newsgroup could ban you without one being able to just pop up again. It started to fall apart when the nodes on the network included every ISP, etc. When people who have no authority over the participants, and no real punitive avenue if they broke conventions, it started to fall apart. Even if you got banned from that node, there were thousands of other nodes to jump to and continue your abuse. [1] When you went to some university, the account they provided you was your authentication on Usenet. You had that single account and it was your sole key to the network.

Majromax 7y ago
> When people who have no authority over the participants, I don't think it's exactly a matter of authority. A university wouldn't care about someone merely being a troll in Usenet; they'd have to be breaking a law or otherwise acting egregiously to attract disciplinary action. Instead, I think it's a matter of reputation. A smaller community is one where everyone is likely to be familiar with everyone else on an individual basis, and a community with a technical barrier to access imposes a transition cost on someone wanting to take their ball and go elsewhere. In my opinion, both of these things act together to change one's target audience and engagement style. In such small Usenet-style communities, a user is speaking to that community at large. In larger forums with less individual reputation and lower barriers to access, the forum instead becomes more of a performance place: people are speaking to a subset of like-minded supporters. Twitter is a great example of a very large forum with a near zero-barrier, where I can shout at an adversary while speaking to like-minded people.
luckylion 7y ago
> Usenet always had a dramatically diverse group of participants. How so? It was universities, tech people in corporations and a few folks that just had PCs as a hobby. In short: upper middle class (because those things are expensive), educated (because it really wasn't as simple as it is today) and with time on their hands. There may been some diversity in political leanings, but on the fundamentals, education, social class etc?

krilly 7y ago

4chan partially solved this problem by using inside knowledge to identify 'newf*gs' and push them out. Triforce, fingerboxes, etc. The weirdly complex boardculture was self sustaining because new people couldn't even keep up with the conversation without lurking for a year or so. And then of course, the newcomers started taking the abrasive and politically incorrect culture at face value.

jandrese 7y ago
My impression is that 4chan did a Mother Night on itself. They started with ironic Hitler memes and edgy teenage shit, but eventually people took that seriously and all that were left were edgelords and nazis.
- krapp 7y ago
  I know it's comforting to believe that there were never any real racists on 4chan until relatively recently, and that it was all naive shitposters and kids making edgy memes, but it's far more likely that actual racists have always hidden behind the pretense of 4chan's ironic culture and anonymity, and have always been active there.
  - 83hajfjeijg 7y ago
    racists, racists everywhere! go to a /pol/ meetup and get back to me - it's still edgelords and trolls. they just got a lot better at trolling and exploiting mainstream media for lulz
  - jandrese 7y ago
    In the olden days you could read between the lines to see people mocking the very culture their post was supposedly glorifying. Later this nuance disappeared as the board was overrun with actual Neo-Nazis.
- kick 7y ago
  4chan still has a lot of good boards. People have an impression that 4chan is exclusively /pol/ and /b/, but a lot of it's fantastic.

wil421 7y ago

Everyone thinks there was a golden age in a lot of platforms where a small group enjoyed a short amount of time together. When I started lurking around HN in 2010 they were saying the same thing, Reddit was identical, AOL, Internet forums, Usenet, BBS etc...

modo_mario 7y ago
I think they're not wrong either. I was rather invested in what used to be a small subreddit that is now huge. It's a shitshow now sometimes but back then most of the posters were regulars and could recognized each-other. Moderating was a lot easier and context and what have you could be taken into account. I know i could trust one person's expertise, that another often would take a specific stance, another that was always an asshole but very careful to stay on the edge of getting banned and what was technically allowed generally got downvoted. There was space for public meta discussions about sources (not)accepted by the community that actually had an impact, etc Experiencing the transition has made me value small communities much much more.
- RubberMullet 7y ago
  The Evaporative Cooling Effect[0]. [0] https://blogs.cornell.edu/info2040/2015/10/14/the-evaporative-cooling-effect-in-social-network/ https://blogs.cornell.edu/info2040/2015/10/14/the-evaporativ...
  - tapland 7y ago
    Thank you for that! It's what I've been trying to word regarding some subreddits back in 2011-2012
- rdiddly 7y ago
  Small communities - you might as well say community communities. Not picking on you, just agreeing, to the point of asserting that "community" can't exist past a certain scale. Dunbar's number and all that.
- jcims 7y ago

fallous 7y ago

It was less the barrier to entry than a combination of limitations in the rate of new members in a subgroup (you may get burst of new members in September but the total number added over the course of a year was manageable) and a process of cultural (with regards to expectations of behavior and discourse) assimilation, made easier by the fact that there was no prior cultural expectations on the part of new members. Remember that usenet newsgroups numbers in the tens of thousands, usually focused on a very specific interest. New members joined either to gain knowledge, be among those who share an interest, or occasionally to troll. Trolls were easy enough to add to .ignore files, and the others had a desire for the benefits the newsgroup offered and thus were inclined to respect whatever rules were in place in order to receive that benefit. The general model of a usenet group is echoed on the web with message boards, absent the unified means of distribution and discovery.

DanBC 7y ago

> of course you'll end up with a group that's more or less self-policing ...don't forget that the supposed golden age of Usenet included a bunch of assholes, and that you could usually call or email their sysadmin at their university / work and get that person to have a quiet word.

ArtWomb 7y ago

For pure institutional memory from primary source. I went to the archives and read a lot of the posts on comp.infosystems.www.announce circa 1990-1994. Origins of Mosaic. Glory days at CERN. And that day had its share of cranks. Perhaps 25% of the populations ;) But even the cranks had a certain elan. The made up private research centers in the email sigs were optimistic: Paragon Institute of Cyber Consciousness, and such Whats interesting about IRC, with xdcc peer to peer file transfers, it already acted as a distributed peer brokerage back in the mid 1990s. Trying to bootstrap a laer like that today requires enormous overhead

Giornito 7y ago

Golden age often comes from a nostalgia driven perspective of what life seemed to be at some point. In many cases it involves individuals who had similar views and beliefs which made them feel more comfortable around each other. In other cases, it is just the brain looking for things that made someone feel good, even if it only accounted for a short picture of what the good/service/experience really was.

shadowgovt 7y ago

I think you are correct, and inconveniently, the principle doesn't apply to only USENET. The public square serves a vital purpose in public discourse and society at large, but it isn't actually where great ideas are born; it's where they're tested. Traditionally, salons and small groups are where great ideas are born and polished before being presented to a public. Otherwise, you're fighting a low signal-to-noise ratio that hampers motion.

dredmorbius 7y ago
Warrens and Plazas. Both are necessary. Neither is superior. They are complements. I'd hived the idea from elsewhere, and this piece discusses it in the context of trying to form a new community (largely failed), but the ideas may interest: https://old.reddit.com/r/MKaTH/comments/4ntf5p/public_private_warrens_plazas/ https://old.reddit.com/r/MKaTH/comments/4ntf5p/public_privat...
- dredmorbius 7y ago
  Almost certainly from Ribbonfarm: https://www.ribbonfarm.com/2010/10/27/warrens-plazas-and-the-edge-of-legibility/ https://www.ribbonfarm.com/2010/10/27/warrens-plazas-and-the... The Evaporative Cooling Effect is also a useful notion. http://blog.bumblebeelabs.com/social-software-sundays-2-the-evaporative-cooling-effect http://blog.bumblebeelabs.com/social-software-sundays-2-the-... Archive as site seems down: https://web.archive.org/web/20101012105003/http://blog.bumblebeelabs.com/social-software-sundays-2-the-evaporative-cooling-effect/ https://web.archive.org/web/20101012105003/http://blog.bumbl...
javajosh 7y ago
What is the modern equivalent of a salon? Coffee shop?
- hairofadog 7y ago
  I think this forum right here is pretty close to the modern equivalent of a salon.

kazinator 7y ago

> I'm too young to have been a part of Usenet. Usenet exists. I read daily and post regularly. Just came here after a little Usenet session.

u801e 7y ago
I would, except the groups I used to post in are essentially dead.
- taborj 7y ago
  I've run into this as well. On the flip side, they were only "alive" because people -- like me, like you -- posted to them. So they're dead, but like Lazarus they can be resurrected by commanding them to be alive, through the simple mechanic of using them, and encouraging others to come participate.
  - floren 7y ago
    I'm up for it! Where do you like to post?
    - taborj 7y ago
      I frequent alt.ham.radio, comp.sys.cbm and comp.os.vms (which is quite active). I lurk on some others that are generally used for notifications, such as alt.bbs (and alt.bbs.ads). I'm always up for more newgroups to hold my interest. Another poster mentioned comp.misc is active, so I'll probably start checking that one out as well.
      - floren 7y ago
        Thanks, I've subscribed to the ham radio groups (don't really do anything with commodore or VMS [anymore]). Do check out comp.misc, it's got some regulars and things can be a bit curmudgeonly but it's quite active and not spammy.
  - pferde 7y ago

technofiend 7y ago

Post-golden age Usenet: see Eternal September [1] on Wikipedia. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eternal_September https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eternal_September The zeitgeist definitely changed as the general public gained access. Prior to wide availability conversations were close to Hacker News posts in that people were mindful to be constructive and meaningfully contribute to conversations. But that was only in the macro - there were still pockets of poor behavior and even groups dedicated to different standards, notably the alt tree was meant to be looser and groups like alt.flame were no-holds-barred. Similar to modern-day memes, one of the alt.flame threads inspired a tshirt (which I still have, somewhere) sporting the quote "Go jump in a goddamn volcano, you f.... cave newt." And like memes of today you need some cultural literacy to get the reference, much less for it to be funny.

amyjess 7y ago
And keep in mind that HN is only able to be the way it is because of constant, vigilant moderation. The Internet has simply grown too large over the past couple of decades for any unmoderated public space to not be taken over by people who don't care about community norms, individual bad actors, organized invasions, and psyops. Usenet could handle the first two in small doses: people who don't care about community norms will eventually learn or leave, bad actors will get bored of trolling, and persistent individuals can be killfiled. But both of those two flooding in in large groups can kill a community. If bad actors harass and attack every new person every time they post something, the community can't grow. and enough people in a community who disregard the existing norms will simply cause the Overton Window to shift, establishing a new normal. And a killfile isn't a large-scale solution: when you have to have a triple-digit killfile just to get past the noise and actually see the useful discussion, the community is dead. Usenet on the other hand has never been resilient against coordinated activity. The Meow Wars were one of the most deleterious things to ever happen to Usenet back in the day, and I'm sure it contributed a lot to people abandoning Usenet for moderated web forums. Now that the Internet has had 20 more years to further develop invasion techniques, and the invading forces are even larger and more malignant than ever, unmoderated communities can't survive unless they're invisible. Even heavily-moderated communities have trouble handling incoming raids from 4chan and 8chan. And then you have the subtle psyops, groups stealthily infiltrating others in order to promote an agenda. Imagine a coordinated effort to have new people join a newsgroup for a TV show and slowly push the Overton Window towards normalizing antisemitism. This is hard to detect and root out even in a place with moderators (see: Stormfront's psyop in /r/videos), and unmoderated spaces are completely helpless against this kind of assault.

anyonecancode 7y ago

"In my estimation, the larger and broader a group is, the more it'll approximate human culture and interaction as a whole. It shouldn't be a surprise when the negative parts of those things (e.g. war, strife, hatred) emerge, just as much as the positive things (peace, fellowship, love)." Yes and no, I think. Physical space has some constraints that counter this in a way online spaces don't. Take a place like NYC, for instance, where there are so many people, from so many parts of the world, that it arguably begins to "approximate human culture and interaction as a whole." What you see here is that people start to subdivide the space and agree on expected behavior -- in public spaces, like the subway, people by and large try to reduce interactions. Then there are public spaces that are pseudo-private, like bars or cafes or restaurants, but each have their own understood rules -- at a bar you can start to talk up a stranger, at a restaurant you don't just walk to a random table and join in a conversation. There are also many private spaces -- apartments, or your own room in an apartment shared with roommates. Contrast that with the typical online space, where it's not just that there are lots of people, but also no constraints. It's the equivalent of going on to a subway and yelling at someone about politics... I don't think the problem with the modern internet is scale so much as a failure to build some constraints into its design. Everything is public at a very loud volume.

Psyladine 7y ago
>Take a place like NYC, for instance, where there are so many people, from so many parts of the world, that it arguably begins to "approximate human culture and interaction as a whole." Except people are a product of context, so putting them into a new context creates a new breed, the new yorker, of which no human being aspires to.
- anyonecancode 7y ago
  Substitute any decently large physical collection of people for NYC. Same overall point I was trying to make applies.
jasode 7y ago
>I don't think the problem with the modern internet is scale so much as a failure to build some constraints into its design. Can you speak more concretely what you mean here? Are you talking about technical "constraints" into protocols such as "http" or "TCPIP"? Or constraints into DNS? Or constraints on HTML markup language? What would an "internet technical architecture designed to prevent negativity" actually look like? Is there an example repo on github or a computer science research paper showing the algorithms that would satisfy this ideal?

rdiddly 7y ago

Throw in "commerce" (on both lists)!

alexgmcm 7y ago

I learned Usenet in 2009 as a Uni freshman because the University blocked p2p software and monitored http traffic to stop people downloading loads but for some reason my Usenet usage wasn't detected. I mean that's over a decade ago now, but it seemed like it was still pretty big back then - albeit just for piracy.

flyinghamster 7y ago

Spot-on. I was on Usenet for a bit in the 1980s, and loved it. After I was out of school, though, it was effectively unavailable to me until internet access opened up in the 1990s. In the meantime, though, there was a similar but smaller network that operated in a similar fashion: FidoNet's Echomail system. For younger readers, FidoNet was a network of dialup BBS systems (usually single-user) with a central list of nodes distributed weekly. Echomail was an add-on that worked in much the same manner as Usenet; a message posted in a forum would be propagated to other systems sharing that forum. Strictly speaking, both still exist today, but like Usenet, FidoNet is a shadow of itself, and most FidoNet nodes are using the internet instead of dialup modems these days. I recall FidoNet having a lot fewer problems with spam and bad actors than Usenet, though, mostly because troublesome nodes could and did get de-listed.

drpgq 7y ago

There's probably something to the average user IQ declining towards the overall population mean as a site becomes more popular.

bmgxyz 7y ago
You may be right, but for what it's worth I caution you against equating being early and being smart.
- yoz-y 7y ago
  Also intelligent people can be toxic, unwelcoming and plain rude too.

DrScientist 7y ago

I remember back in the early 1990's as the web took off people bemoaning the fact that the oiks from AOL were bringing the tone down. Back then studying for a PhD was almost the defacto minimum requirement to have access. Few undergrads outside computer science had access. As an illustration, back then, once I got into a usenet discussion with some called Martin Rees ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Martin_Rees https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Martin_Rees ) on the nature of science.

rubsh99 7y ago

IMO humans keep developing ornate epistemologies that have nothing to do with utilitarian needs of the public, and keep ramming them down the masses throats. An open literal trade network of materials is one thing. Deference to the godheadeds romantic notions that a minority rule of that trade network is proper order is nonsense. It’s WWE as a political platform. Yet at scale we keep deferring to the romantic until the utilitarian aspect is kept from the growing masses, we refuse to accept the literal growing population, so a new romance comes along to expand access to utilitarian life and then it’s gamed over a generation until... well you get the point. Chimp tribes have been observed killing their alphas. Utilitarian life became more normalized for the tribe at large. Humans might consider figuratively doing the same. Emotionally disempowering such nonsense. It does nothing to limit our capacity for great ideas. Einstein was not an Alexander the Great literally. We need to be modeling neurons, which is exactly what rule of law/religion/monarch does so let’s not get all “oh that’s scary mind control”, we’ve long accepted it’s required without having the science to see how literal that truth is, to disempower unaccountable empire building. Personal property is one thing. Unaccountable manipulation of social agency at scale is inequality, and despite many of us here making bank in tech, the daily cadence should be in our control as individuals. And it’s pretty clear to me the messaging has effectively made it so it’s not. Talking heads on MSNBC going on about socialist death squads, keeping the ship on course. Then Fox News of course. Don’t look behind the curtain! I saw this in the 80s/90s too. Who is all in office still? What a shock the narrative isn’t feeling much different 30 years later.

LaGrange 7y ago

> I'm too young to have been a part of Usenet, but it seems to me that there's no good way to recreate the space described in the article without keeping most people out. Hahahah no. So the biggest problem of usenet wasn't really the throngs of the "Eternal September" people (I hate the expression, btw). It was that nearly every Usenet group had its resident troll with too much time on their hands and an extreme obsession. So you'd post about, say, plans to build a 2nd railway track between Chachówek and Radom, and you'd get some dude go at you about how useless that would be and how improving transport between Warsaw and Radom would destroy the public infrastructure of the entire country. This is not theoretical, I've stumbled on usenet archives from _a few years ago_ recently and have seen the dude still going. And it was everywhere. Operating systems? Some journalist going off about how Mac's better than Linux in Every. Single. Thread. General "whine about the world" group? Some random libertarian to tell you that actually it's you who sucks. It wasn't many people, but they were active enough to ruin everyone's day. You could mute them, but unless you muted every thread that included them (and nearly every did) you'd still be exposed to them. And, because I happened to meet a few of them personally: if you further restrict the space by means, credentials and "interest", all you're going to get is a higher concentration of these people.

pmoriarty 7y ago
"So the biggest problem of usenet ... was that nearly every Usenet group had its resident troll with too much time on their hands and an extreme obsession." This is what kill files were for, which every half-decent news reader of the time had (something that's still lacking in most contemporary web forums). So trolling wasn't really a problem, because you could easily filter out the trolls. Same with spam, especially once Bayesian spam filtering was invented. No, the real challenge that Usenet faced was the World-Wide Web. People were enamoured with the new shiny, with hypertext, and with embedded pictures and styling, which Usenet did not have. Web forums were also a lot easier to use. You didn't need to download or learn to use a news client. All you needed was a web browser, which everyone already had and knew how to use. Also, web search results on your topic of interest usually pointed you to forums, not to Usenet newsgroups. If Usenet was better integrated in to the web, it might have stood a chance.

zouhair 7y ago

> I'm too young to have been a part of Usenet Indeed you are[0] [0]: https://timeline.com/flame-wars-early-cyberbullying-1c509aa5ffad?gi=13e0b5bb82f7 https://timeline.com/flame-wars-early-cyberbullying-1c509aa5...

zozbot234 7y ago
These conflicts didn't really matter because nobody used real names anyway. Online identities were very much expected to be disposable, if necessary. Real names and real-world reputation wpuld only enter the picture in more "serious" spaces where moderation actions and social expectations were correspondingly a lot higher. Modern social media merged the "real names only" expectation of the most academic Usenet groups with the conflict-orientation of alt.flame.flame.flame and www.4chan.org. Disaster is the predictable outcome of this, often with non-trivial real-world consequences.
- zouhair 7y ago
  There were still a lot of flame wars between known people.

dejawu 7y ago

I've been toying with the idea of running some "chatroom experiments" - chatrooms each with different functional gimmicks, one of which would be capping the user count allowed in each channel. I think reddit's robin [0] was onto something really cool and I wish they'd explored it more in-depth. [0] https://www.reddit.com/r/joinrobin/comments/6398yp/what_was_robin/ https://www.reddit.com/r/joinrobin/comments/6398yp/what_was_...

Animats 7y ago

There's no good way to recreate the space described in the article without keeping most people out. Right. Anonymity plus the ability to create an unlimited number of accounts guarantees spam. Originally, to have a USENET address you had to have an account on a time-sharing computer of moderate size, or run your own node. Both were hard to create in bulk, which kept the noise level down. What can we use now? Facebook real names? RealID? Proof of work?

toohotatopic 7y ago

>there's no good way to recreate the space described in the article without keeping most people out. I have to disagree. You don't have to keep them out, you just have to provide an option to mark and filter them. Then, it's possible to see the full spectrum of comments and interact with everybody. However, if discussions become too big, the filters can be used to remove the noise. Creating such a system will be brutally eye-opening for some people but it will inevitably come. The minimum viable product will be the Chinese social graph. If China plays its cards right, they have the tool to overcome Eternal September.

vkou 7y ago

> In my estimation, the larger and broader a group is, the more it'll approximate human culture and interaction as a whole. It shouldn't be a surprise when the negative parts of those things (e.g. war, strife, hatred) emerge, just as much as the positive things (peace, fellowship, love). Given how vicious and downright nasty politics can get in incredibly homogeneous small towns/organizations/communities, I don't think the size of a community has all that much to do with this. As soon as everyone is not friends with everyone, people start behaving in incredibly shitty ways. If the community does not police that behaviour, the resulting interactions become quite visibly toxic. If the community does police that behaviour, then they are still toxic, but in a less-visible manner.

dredmorbius 7y ago

In large part agreed. People see Usenet and the wide-open access to all. What they fail to see, especially for its crucial first formative decade (1980-1990) was the very formidable gates that did exist: institutional access through selective research universities, and a handful of tech firms and government agencies. It was a bit like Disneyland's legendary E-Ticket -- once inside the gates you could wander freely and sample at will. But there was a price to be paid to enter: technical ability, inclination, and most of all access to the institutions. Those institutions also provided a brake on some of the worse forms of abusive behaviour -- individuals could be identified, sanctioned, and removed from the system. The small number of site administrators (initially literally a handful, later still capable of fitting within a single conference room or lecture hall) also reflected a balance of centralisation and decentralisation which seemed to mostly work. Much of what was good and bad about Usenet derived from these gatekeepers, and that is a point very often missed in subsequent treatments or discussions.

jfalcon 7y ago
Don't forget that Usenet itself has its own safeguards as in the news.admins and the newsgroup moderators should that particular newsgroup have it enabled. Otherwise, it was and still is the wild west in terms of content and quality.