>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

>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.