I had the dubious honor of starting undergrad, and being introduced to the Internet, during the actual Eternal September (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eternal_S

I had the dubious honor of starting undergrad, and being introduced to the Internet, during the actual Eternal September (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eternal_September http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eternal_September). As much as I've always been irked by some items in this document (e.g. all-caps, chain letters, etc)... I definitely do not miss the days when half of all discussion in any given forum was meta-babble about how to properly post in the forum. I swear, back in the mid-90's it felt like every single Usenet thread devolved into a shouting match between "bottom posters" and "top posters"! Plonk! This may be blasphemy, but even at that time I always believed that the tools would have to evolve to fit human nature rather than the other way around. Why not just improve your Usenet readers (even the shell-based ones) to minimize quoted text regardless of where it's found? You know, like every single email client does today without us thinking anything of it? Such basic usability features were slow to appear... not because it's all that technically challenging, but rather due to cultural resistance and purity dogma. Nonsense. If any system of human interaction requires a high degree of deliberate and manual cooperation, then it's not tenable and can be improved by technology.