Do people really think HN's denizens are abusive? I remember usenet from the mid-nineties. It was really, really bad. People would routinely post very graphi

Do people really think HN's denizens are abusive? I remember usenet from the mid-nineties. It was really, really bad. People would routinely post very graphic messages about killing other people (and worse), and sometimes there'd be personally-identifiable information posted (like physical addresses), and all manner of other intensely awful stuff would happen. This was usually restricted to certain groups, but due to the nature of "cross-posting", it would often spread all over the place - in fact, people would quite often randomly add "nice" groups into a massive flamewar just to cause trouble. Sometimes the police would be involved, too, but they never did anything - from what I can remember - because usenet didn't have real-life celebrities on it (apart from a few sci-fi and fantasy authors) and was fairly incomprehensible in comparison with, say, Twitter or Facebook. Also, teenagers didn't commit suicide very often from it so I suppose it was hard to turn it into a political issue. But, Usenet also had some really great discussion on it, and with a good news client (like slrn) was vastly better than any web forum anyone has ever come up with since... and with a suitably powerful client, you could actually filter out a lot of the abuse too. Against all of that, anyway, HN seems incredibly tame to me.