>w.r.t. your #4: Usenet also had epic flamewars as users failed to self-moderate and groups which suffered particularly from this were very hostile to new users

>w.r.t. your #4: Usenet also had epic flamewars as users failed to self-moderate and groups which suffered particularly from this were very hostile to new users. No different from the present day centrally moderated platforms - whether Facebook, Twitter, or HN. There's significant amount of objectionable and even illegal content on Twitter. The central moderation is a figleaf over it. >w.r.t. your #5: how does 'participation in some groups is subject to moderation, but participation is optional' fit with the platform/publisher dichotomy? To re-emphasize: >>Certain groups were centrally moderated through middlemen; (participation in those was optional), and content was explicitly submitted to moderation. Easily the key distinction is that the moderators weren't part of the platform. It was not the platform doing the moderating. It was pre-arranged users that were designated by the community to have a say who selects the best posts to then forward. It wasn't "this post breaks our ever-shifting rules"; it was "this post is good enough for me to to forward it to the list". The proverbial firewall separating the platform from the users doing the selection is the key distinction. The closest modern analogy of how the moderated Usenet groups were is "a public-read, private-commit Git repo, with project heads accepting pull requests at their discretion".