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I've used Usenet quite extensively in its heyday. At one point I even ran a Usenet site with dozens of peers and thousands of users. All on a very beefy (for it

I've used Usenet quite extensively in its heyday. At one point I even ran a Usenet site with dozens of peers and thousands of users. All on a very beefy (for its time) Sun E450. In my opinion Usenets greatest strength was also its downfall. It is a distributed system without central authority over who could connect to the network or firm control over groups and their contents. To connect to it as a peer, you just had to find at least one Usenet site willing to exchange messages (peer) with you. Usually that wasn't a problem. ISPs, universities, organizations of all kinds were running their own servers, offering Usenet client access to their customers and members for no additional charge. In a distributed system without central authority, innovation is exceedingly hard though. The protocols and features were basically set in stone. Taking the concept of offering discussions among users to a centralized or closed system made it possible to innovate very fast and offer superior features to the users. As the article pointed out, that wasn't the only protocol which got picked up that way and innovated upon until it displaced its origins. Since Usenet is still frozen feature wise were it was 30 or more years ago, I don't see a revival coming anytime soon.

liotier 3y ago
> without central authority over who could connect to the network or firm control over groups and their contents Moderation. In public forums, everything else is trivial and moderation is the invisible stinking hairy elephant in the room. To the question "why isn't there a decentralized open protocol free software X" the answer is moderation. Think or it as the discreet but efficient bouncers without which a sufficiently popular public place cannot maintain a welcoming atmosphere. Newsgroups became sufficiently popular, death by inadequate moderation ensued.
- NoMoreNicksLeft 3y ago
  Obviously, this is why 4chan died back in 2012. If only they had moderation, they might still be around today.
  - amadeuspagel 3y ago
    4chan has moderation.
  - pjc50 3y ago
    They're a special niche, and I believe they've been forked multiple times over moderation disasters resulting in 8chan etc. If 4chan "breaks cover" into the mainstream in the way that, say, Facebook has, it will make for some very entertaining Congressional hearings.
  - dopa42365 3y ago
    4chan has a million jannies, it's heavily moderated...
- dragontamer 3y ago
  There were plenty of well moderated newsgroups actually. A moderated newsgroup had all messages going through the moderator's system, with their programs deciding whether or not the message should be forwarded to the rest of the newsgroup. This doesn't necessarily mean that a human read all messages either. Some of the oldest flamewars I've participated in are about moderated vs unmoderated USENET newsgroups. It amuses me that we're still debating the issue today.
  - amadeuspagel 3y ago
    What kind of moderation programs were people using then? Word filters? I can't imagine anything that isn't both easy to circumvent and likely to catch innocent posts merely quoting a "bad" word.
    - jghn 3y ago
      People used Killfiles [1] [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kill_file https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kill_file
      - dragontamer 3y ago
        I don't think a "kill file" was the same as "moderation". A kill file is "User X is tired of seeing User Y, so X stops reading posts from Y". Everyone else can still read Y. A moderator is "Moderator is tired of seeing User Y, so Y cannot post to Newsgroup anymore". A much stronger action. --------- Its been a few decades since I was part of any Usenet though. So maybe I'm mis-remembering the lingo. Or are you saying that the moderators used kill-files that somehow applied to the whole newsgroup? Because... the later would make sense. But I really don't know how things worked back then.
        pm215 3y ago
        The machinery for a moderated newsgroup works by the news server you post an article to having a list of moderator email addresses for moderated groups. Instead of posting your article the server emails it to the moderator. The mod will then either just discard it, or else post it to their own news server with an Approved header to say it's moderated (and these days some crypto signing stuff). Then the post gets propagated as usual. The "approve/deny/edit" stuff is handled by moderation software, which in principle can do anything you like.
- phpisthebest 3y ago
  [flagged]
  - mavhc 3y ago
    More it was overwhelmed with bad actors spamming everything, and no way to stop that. Free speech is not about letting you post your conspiracy theory in the wrong group
    - phpisthebest 3y ago
      I can see you are a "I support free speech but [except]" and then proceed to explain that you do not actually support free speech
      - shadowgovt 3y ago
        I, for one, own that label. I support free speech except in some circumstances where curtailing it makes almost everyone's lives better. Where I support it to the most extreme: criticizing the government. Where I want it most throttled: my own living room, so I can have some peace and quiet. I think most functioning adults have a similar spectrum of allow / deny and aren't absolutists on the topic. And, I mean... I don't think we need to look deep into the history of the Internet to see that becoming the dominant pattern. USENET failed. Email without spamblockers failed. Every forum either eventually adopts moderation policies or goes underground where barely any casual user hears of its existence. The user interprets lack of censorship as damaged and routes away from it.
        amadeuspagel 3y ago
        > Where I support it to the most extreme: criticizing the government. > Where I want it most throttled: my own living room, so I can have some peace and quiet. This is a category error. What if someone wants to criticize the government in your living room?
        3y ago
- Scarblac 3y ago
  There was moderation. There was even a newsgroup that probably has some overlap with here that required you to circumvent it in order to post.
- pierat 3y ago
  "Moderation" is a terrible excuse used by the corporate types as a reason to stick in their safe walled gardens. We had moderation on Usenet. It was simple, but damn, did it work. We had plonka lists (client selected ignored users), keyword scoring, server level scoring, some anti-spam. There was EARLY work in Bayesian filters built in to clients, but was too late for the "big event". (When ISP's everywhere killed Usenet servers, for what is pretty surely assumed as anti-piracy.) But lets look corporate moderation. It's done in secret, with vague rules that may or may not be stated, and by content moderation farms that use and abuse people. https://www.wired.co.uk/article/facebook-content-moderators-ireland https://www.wired.co.uk/article/facebook-content-moderators-... . Or worse yet, you fool people in faux-ownership (reddit) and get them to do your moderation for you. Well, that is unless you do a bad job and get your subreddit banned for "low/no moderation". I'd much rather see everything, and craft my own blocklists as I see fit. You know, just like Mastodon. Sure, there's some fediblocks at admin-level over pervasive content from a single server. But aside admin tasks, its pretty damn sweet. And it's loads better than the shit that happens over on Twitter, Reddit, or Facebook.
  - liotier 3y ago
    We, the technologically literate, are not the target audience. Client-side filtering requires awareness of client-side filtering. How many Reddit users want that ? Facebook users ? Oh, maybe they want to fine-tune their scoring rules library or tweak they bayesian filters - so much fun ! And lacking social intelligence, client-side filtering fails against organized harassment. By the way, who is liable for infractions to the local law ? Enter the party, meet regulars, meet new faces, enjoy a drink and don't even think about safety. Sure, you can manage it yourself for a birthday party at your home but at larger scales even the wild rave party thrown in an abandoned hangar out there will have some form of institutionalized enforcement, even if they are not corporate security. Yes, that means that successful large public places tend towards bland - the same reason why successful edgy underground dives are small affairs and their character can't survive growth.
    - pierat 3y ago
      > We, the technologically literate, are not the target audience. Highly disagree. It's the early adopters of ANY platform, hardware, or whatever that drive real organic demand and adoption. And those early adopters ARE exactly that: technologically literate. Alienating that group is how you get relegated to the "Digg v4" area of history. > How many Reddit users want that ? Facebook users ? Oh, maybe they want to fine-tune their scoring rules library or tweak they bayesian filters - so much fun ! How many Facebook or Reddit users even HAVE the capability of client side anything? The big threads are that Reddit's killing most API access unless you pay a pound of flesh. And Facebook does enough horrible things in their coding that makes it impossible to even screen-scrape. The text "Sponsored" shows up as shittery like "essprnodo". For those gated islands, you'd need their permission to really do any sort of client side anything. Places like Mastodon make blocking trivial. Ive shared that link, and no, you don't need to know about Bayseian weights or whatever new mod scheme you want to make. Its there, the initial functions are easy-peasy, and the API hooks are there to add whatever you want. > And lacking social intelligence, client-side filtering fails against organized harassment. And that already is a major problem on the corporate side. Reddit calls it "brigading". HN has chill-down scripts to defuse flamewars. Twitter, Facebook, and Reddit all have mass-reporting as harassment. There's even current 4Chan threads to organize just that. Sure seems like an unsolved problem, not just "unsolved for federated systems". > By the way, who is liable for infractions to the local law ? Irrelevant. Someone in another area could read content that is illegal to them. That's *their* responsibility, not mine. As long as I follow the laws in my jurisdiction and where my server is located, I'm fine. And 17 USC 512 covers me as long as I do good-faith DMCA process. > <example of comparing physical real world with raves/alcohol/drugs with online "dangers"> And in your latter half, your other problem is that you're equating online "safety" with in-person bodily safety with alcohol and drugs. Those 2 aren't even remotely the same, and its laughable that you'd try to compare them. If someone is coming on to you in a sexual manner, and your "No" isnt effectively heard or acknowledged, you have a big problem. If someone uploads a bad image (say, animal torture, for something abhorrent), you can block the user, the server, report the user to their/your server admins. You can also choose not to show images. It's terrible, but physical assault is no comparison to a bad image or terrible text.
martinald 3y ago
This is the key problem with decentralised systems. They simply can't innovate as quickly as centralised systems. We saw this with usenet and we also saw it with IRC. IRC really is what slack was, 30years ahead of it. However, IRC has so many essential missing features it never caught on - push notifications, saving your state when offline, admin controls, etc. I know some of these were solved with extensions and workarounds (having a shell connect to irc an then you connect to the shell for persistence for example) but it's a huge hack. This compares to Slack or Teams where they can push a back and front end update to millions/billions(?) of users in a very short space of time to add additional functionality. This is another reason why all the decentralised 'blockchain' things would have struggled (on top of many others).
- api 3y ago
  I think this argument is seductive but wrong because it ignores an invisible elephant in the room: funding. Decentralization is a business problem, not a technical problem. Engineers tend not to see this because we're engineers and so we see technical problems first. Usenet had no economic model. All the problems you list are solvable if there were funding available to solve them. Free volunteer developer work tends to stop at the level of polish with which developers are comfortable, which is usually command line interaction and fairly manual processes. Developers generally have to be paid to develop new features and polish those features for the general audience, which is why there are precious few open source systems used by anyone other than developers. Those that do exist tend to be subsidized by huge companies for the purpose of "commoditizing your compliments" or as tools to herd users into an ecosystem that has upsell opportunities built into it. Examples: Chrome, any open source client for a SaaS service, etc. Non-profits can fund to some extent, but the truth is that polished feature-rich easy to use software is extraordinarily expensive to produce. A system that a developer can create in their spare time might cost millions to render usable to non-developers. Computers are actually very hard to use. We just don't see this because we're accustomed to it. Making them easy to use is a gigantic undertaking and is often far more difficult and complex than making something work at the algorithmic level. Centralized systems with built-in economic models like SaaS or commercial software tend to triumph because they can fund the polish necessary to reach a wider audience. A wider audience means exponentially larger network effects. See Metcalfe's Law. Cryptocurrency could have offered an alternative model but failed for entirely different reasons: perverse incentives that attract scammers. In crypto by far the most profitable thing to do is build a fake project that can appear just credible enough to attract retail buyers onto whom you can dump your tokens. There is no structural incentive to stick with a project and really develop it because all the money is made up front through the initial offering. This also ruins the ecosystem because "the bad chases away the good." Scammers make legitimate people not want to go anywhere near crypto, transforming the whole ecosystem into a "bad neighborhood."
shadowgovt 3y ago
The old chestnut "The Net interprets censorship as damage and routes around it" referred specifically to USENET if I recall correctly; it is often mis-applied to the Internet itself or to other services. But it referred to the notion that since USENET servers just routed their stash of stories to any node that requested them, censorship was functionally a non-starter; if you (the node owner) wanted content that some other node owner was squelching, you could request it from another node. But it turns out that model had some major flaws. Nowadays, one could say the 'net interprets lack of censorship as offensive and migrates away from it. If there's one thing the experiments after USENET (from Slashdot to Mastodon) suggest, it's that people on average want some control (and don't on average want the burden of being their own moderator for every damn bitstream that comes down the pipe).
- bitwize 3y ago
  The net interprets hate as noise and filters it out. At least, that's the goal.
sleepybrett 3y ago
Interested to see if we find these negatives paralleled in the fediverse.
boramalper 3y ago
Relevant: The ecosystem is moving (Challenges for distributed and decentralized technology from the perspective of Signal development) https://media.ccc.de/v/36c3-11086-the_ecosystem_is_moving https://media.ccc.de/v/36c3-11086-the_ecosystem_is_moving

liotier 3y ago

> without central authority over who could connect to the network or firm control over groups and their contents Moderation. In public forums, everything else is trivial and moderation is the invisible stinking hairy elephant in the room. To the question "why isn't there a decentralized open protocol free software X" the answer is moderation. Think or it as the discreet but efficient bouncers without which a sufficiently popular public place cannot maintain a welcoming atmosphere. Newsgroups became sufficiently popular, death by inadequate moderation ensued.

NoMoreNicksLeft 3y ago
Obviously, this is why 4chan died back in 2012. If only they had moderation, they might still be around today.
- amadeuspagel 3y ago
  4chan has moderation.
- pjc50 3y ago
  They're a special niche, and I believe they've been forked multiple times over moderation disasters resulting in 8chan etc. If 4chan "breaks cover" into the mainstream in the way that, say, Facebook has, it will make for some very entertaining Congressional hearings.
- dopa42365 3y ago
  4chan has a million jannies, it's heavily moderated...
dragontamer 3y ago
There were plenty of well moderated newsgroups actually. A moderated newsgroup had all messages going through the moderator's system, with their programs deciding whether or not the message should be forwarded to the rest of the newsgroup. This doesn't necessarily mean that a human read all messages either. Some of the oldest flamewars I've participated in are about moderated vs unmoderated USENET newsgroups. It amuses me that we're still debating the issue today.
- amadeuspagel 3y ago
  What kind of moderation programs were people using then? Word filters? I can't imagine anything that isn't both easy to circumvent and likely to catch innocent posts merely quoting a "bad" word.
  - jghn 3y ago
    People used Killfiles [1] [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kill_file https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kill_file
    - dragontamer 3y ago
      I don't think a "kill file" was the same as "moderation". A kill file is "User X is tired of seeing User Y, so X stops reading posts from Y". Everyone else can still read Y. A moderator is "Moderator is tired of seeing User Y, so Y cannot post to Newsgroup anymore". A much stronger action. --------- Its been a few decades since I was part of any Usenet though. So maybe I'm mis-remembering the lingo. Or are you saying that the moderators used kill-files that somehow applied to the whole newsgroup? Because... the later would make sense. But I really don't know how things worked back then.
      - pm215 3y ago
        The machinery for a moderated newsgroup works by the news server you post an article to having a list of moderator email addresses for moderated groups. Instead of posting your article the server emails it to the moderator. The mod will then either just discard it, or else post it to their own news server with an Approved header to say it's moderated (and these days some crypto signing stuff). Then the post gets propagated as usual. The "approve/deny/edit" stuff is handled by moderation software, which in principle can do anything you like.
phpisthebest 3y ago
[flagged]
- mavhc 3y ago
  More it was overwhelmed with bad actors spamming everything, and no way to stop that. Free speech is not about letting you post your conspiracy theory in the wrong group
  - phpisthebest 3y ago
    I can see you are a "I support free speech but [except]" and then proceed to explain that you do not actually support free speech
    - shadowgovt 3y ago
      I, for one, own that label. I support free speech except in some circumstances where curtailing it makes almost everyone's lives better. Where I support it to the most extreme: criticizing the government. Where I want it most throttled: my own living room, so I can have some peace and quiet. I think most functioning adults have a similar spectrum of allow / deny and aren't absolutists on the topic. And, I mean... I don't think we need to look deep into the history of the Internet to see that becoming the dominant pattern. USENET failed. Email without spamblockers failed. Every forum either eventually adopts moderation policies or goes underground where barely any casual user hears of its existence. The user interprets lack of censorship as damaged and routes away from it.
      - amadeuspagel 3y ago
        > Where I support it to the most extreme: criticizing the government. > Where I want it most throttled: my own living room, so I can have some peace and quiet. This is a category error. What if someone wants to criticize the government in your living room?
        3y ago
Scarblac 3y ago
There was moderation. There was even a newsgroup that probably has some overlap with here that required you to circumvent it in order to post.
pierat 3y ago
"Moderation" is a terrible excuse used by the corporate types as a reason to stick in their safe walled gardens. We had moderation on Usenet. It was simple, but damn, did it work. We had plonka lists (client selected ignored users), keyword scoring, server level scoring, some anti-spam. There was EARLY work in Bayesian filters built in to clients, but was too late for the "big event". (When ISP's everywhere killed Usenet servers, for what is pretty surely assumed as anti-piracy.) But lets look corporate moderation. It's done in secret, with vague rules that may or may not be stated, and by content moderation farms that use and abuse people. https://www.wired.co.uk/article/facebook-content-moderators-ireland https://www.wired.co.uk/article/facebook-content-moderators-... . Or worse yet, you fool people in faux-ownership (reddit) and get them to do your moderation for you. Well, that is unless you do a bad job and get your subreddit banned for "low/no moderation". I'd much rather see everything, and craft my own blocklists as I see fit. You know, just like Mastodon. Sure, there's some fediblocks at admin-level over pervasive content from a single server. But aside admin tasks, its pretty damn sweet. And it's loads better than the shit that happens over on Twitter, Reddit, or Facebook.
- liotier 3y ago
  We, the technologically literate, are not the target audience. Client-side filtering requires awareness of client-side filtering. How many Reddit users want that ? Facebook users ? Oh, maybe they want to fine-tune their scoring rules library or tweak they bayesian filters - so much fun ! And lacking social intelligence, client-side filtering fails against organized harassment. By the way, who is liable for infractions to the local law ? Enter the party, meet regulars, meet new faces, enjoy a drink and don't even think about safety. Sure, you can manage it yourself for a birthday party at your home but at larger scales even the wild rave party thrown in an abandoned hangar out there will have some form of institutionalized enforcement, even if they are not corporate security. Yes, that means that successful large public places tend towards bland - the same reason why successful edgy underground dives are small affairs and their character can't survive growth.
  - pierat 3y ago
    > We, the technologically literate, are not the target audience. Highly disagree. It's the early adopters of ANY platform, hardware, or whatever that drive real organic demand and adoption. And those early adopters ARE exactly that: technologically literate. Alienating that group is how you get relegated to the "Digg v4" area of history. > How many Reddit users want that ? Facebook users ? Oh, maybe they want to fine-tune their scoring rules library or tweak they bayesian filters - so much fun ! How many Facebook or Reddit users even HAVE the capability of client side anything? The big threads are that Reddit's killing most API access unless you pay a pound of flesh. And Facebook does enough horrible things in their coding that makes it impossible to even screen-scrape. The text "Sponsored" shows up as shittery like "essprnodo". For those gated islands, you'd need their permission to really do any sort of client side anything. Places like Mastodon make blocking trivial. Ive shared that link, and no, you don't need to know about Bayseian weights or whatever new mod scheme you want to make. Its there, the initial functions are easy-peasy, and the API hooks are there to add whatever you want. > And lacking social intelligence, client-side filtering fails against organized harassment. And that already is a major problem on the corporate side. Reddit calls it "brigading". HN has chill-down scripts to defuse flamewars. Twitter, Facebook, and Reddit all have mass-reporting as harassment. There's even current 4Chan threads to organize just that. Sure seems like an unsolved problem, not just "unsolved for federated systems". > By the way, who is liable for infractions to the local law ? Irrelevant. Someone in another area could read content that is illegal to them. That's *their* responsibility, not mine. As long as I follow the laws in my jurisdiction and where my server is located, I'm fine. And 17 USC 512 covers me as long as I do good-faith DMCA process. > <example of comparing physical real world with raves/alcohol/drugs with online "dangers"> And in your latter half, your other problem is that you're equating online "safety" with in-person bodily safety with alcohol and drugs. Those 2 aren't even remotely the same, and its laughable that you'd try to compare them. If someone is coming on to you in a sexual manner, and your "No" isnt effectively heard or acknowledged, you have a big problem. If someone uploads a bad image (say, animal torture, for something abhorrent), you can block the user, the server, report the user to their/your server admins. You can also choose not to show images. It's terrible, but physical assault is no comparison to a bad image or terrible text.

martinald 3y ago

This is the key problem with decentralised systems. They simply can't innovate as quickly as centralised systems. We saw this with usenet and we also saw it with IRC. IRC really is what slack was, 30years ahead of it. However, IRC has so many essential missing features it never caught on - push notifications, saving your state when offline, admin controls, etc. I know some of these were solved with extensions and workarounds (having a shell connect to irc an then you connect to the shell for persistence for example) but it's a huge hack. This compares to Slack or Teams where they can push a back and front end update to millions/billions(?) of users in a very short space of time to add additional functionality. This is another reason why all the decentralised 'blockchain' things would have struggled (on top of many others).

api 3y ago
I think this argument is seductive but wrong because it ignores an invisible elephant in the room: funding. Decentralization is a business problem, not a technical problem. Engineers tend not to see this because we're engineers and so we see technical problems first. Usenet had no economic model. All the problems you list are solvable if there were funding available to solve them. Free volunteer developer work tends to stop at the level of polish with which developers are comfortable, which is usually command line interaction and fairly manual processes. Developers generally have to be paid to develop new features and polish those features for the general audience, which is why there are precious few open source systems used by anyone other than developers. Those that do exist tend to be subsidized by huge companies for the purpose of "commoditizing your compliments" or as tools to herd users into an ecosystem that has upsell opportunities built into it. Examples: Chrome, any open source client for a SaaS service, etc. Non-profits can fund to some extent, but the truth is that polished feature-rich easy to use software is extraordinarily expensive to produce. A system that a developer can create in their spare time might cost millions to render usable to non-developers. Computers are actually very hard to use. We just don't see this because we're accustomed to it. Making them easy to use is a gigantic undertaking and is often far more difficult and complex than making something work at the algorithmic level. Centralized systems with built-in economic models like SaaS or commercial software tend to triumph because they can fund the polish necessary to reach a wider audience. A wider audience means exponentially larger network effects. See Metcalfe's Law. Cryptocurrency could have offered an alternative model but failed for entirely different reasons: perverse incentives that attract scammers. In crypto by far the most profitable thing to do is build a fake project that can appear just credible enough to attract retail buyers onto whom you can dump your tokens. There is no structural incentive to stick with a project and really develop it because all the money is made up front through the initial offering. This also ruins the ecosystem because "the bad chases away the good." Scammers make legitimate people not want to go anywhere near crypto, transforming the whole ecosystem into a "bad neighborhood."

shadowgovt 3y ago

The old chestnut "The Net interprets censorship as damage and routes around it" referred specifically to USENET if I recall correctly; it is often mis-applied to the Internet itself or to other services. But it referred to the notion that since USENET servers just routed their stash of stories to any node that requested them, censorship was functionally a non-starter; if you (the node owner) wanted content that some other node owner was squelching, you could request it from another node. But it turns out that model had some major flaws. Nowadays, one could say the 'net interprets lack of censorship as offensive and migrates away from it. If there's one thing the experiments after USENET (from Slashdot to Mastodon) suggest, it's that people on average want some control (and don't on average want the burden of being their own moderator for every damn bitstream that comes down the pipe).

bitwize 3y ago
The net interprets hate as noise and filters it out. At least, that's the goal.

sleepybrett 3y ago

Interested to see if we find these negatives paralleled in the fediverse.

boramalper 3y ago

Relevant: The ecosystem is moving (Challenges for distributed and decentralized technology from the perspective of Signal development) https://media.ccc.de/v/36c3-11086-the_ecosystem_is_moving https://media.ccc.de/v/36c3-11086-the_ecosystem_is_moving