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Post-golden age Usenet: see Eternal September [1] on Wikipedia. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eternal_September https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eternal_Septe

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.
- technofiend 7y ago
  >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. You really hit the nail on the proverbial head... curated or moderated forums are really the only thing that can work in the face of so much noise, but without passionate ownership as we have here on HN or possibly a paid position of some kind I'm not sure what the answer is. PGP's web of trust model sort of addressed this but failed to embrace the nuance of human social interaction needed in modern society. Google's circles kind of tried to do the right thing but failed there too. What I mean in a practical example is if my father who describes himself as slightly more conservative than Gengis Khan wants to send me some conservative screed that's fine I can handle it, but I don't want that to be generally consumable content in my "feed" and associated to me for all my friends to see, particularly as my views may be (and often are) wildly different. I need to firewall people based on multidimensional levels of interest and trust. I abandoned Facebook over a decade ago because their business model is antithetical to that way of thinking and their regular and involuntary updates to privacy policy and settings simply clashed too much with my needs. A practical example at the time was something like my wife didn't want photos of her shared with anyone but family, but I had friended people she'd never heard of and FB let them or possibly even friends of friends see her in my posts. Since I couldn't guarantee perfect separation of interests thanks to their meddlesome tweaking I deleted facebook. I suppose the trolls can claim a kind of victory because at least for me it's just easier to tune out and withdraw rather than slog through the noise.

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.

technofiend 7y ago
>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. You really hit the nail on the proverbial head... curated or moderated forums are really the only thing that can work in the face of so much noise, but without passionate ownership as we have here on HN or possibly a paid position of some kind I'm not sure what the answer is. PGP's web of trust model sort of addressed this but failed to embrace the nuance of human social interaction needed in modern society. Google's circles kind of tried to do the right thing but failed there too. What I mean in a practical example is if my father who describes himself as slightly more conservative than Gengis Khan wants to send me some conservative screed that's fine I can handle it, but I don't want that to be generally consumable content in my "feed" and associated to me for all my friends to see, particularly as my views may be (and often are) wildly different. I need to firewall people based on multidimensional levels of interest and trust. I abandoned Facebook over a decade ago because their business model is antithetical to that way of thinking and their regular and involuntary updates to privacy policy and settings simply clashed too much with my needs. A practical example at the time was something like my wife didn't want photos of her shared with anyone but family, but I had friended people she'd never heard of and FB let them or possibly even friends of friends see her in my posts. Since I couldn't guarantee perfect separation of interests thanks to their meddlesome tweaking I deleted facebook. I suppose the trolls can claim a kind of victory because at least for me it's just easier to tune out and withdraw rather than slog through the noise.