"USENET had no way of dealing with some rude teen telling the lead C++ dev at Borland that he was an idiot." We just used kill files, which let you ignore user

"USENET had no way of dealing with some rude teen telling the lead C++ dev at Borland that he was an idiot." We just used kill files, which let you ignore users and even let you filter through complex pattern matching. Web forums and social media still don't let you do the latter, despite such capability being available in Usenet news readers several decades ago. "It didn't scale, and didn't prevent from plenty other people reacting to whatever jerk had wandered in." Flame wars were a distraction, but they still happen in web forums and on social media, and depending on the community they may even be tolerated. I can't count the number of times irrelevant tangents dominated the top voted comment threads on HN or on Reddit, and on Twitter the trolls have obviously been let back in. Reddit too used to be a safe space for them for most of its existence.