5 ms·

Any ex-Usenet moderators out there? I don't remember this being such a huge deal, and there was always the alt groups.

Mediterraneo10 6y ago
Things have changed since the 1990s. Some mild homosexual slurs might have made their way through Usenet moderation, and trans issues were not even on the radar. Today, those favouring content moderation expect what they see as anti-LGBT attitudes to be filtered out. Also, Usenet was so niche that state actors weren’t running troll armies for propaganda purposes, but this is something any modern social network has to deal with.
jfengel 6y ago
A lot of the language we use for dealing with moderation was developed for Usenet and related systems: trolling, spam, flames, etc. The problem was bad enough that we developed names for it. There was certainly less of it; all of Usenet fit in a box of magtapes. But it could still have some pretty big tempests in that teapot. It never even got close to solving spam, which exploded after Eternal September. It took AI-esque systems (and enormous heaps of data to feed them) to reduce spam to a manageable level. Trolling is a harder problem than spam.
- gregw2 6y ago
  Just to chip in a comment about the size of Usenet... I did some analysis comparing Slashdot (with distributed moderation) traffic volumes to Usenet (centralized moderation) in the late 90s. If I recall, the peak volume of posts to the largest (moderated?) Usenet newsgroup was about 3000 posts/day. I seem to recall it was alt.fan.rushlimbaugh or something. I don't know about the quality of moderation but I took that to be the "peak traffic a single/paired human moderator" could handle before we had databases and distributed user-moderated content. Not sure what dang et all are handling here but it seems higher than that nowdays (but not more than 10x higher with all the newer technology they've developed?)
bombcar 6y ago
Usenet self-selected for (relatively) wealthy (usually) Americans who had the intelligence and know-how to get online at a time when it was costly and difficult. And it fell to Eternal September. The really only way to moderate a group is keep the group small.
dsr_ 6y ago
Current Usenet moderator here, of an exceedingly low traffic group. In the last year I've only had to kill two posts, both from the same troll. On the other hand, I use my personal killfile quite liberally.

Things have changed since the 1990s. Some mild homosexual slurs might have made their way through Usenet moderation, and trans issues were not even on the radar. Today, those favouring content moderation expect what they see as anti-LGBT attitudes to be filtered out. Also, Usenet was so niche that state actors weren’t running troll armies for propaganda purposes, but this is something any modern social network has to deal with.

jfengel 6y ago

A lot of the language we use for dealing with moderation was developed for Usenet and related systems: trolling, spam, flames, etc. The problem was bad enough that we developed names for it. There was certainly less of it; all of Usenet fit in a box of magtapes. But it could still have some pretty big tempests in that teapot. It never even got close to solving spam, which exploded after Eternal September. It took AI-esque systems (and enormous heaps of data to feed them) to reduce spam to a manageable level. Trolling is a harder problem than spam.

gregw2 6y ago
Just to chip in a comment about the size of Usenet... I did some analysis comparing Slashdot (with distributed moderation) traffic volumes to Usenet (centralized moderation) in the late 90s. If I recall, the peak volume of posts to the largest (moderated?) Usenet newsgroup was about 3000 posts/day. I seem to recall it was alt.fan.rushlimbaugh or something. I don't know about the quality of moderation but I took that to be the "peak traffic a single/paired human moderator" could handle before we had databases and distributed user-moderated content. Not sure what dang et all are handling here but it seems higher than that nowdays (but not more than 10x higher with all the newer technology they've developed?)

bombcar 6y ago

Usenet self-selected for (relatively) wealthy (usually) Americans who had the intelligence and know-how to get online at a time when it was costly and difficult. And it fell to Eternal September. The really only way to moderate a group is keep the group small.

dsr_ 6y ago

Current Usenet moderator here, of an exceedingly low traffic group. In the last year I've only had to kill two posts, both from the same troll. On the other hand, I use my personal killfile quite liberally.