
Usenet – Let's Return to Public Spaces - jsmoov
https://october.substack.com/p/part-ii-usenet-a-genuinely-public
======
bmgxyz
I'm too young to have been a part of Usenet, but it seems to me that there's
no good way to recreate the space described in the article without keeping
most people out. My understanding is that the "Golden Age" of Usenet was
possible mainly because only the people with the proper resources, knowledge,
interest, and opportunity could even get to it in the first place. When you
select a group of people from the general population with those traits and
assets, of course you'll end up with a group that's more or less self-
policing; the population will be small and largely homogeneous. It's hard to
have conflict when your neighbors are almost identical to you, at least on a
large scale.

In my estimation, the larger and broader a group is, the more it'll
approximate human culture and interaction as a whole. It shouldn't be a
surprise when the negative parts of those things (e.g. war, strife, hatred)
emerge, just as much as the positive things (peace, fellowship, love).

~~~
anyonecancode
"In my estimation, the larger and broader a group is, the more it'll
approximate human culture and interaction as a whole. It shouldn't be a
surprise when the negative parts of those things (e.g. war, strife, hatred)
emerge, just as much as the positive things (peace, fellowship, love)."

Yes and no, I think. Physical space has some constraints that counter this in
a way online spaces don't. Take a place like NYC, for instance, where there
are so many people, from so many parts of the world, that it arguably begins
to "approximate human culture and interaction as a whole." What you see here
is that people start to subdivide the space and agree on expected behavior --
in public spaces, like the subway, people by and large try to reduce
interactions. Then there are public spaces that are pseudo-private, like bars
or cafes or restaurants, but each have their own understood rules -- at a bar
you can start to talk up a stranger, at a restaurant you don't just walk to a
random table and join in a conversation. There are also many private spaces --
apartments, or your own room in an apartment shared with roommates.

Contrast that with the typical online space, where it's not just that there
are lots of people, but also no constraints. It's the equivalent of going on
to a subway and yelling at someone about politics...

I don't think the problem with the modern internet is scale so much as a
failure to build some constraints into its design. Everything is public at a
very loud volume.

~~~
floatingatoll
The constraint that no one in tech wants to consider is on full-text search.

If you want to regain the pseudo-privacy of physical spaces online, put your
community’s conversations behind an authentication barrier and disable full
text search of conversations.

Search engine indexing is what turns a pseudo-private space into a
humiliating-public one.

It’s okay to let search engines index your forum’s existence, the sub forums
it contains, and their descriptions. But do not let them index participants or
conversations - either by subject, by participants, or by content. And do not
offer full text search of post content to authenticated members. It’s okay to
index keyword tags, but that’s it.

If you do this, you will regain the semi-anonymity that made the early
Internet possible to enjoy. If you don’t, you will continue to suffer the
trolls and abuse that full-text search enabled in the mid-90s (see also
DejaNews, X-No-Archive: Yes, and Google’s purchase of DejaNews).

EDIT: If you truly feel that full-text search is so valuable that it must not
be withheld, you have to do a lot of things to defend against abuse attackers
- for example: charge money for search credits, deduct credits when they
choose to reveal the text of results, warn users that their searches will be
monitored for abuse, require users to be in good standing with paid membership
and posting activity for at least 90 days, etc. Otherwise trolls will just use
stolen cards to perform full content searches to identify users to harass and
then report their findings back to a central forum. They may still do that
after all the above criteria, but they’ll have to work excruciatingly hard at
it. Yeah, they could manually scrape the site, but you can defend against that
too (“you’ve participated on 12 days, so you’re allowed to view 12 days of old
content” is a good simple test).

~~~
Yen
I broadly agree that infinite perfect archival, and searchability of that
archive, make an online discussion effectively public forever, subject to
broadcast forever.

But, even if you disable search, disable history, there's the fundamental fact
that _anyone_ can record everything they see, easily and silently. You can't
just have a private authenticated space, you need to be able to personally
trust every single person you let in that space.

At that point, the features around archiving or search are a bit moot.

~~~
floatingatoll
"It's impossible to stop a truly determined attacker, so we'd better not take
any steps to fend off the less-determined attackers" is a terrible approach to
building safe spaces. Some applications of that logic:

\- We shouldn't bother checking for characteristics of credit card fraud at
transaction time, because a determined attacker might get a fraudulent card
through.

\- We shouldn't bother checking IDs at bars, because a determined attacker
might get a fake ID through.

\- We shouldn't bother trying to prevent email spam, because a determined
attacker might get a spam message through.

\- We shouldn't bother making laws against recording people without their
consent, because a determined attacker might do so anyways.

Please construct a more plausible argument than "it's ultimately hopeless".
I'm willing to consider alternatives, but I'm not willing to consider
fatalism.

~~~
marcinzm
Three of the four items you list work because the government will use force
against those who break the rule which prevents rampant abuse. If you want a
government run and legally protected safe space then sure. I suspect most
people talking about them don't actually want that.

~~~
floatingatoll
As noted above, fatalism is an uninspiring argument here. "This won't work
because you can't use force against those who break the rules" is framing-by-
assumption that success is either all or nothing. Success is not all-or-
nothing when it comes to creating safe spaces. If you take steps and someone
works very hard to break through your steps, they will probably succeed. That
does not implicitly guarantee failure, especially if success is defined as
"safety improved" rather than "safety guaranteed".

~~~
marcinzm
The illusion of safety is dangerous because it makes people act in ways that
ultimately make them even less safe once the illusion is broken. The current
issues with social media posts coming back to bite people after years is a
perfect example. It works until it doesn't and then you're in the deep end of
the pool realizing you don't know how to swim.

------
rpiguy
People miss the quality of discussions on Usenet, but don't ever think about
why the discussions were better.

Biggest factor I think that made the discussions better is that folks were not
connected all the time so discussions would span days or weeks. You had time
think between posts. Folks would log on once or twice a day. Obviously there
were exceptions. Today a reddit thread has about a 24 hour shelf life because
of its global nature, and then it dies. Furthermore the most intense
discussions will happen in bursts and then flame out. People aren't engaging
in discussion they are shouting their opinion into the ether and moving on.

Second factor obviously is the tremendously larger and more diverse population
on the internet. More people mean more new topics posted and less time to
discuss topics. The actors are less technical overall than those who had
internet in the 90s and early 00s.

~~~
mumblemumble
I think you're very right about the slower pace fostering better discussions.

It plays out in other places, too. I've noticed that, since moving to Slack,
the quality of electronic communication at my company has taken a serious nose
dive. I think precisely because Slack makes it nearly impossible to have a
deep conversation over a long period of time.

I've also noticed that the quality of discussion in face-to-face meetings
tends to be inversely proportional to the number of people present. The more
people, the quicker you need to be to speak if you want to get anything out
there before the flow of conversation moves on and whatever you have to say
becomes a non sequitur. The less time you can take to compose your thoughts
before presenting them. The people who place the highest value on measured
speech generally don't open their mouths at all, unless someone puts them on
the spot.

The worst incarnation of this phenomenon that I can think of seems to be
Twitter. Twitter doesn't host conversations. It hosts a conversation-themed
massively multiplayer live action game in which participants compete for
scorekeeping tokens known as "likes" and "retweets".

~~~
rpiguy
I agree. I am less glib and more quiet now than when I was younger and get
crowded out of meetings quite quickly. I used to just speak my mind, but now I
prefer to mull things over.

Reddit is also like Twitter. Karma has certainly evolved into a game. The
focus on Reddit has always been to shift content to the "new" topics as well.

The primary difference between Reddit and Twitter, at least for me, is that I
somehow became addicted to the former and could care less about the latter,
despite trying.

------
_red
It really annoys me that increasingly its required to join slack / discord /
telegram channel in order to connect with developers of projects I'm
interested in.

I understand spam is a problem, but its such step backwards from just
subscribing to alt.whatever.

The glory days when NNTP was built-in to most email clients, so mornings were
spent with a cup of coffee answering emails and keeping up with project
conversations.

The future of our world looks to be hyper-siloed with incessant privacy
leaking and no one actually seems to mind.

~~~
sneak
It's not just leaking. You cannot use Discord anonymously.

Signing up for a new Discord account via Tor means you are prompted for a
phone number, which is a single API call to a data broker away from full name,
email, and home address.

You cannot join anyone's discord chats without the digital equivalent of
showing an ID.

A lot of us mind. We're just being excluded from more and more conversations.

~~~
beefhash
> You cannot join anyone's discord chats without the digital equivalent of
> showing an ID.

This only happens via Tor and oft-abused VPN providers. "Showing ID" has two
benefits:

1\. It helps mitigate a lot of unsophisticated spam attacks, taking off server
load and annoyance off users.

2\. It helps to some extent with mitigating criminal affairs because any
potential criminal that falls in the gap _between_ "doesn't realize IP
addresses may leak location information" and "knows how to use compromised
hosts as proxy" can be picked off by the authorities once they're noticed.

Anonymity is gone and it's not coming back. We have to adapt and we don't get
a choice. At least there's some minor upsides to it.

~~~
allovernow
>Anonymity is gone and it's not coming back. We have to adapt and we don't get
a choice. At least there's some minor upsides to it.

The choice starts with us, the developers building this antisocial software.
The industry is in desperate need of a collective attitude adjustment before
we pass the event horizon of the quickly approaching tech dystopia.

------
h2odragon
Keeping a decent Usenet spool running was _no joke_. I'd say the primary
reason Usenet died is ISPs and schools stopped hosting their own news feeds.
You had to go commercial, by around '96; and by '98 that'd pretty well killed
it off. It was harder to put stuff up on Usenet than the web, and once you had
it was gone in day or weeks.

I don't know what "store and forward" publication would look like today; the
"common carrier" concerns about being responsible for something someone else
posted to your spool seem to be larger and murkier today then they were back
then.

~~~
joshspankit
You touch on the very difficult legal conversation that was just bubbling up
when the commercial providers stepped in: Companies that had their own Usenet
servers had to not only keep a _massive_ storage pool with serious bandwidth,
but they were _without question_ hosting illegal material.

At a certain point before that it was flying under the radar: most people
seemed to assume that it was just text since that’s all the technology
supported, but of course 7-bit encoding, multi-part archives, and parity files
all had changed that. Once the rights groups got wind, the clock was ticking

Some “scene groups” chose to encrypt uploads and change post names, but that
only served to splinter the usefulness of it since most of those became group
specific.

For everyone else, it was ISPs committing more and more resources to fighting
to keep illegal files off their network, and end-users scrambling to either
grab stuff fast before it was taken down, or move to a grey market “full
archive“ provider for a fee.

Somehow, as bittorrent took off, the newsgroup technology never ended up
having to “pay the piper”. But that is definitely something that could happen
very easily in current day.

------
tptacek
As usual I am obliged to point out that what killed Usenet was software
piracy. The amount of work it took to run a competitive news server with
reliable binaries was unbelievable, easily the most expensive and fussy
hardware we had at the ISP, and if your service fell behind or dropped any
binaries, users would absolutely lose their shit: Usenet was an all-or-none
proposition, so if you weren't going to buy a rack full of NetApp filers to
run binaries you might as well not run Usenet at all. The protocol centralized
before web interfaces made centralization palatable to users, and then died.

~~~
ancarda
I'm not following - in part because I'm too young to have ever used
Usenet/NNTP. Did you have to offer hosting binaries? My (limited)
understanding is it's a decentralized thing; couldn't you just do discussions
over some niche topic (like web forums still do today) and have value in that?

~~~
joshspankit
This might help:

\- When someone hosted a usenet server, they were actually downloading (and
keep in sync) a complete mirror of the sort of “globally agreed-on data”. This
was part of it’s biggest appeal that the time of limited bandwidth: you could
connect directly to your ISPs server with low latency and it wouldn’t matter
how busy the other servers were.

\- The technology itself never supported binaries, it’s just that people
figured out that you could encode binary data as text, post the text as a
message, and have everyone else reverse the process.

\- Some providers actually chose to only host _some_ of the groups
(alt.binaries.movies would be an easy one to avoid hosting for example), but
that offered limited help if people decided to upload pirated content to other
groups. As the restrictions tightened, many discussion groups completely lost
the ability to discuss things when a “scene group” came in and started
uploading hundreds or thousands of files as messages.

Looking back; I suspect that even if there was a restriction of 10KB per
message and the same level of policing, piracy would still overwhelm usenet
with millions of 10KB “messages” per HD movie

------
hota_mazi
I think reddit is a superior product to Usenet.

I used to use Usenet in the early 90s, I was even a sysadmin at the time and
helped my university install it. NNTP, huge hard drives, constant network
stream, it was a big deal but so excited to manage and read it.

But I quickly felt the need to have some kind of upvoting system in order to
wade through the noise. At the time, I used jwz' genius "BBDB" emacs
extension, which allowed you to weigh posts based on authors and subjects. The
potentially most interesting articles would magically bubble at the top of the
discussion group and this would tremendously speed up my consumption of all
the groups.

But obviously, this is not as effective as the crowdsource voting system that
reddit uses. The combination of reddit's voting system (for the voting) and
RES (for the customized author tagging) makes the reading a lot more efficient
than Usenet ever was.

I personally don't have a problem with the fact that reddit is proprietary.
The amount of knowledge and entertainment that I gain from reddit way
outweighs my slight philosophical discomfort from the proprietary aspect.

And if one day, reddit fails to meet that criterion, another site will replace
it. Digg has shown us that these sites are a lot less permanent than they
seem.

------
prepend
I think the secret to reviving Usenet is to make it harder to use. The hassle
of using irc is like a proof of work that doesn’t keep out all idiots, but
helps.

I haven’t used Usenet in years and the only people I know who still use it,
use it for movies and music and stuff.

I spent a lot of time on alt.food.tacobell and alt.destroytheearth and
alt.music and places like that.

They worked for the same reason bbs boards on fidonet worked. I think because
there wasn’t anything better and they were hard to set up and use. So only
people with enough time or passion or smarts to overcome the setup and
management were involved.

I expect that once people stop trying to pyramid scheme crypto, we will
eventually get some sort of “pay a penny per message with tips and escalating
costs for violations” that is protocol based so can be run by volunteers
rather than “core developers.”

It needs to be just confusing enough to keep out people, but useful enough to
keep in enough people.

~~~
chrissnell
Sorry, but the ship has sailed. I ran a BBS and FidoNET node (and even a hub)
and it was the golden era of computers for me. Sadly, there's just no way that
we could ever drum up the sustained interest to (re)build a semi-private
network with a high technical bar again. People simply don't have the time. It
was the era before smartphones and social media and Netflix and most people
came home from work and watched cable TV or read books and most average people
never conversed with other people outside their immediate sphere. It was new
and novel but that feeing is long gone. Now people get into arguments online
and don't even appreciate the long chain of technology that makes it so
instantaneous.

Believe me, I would ditch all of this tech and go back to 1992 in an instant
if it was a viable option but let's be real: we've been discussing this in the
semi-annul Fido and Usenet HN posts for years and yet, here we are.

The only way this could happen is if some techno-elites with name recognition
decided to recreate it. Even then, it would probably die quickly. Remember
Ello?

------
jasode
_> Decentralized / Shared Ownership - a genuinely public space no one “owned”

>IMO, this last aspect is what made Usenet truly special.

>The idea that no one was bigger than any given (news)group was baked directly
into the software. Everyone held the keys to the castle. [...] Sadly, it seems
we’ve given up on the idea of online communities as shared spaces — but
studying Usenet is a great way to be reminded of what’s possible. _

I took the opposite lesson from USENET history: shared spaces where _everyone_
has equal say and power is _impossible_.

(Much of my thinking in the following paragraphs is influenced by Clay Shirky
but his essay seems to be deleted from the internet.[1])

Any digital shared space that _needs to function for the long term_ will
always create a formal (or informal) power structure where a subset have
disproportionate influence. Therefore, any idealism of a shared space where
everyone has equal say or power will _devolve into unequal power_. This has
happened with all "digital shared spaces" of any significance outside of
USENET such as _Bitcoin_ (democratic home computers --> China ASIC miners), or
_Ethereum_ (a few influential developers choose to reverse the DAO hack), or
_Wikipedia_ (super editors with special powers to reverse edits). The
repetition of that human history across many digital domains shows that _only
a subset_ will hold the keys to the castle.

I was an avid user of USENET in the 1980s. I learned C Language by asking
questions in USENET (comp.lang.c). I also had my first long discussions on
economics on USENET. I have a fondness for nostalgia but that doesn't change
the fact that reddit/Stackoverflow/HN are far more useful to me than USENET
ever was. I think that private ownership of those entities _improves baseline
quality_ of discussion. Sure, Mastodon is decentralized but the discussions
there are not as interesting to me as the front page of HN. We techies don't
like to admit that decentralization makes shared spaces _worse_ on many
dimensions which is why I abandoned USENET because it wasted too much of my
reading time.

[1][https://www.google.com/search?q=clay+shirky+group+worst+enem...](https://www.google.com/search?q=clay+shirky+group+worst+enemy)

~~~
prepend
There aren’t too many truly successful forums I know of, but I think the key
is some form of benevolent dictatorship and transparency so the community can
fork or more quickly depart.

HN might be the last forum working forum where I participate and it’s pretty
topic specific.

There are still some dev projects that use irc (maybe pandas), but email is
expensive to support because it’s 1:1 in that my answer only helps the
recipient and it gets mixed in with all the other stuff.

I recently had a problem with the Altair python viz package and submitted a
question on GitHub but found their google group [0] from searching and had
someone help me in the middle of the night EST. That was neat.

I think my take away is that there doesn’t need to be a single protocol like
nntp as long as there is effective search.

Although I do miss my morning coffee and Usenet. Phenomenal porn too.

[0] [https://groups.google.com/forum/m/#!forum/altair-
viz](https://groups.google.com/forum/m/#!forum/altair-viz)

------
johnminter
I remember Usenet and the science newsgroups. The author of the parent article
mentioned the problem with trolls. There was one who was especially
infuriating and unforgettable. He was from Dartmouth and used the screen name
"Archimedes Plutonium". People would be discussing some topic on the science
newsgroups and he would post off topic rants proclaiming the plutonium atom
was god. Of course people took the bait. Dartmouth decided that was part of
free speech. I think this was the origin of the advice "Don't feed the
trolls".

~~~
beezle
That guy was in my kill file...along with a few others that made sci.physics
and similar otherwise unreadable! I do miss those groups and do check in from
time to time but they are still heavily weighted to crackpot theories rather
than general questions, reasonable discussion and new results. Sad.

~~~
downerending
I miss USENET, but I _really_ _really_ miss kill files. In principle one can
locate substitutes for various sites like HN, but in practice it often seems
ineffective and unreliable.

I'd love to see a general solution to this.

------
vascocosta
Getting a home Internet connection in 1997 I was still lucky enough to enjoy
Usenet. Back then I spent the bulk of my time answering emails and Usenet
posts, rather than surfing the web or gopher space. The almost identical
interface shared by email and Usenet was what truly captivated me.

Usenet was also great due to it's subscription model with a pull paradigm.
Instead of getting all emails in a mailing list pushed to you, you could pull
only a selection of newsgroups and messages to read, depending on your mood. I
loved this way of interacting with people in the nineties.

Like already mentioned, Usenet promoted thoughtful answers, as opposed to
quick superficial answers like on IRC. I spent a lot of time on the latter,
nevertheless Usenet was where I learnt critical thinking and massively
improved my English. Thank you for that, rec.autos.sport.f1, a newsgroup which
is still active by the way.

Having gone through a reasonable amount of Internet eras, IMHO the main
roadblock to a perfect community, no matter which protocol is used, will
always be an elevated number of users. Thus, a possible solution is to have
more communities with less users.

~~~
mmcgaha
I couldn't agree more; In the 90s, my main internet usage was lurking various
news groups. Everything that I wanted was on usenet. I could get answers to
programming questions, tech support, source code, software, quality images,
and plenty of reading material. I am not sure when my net habits changed, but
I was still setting up leafnode as late as 2003.

~~~
vascocosta
Indeed. I forgot to mention what you just did. Usenet, despite its
distributed/federated technical nature, which made the network extremely
resilient, centralised the way we searched for information on all sort of
different topics.

There was no need to use dozens of different protocols or visit different
websites. I remember I had my newsgroups grouped by topic like programming,
operating systems, science, sports and so on.

------
rbanffy
> Missing a business model

In the late 90's my main access to it was via my ISP. It was one more reason
to sign up.

> Surpassed in ease-of-use by browser-based forums (didn’t need to be
> installed)

At that time browsers came with NNTP clients. Both Netscape and Internet
Explorer (in the form of Microsoft News and Mail, later Outlook Express, later
Windows Mail). While the experience was better with a dedicated NNTP client,
using the system didn't require installing anything the user wouldn't already
have.

As a side note, I twice set up NNTP servers to replace e-mail discussions in
two companies with reasonable success. Public discussions were so much neater
in that format.

------
tom-thistime
Key part: Usenet was effectively a public space. Nobody had their hand on the
OFF switch.

Much less important part: Usenet was full of horrible behavior for many years
before people started complaining about "Endless September." If there was a
golden age it was before my time (1985).

~~~
webmaven
Prior to "Eternal September", maintaining a personal killfile[0]/scorefile was
only a minor chore (indeed, adding someone to your killfile could be
accompanied by a sense of glee), but in the next few years the addition of
spam to the mix made it overwhelming, giving an edge to moderated mailing
lists and discussion boards.

YMMV, of course, depending on which groups you frequented and their community
norms.

pg's "A Plan for Spam"[1] provided a lower-effort solution eventually, but by
then it was too late as the onboarding experience for new users had become
hopelessly polluted and toxic (new email users at least had a grace period
before their address was discovered).

[0]
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kill_file](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kill_file)

[1] [http://www.paulgraham.com/spam.html](http://www.paulgraham.com/spam.html)

------
dspillett
_> Interface - UI made it easy to scan many posts quickly_

This is the thing I really miss. The NNTP client I used in the late 90 / early
00s had a far better UX for dealing with large groups and complex nested
threads (such as those seen in groups I used to frequent like comp.language.*
and alt.fan.pratchett) than _anything_ I've seen implemented via HTTP+HTML
since.

Part of that is due to bandwidth constraints no doubt: the client was working
from a local database of content that the UI was pulling data from for display
so achieving everything it did on "old web" tech could impose a massive
bandwidth cost on the provider and UI latency cost on the user, but with
modern UAs this could be largely replicated with the various client-side
storage options. There would still be an issue for users who moved between
different browser instances regularly, a bunch of "read/purged/etc" data would
need to be synced between clients via the service which increases the design
complexity, but something noticeably better than most (all) web based forums
offer should be eminently possible.

~~~
talkingtab
does anyone have a screenshot of the usenet UI or an easy way to see it? A
couple of people have mentioned this.

~~~
pwg
You can find several screen shots in the different client web pages linked
from this wikipedia article:

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Usenet_newsreaders](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Usenet_newsreaders)

------
MrGilbert
> [...] how to build better online communities by studying internet history.

I love that part already, even without reading the full article. Yesterday, I
had an interesting experience (yes, storytime):

I started using a fountain pen again a while ago, and wanted to research why
I've some pain in my wrist after using it[1]. So I stumbled upon an old
thread, which basically asked how to develop a "well-refined handwriting"[2].
This thread was from 2004, so just short after when I started to use "the
internet". The conversation was all in all very polite, respectful, with some
tips from other members, and often some kind of "well, you could try it like
this and that" or "I found something here, where xyz showed you could do it
like this", "I prefer to do it like this, but ymmv.", and etc.

The thread spans 19 pages, and, interestingly, is still active almost 15 years
later.

What stroke me the most was the change of tone towards the end. There was a
lot more "you HAVE to do it like that", "THIS is how it WORKS!" and there
like. Also, they started discussing what "well-refined" means at all. 15 years
later. There was a lot of, let's say, "whining" towards the end of this thread
(that school nowadays needs a lot of parental involvment, nothing works, and
everything is bad).

I am left confused. Something has changed in the last 15 years, and I'm not
sure what the reason is.

[1]: You guessed it: It has to do with the way I'm holding it. Now, back to
topic!

[2]: //edited upon request, german page though:
[https://www.penexchange.de/forum_neu/viewtopic.php?f=17&t=37...](https://www.penexchange.de/forum_neu/viewtopic.php?f=17&t=378)

~~~
yori
> Despite the english name of the website, it's a german page, so no use in
> linking it here I suppose.

No, please do link it here. First, there are many Germans here who would
appreciate it. Second, people like me who cannot read German can still auto-
translate the page to English and read it.

~~~
MrGilbert
Understood - I added the link. :)

------
derekp7
For dealing with "bad actors", the problem is anonymity. Systems such as
moderation, adding people to an ignore list, etc are all defeated because bad
actors can get unlimited anonymous identities. Ways of combating that (such as
a signup form checking IP address, or other patterns) remove some anonymity
which isn't really that great either.

What I'd like to see is the ability to get a personal identity SSL cert with
tooling (browser plugins, for example) to make it easy to use on signup pages.
This personal cert could have several fields, depending on how much
information the user revealed to the certificate authority.

The primary field would be how much they paid for the certificate. That way
people can be as anonymous as they want, and can get new IDs if they need, but
they have to pay for each one. Then forums could require new users to have a
certificate that cost at least a minimum amount, whatever is required to keep
trolls away (that is, trolls who constantly sign up with new IDs). I'm
thinking that $5.00 should be enough for most purposes. (There would be a
minimal cost to cover the CA's expenses, however anything above that can be
specified by the user depending on if they want a bronze level or platinum
level certificate)

There could be additional fields that the CA verified, such as name, address,
etc. These could also be marked as "Supplied to / verified by CA", but not
included in the cert (so only the CA knows that info, and can have a policy of
destroying their records shortly after verification). Or if needed (such as
for financial transactions), name and address could be part of the cert.

The whole idea here is that forums could better control when troll users
register multiple accounts -- yes, with the "completely anonymous" version of
the cert the troll could keep buying new ones, but that is still a higher bar
they have to cross than they do now.

~~~
dexen
_> For dealing with "bad actors", the problem is anonymity_

I wish it was this simple :^)

Consider Facebook, where people post mostly under their own name and photo.
Even a casual visit to Facebook quickly reveals your hypothesis is wrong; it's
nearly the exact opposite of reality.

Contrast that with HN, where users range from pseudonymous to fully anonymous,
and where discussion is kept to a much higher standard.

It bears repeating - the discourse on HN is _kept_ to a much higher standard.
Active moderation and community guiding, performed by _intelligent agents_ ,
is the real answer to the woes. Anything automatic, anything with a
_guaranteed_ outcomes will be 'gamed' and put to bad ends.

\--edit--

There's also the separate but equally important matter of privacy. As internet
spaces became both the _town square_ and also _gentlemens ' clubs_ and also
_private homes_ to multitude of discourses, we need privacy from various
actors' prying eyes.

~~~
downerending
Discussion here may be kept to a higher standard, but that also means that a
lot of things I'd be interested in are censored.

Not sure what the solution is, but it would be nice to have some sort of ML-
based approach that would tune the content I see to _my_ wishes, rather than
the wishes of the average denizen or the moderators.

~~~
dexen
_> a lot of things I'd be interested in are censored_

Same for me.

Frankly I accept HN is a space to discuss a limited range of subjects, and
keep other subjects to elsewhere. It's annoying to a degree, but it the longer
run it works.

------
Arathorn
random observation: Usenet was a direct inspiration for creating Matrix.org,
in terms of providing replicated conversation history with open (well, semi-
open, in usenet’s case) federation. Usenet’s collapse under spam,
alt.binaries, google groups and eventually reddit/fb/stack overflow left a
massive hole on the open internet for open communications.

The problem that remains is still one of solving the abuse/spam/reputation
problem, but there’s enough progress that hopefully this time things won’t
collapse again :)

------
zzo38computer
I still use Usenet (although I would like to find more newsgroups that I may
be interested in), and actually only started using it in late 2019 (and read
another article posted to Usenet by someone who also did). Usenet is still in
use (although maybe not so much compared to before). (Note: I don't use binary
newsgroups, and the service I use doesn't include them anyways. That is OK,
because it is the text newsgroups that I am interested in.)

The flaws they list I think are often not as bad as the alternatives.
Additionally, there are mitigations for them, such as kill files, alternative
interfaces, etc.

I also think that you should continue to use NNTP, both Usenet and otherwise
(when making your own newsgroups which are not part of Usenet, I suggest
Unusenet to avoid namespace collision; it uses reverse domain names as name
spaces, like Java and some other stuff does; and like Usenet it can be
federated, but usually isn't). This is a better alternative to mailing lists
and web forums, although it is possible to have multiple interfaces to the
same messages (you could have web forum, mailing list, and NNTP, all
interoperable with each other).

I would like to find more Usenet (and/or Unusenet and/or others; I think there
is also something called "Rock solid network", apparently?) newsgroups for
some stuff I am interested to have, and would like to promote use of NNTP.

(I also think that those who make available Usenet archives should implement
proper From-munging. The only one I downloaded so far, does not do this.)

------
exterrestrial
Reddit is easily the best model for social media, if only the software was
better. The key is prioritizing community over individuals. Subreddit admins
have a ton of freedom, so long as a very small bit of their energy goes toward
a few basic universal rules. This gives them a real sense of ownership.

Healthy social media must support and defend pseudonymity, because it’s the
only way to juggle the fact that everything on the internet can be recorded by
at least one other party. And the only way to defend pseudonymity is to treat
every user the same. Twitter’s “approved” users violates this and Facebook
violates it in many different ways, but Reddit just prioritizes communities
over individuals. This is the root of the solution.

When people treat Reddit like it has some broad character or quality, I have
to disagree. Those people just haven’t found a subreddit that they love,
probably because they haven’t tried to. And I don’t think that needs to he
changed or automated. If a Reddit-like site was the only social media, all
these people would be motivated to create or build their own communities.

------
sequoia
I am sorry to say this (not really, I was young) but I was a USENET troll back
in middle school. I remember coming home from school and running up to my
computer, turning it on and connecting to the internet, downloading new
messages to see what mayhem our (my friend and I shared a handle) latest
provocations had caused. We eventually had an entire forum revolving around
our posts, about 50% of messages were from or related to us. It became
tiresome in time & we stopped.

One anachronism that sounds almost unbelievable to younger internet users was
this: another user threatened to (and did) take down my ISP and report me to
my ISP "for abuse." It sounds so incredibly quaint in the 21st century, but
time was you were expected to behave yourself online, potentially on penalty
of your provider cutting you off. How times have changed.

------
ping_pong
The only issue that killed Usenet was the illegal content, namely MP3s and
child pornography. Back in the early 90s, I knew people that were using Usenet
for regular porn (not kiddie porn).

But it was the MP3s once music piracy got big that became huge. The weight of
all those binary posts, plus the risk of housing child pornography is why most
ISPs shut off access to Usenet.

Reddit is an excellent upgrade on Usenet. If you have a specific interest,
it's usually well-maintained by a moderator or the subreddit dies. And unlike
Usenet, the best comments usually bubble to the top, so you don't have to read
every single comment, the voting mechanism works on well-run subreddits.

------
cjslep
Federating applications allows one to balance the competing factors of
building a local community with its own identity and having that community
participate in a wider whole. The hard part is convincing users to use the
federated applications.

------
btbuildem
> Unfortunately Twitter hashtags suffer from the same structural deficiency as
> Usenet newsgroups: unfettered anarchy collapses at scale.

Perhaps that is a feature and a life-saver after all. Nobody should have a
megaphone that can reach five billion people.

------
nige123
I had fun writing my Master's thesis on 'Flaming' back in 1995. There was a 6
month long flame war between the denizens of alt.tasteless and those quiet,
kind, kitty lovers in rec.pets.cats.

And what about Kibology - where is Kibo now??! ;-)

------
ageofwant
Ah yea, "Eternal September". I'm just old enough to have gotten on usenet when
ES was in full swing, but you could still get a glimpse through the dust of
stampeding trolls and the campfires of the marauding neverdowells of the lost
great edifices that stood in that land before. I have to confess that I was
one of those trolls: Edgy McEdgeLord saying things and acting in ways that
I'll never dare with real people in a real room.

I would like to see AI moderated feeds of some sort, tuned to the preferences
of the seed group. It would be a interesting social experiment at least.

------
Paul_S
If you make a usenet anyone can use you'll just have another twitter or
reddit. The reason usenet was different wasn't the technology but people. If
it had been centralised it would've been the same.

------
aSplash0fDerp
I agree with the notion that early on, participants were pre-qualified by
having to clear a small hurdle of hardware reqs and technical chops to
connect.

The mobile phone changed the barrier to entry forever on Internet 1.0, but if
the satco's decided to launch petabytes of storage into space and require a
specific basestation/modem to access the signal, that small hurdle would limit
participation to those that made an effort and effectively leave 99% of Inet1
behind.

Perhaps not the best example, but all it takes is a small technical hurdle to
limit participation.

------
fao_
BBS systems are still alive (SDF has one, and it's reasonably good and well-
read). So is IRC and mailing lists, the latter of which encourages the
behaviour that Usenet had.

------
tonfreed
I'm convinced the way we'll return to the golden age is if we all jump off
broadcast social media if it's not anonymous. The amount of people I see
demanding special treatment because of their follower count or whatever, or
insisting they're to be free from all criticism is insane. I remember my
parents telling me to never upload photos of ourselves onto the internet, now
20 years later we seem to have forgotten that little bit of common sense

------
thosakwe
What I got from this article is that the main reason to return to Usenet is
the lack of requiring moderators. Wouldn't you still need moderators on a big
enough Usenet instance? There's also the issue of what happens in an
unmoderated community of any size (4chan).

EDIT: Also, I don't see "having more thoughtful discussions" as a good reason
for needing to return to Usenet. Not every discussion _has_ to be thoughtful,
and really, most aren't.

~~~
amiantos
What I got from this article was sheer nostalgia, mixed with early-internet
optimism. The fact is, on the internet these days, you can't allow everyone to
have an equal voice without threat of moderation, because more often than not
people will use that voice to spew hatred and vitriol just for fun. In the
early days it was somewhat easy for good people to shout down or ignore the
bad actors, but these days there are more bad actors than there are good
people--if this isn't the case, it's surely the case that the bad actors
simply have more time, and the good people ultimately flee and do something
else with their time.

~~~
thosakwe
Agreed, especially since it's often that the bad actors aren't even human, and
simply explosive in number. Moderation is hard, but ignoring it is a recipe
for disaster.

------
indymike
I have a lot of positive feelings for Usenet, but it wasn't because of the
lack of central control. Most of the positive was that the internet was
smaller, and the people on Usenet were often very influential. I got to talk
to movie producers, scientists, business executives, rock stars and lots of
very engaged, interested regular people.

The problem with Usenet was that it was that it slowly was infested with
pirates (of the copyright kind), troll, netcops and spammers.

~~~
Mediterraneo10
> pirates (of the copyright kind), troll, netcops and spammers.

Don't forget the mentally ill, who ruined a lot of science newsgroups. It
became hard to find solid discussion among university-employed experts once
the newsgroup attracted cranks who wanted to propound their ideas, e.g.
"Perpetual motion machines are possible!" or "I have deciphered Linear A!"

Even if you killfiled the mentally ill, a lot of the experts got bogged down
in pointlessly trying to refute the cranks, so you would see their replies and
it totally destroyed the group's culture.

That said, I am not sure why you find pirates a problem. Sharing binaries
actually goes back to the golden age of Usenet, before Eternal September.

~~~
indymike
There were quite a few enthusiastic believers in the impossible, but that
happens in real life, too.

The reason pirates were a problem was they were the excuse for removing Usenet
as a service for ISPs. Binaries were most of the bandwidth, legal and storage
cost.

------
dredmorbius
Community and conversation are _exceedingly_ difficult to scale. Mostly they
simply don't, and scaling will kill what little that actually does form.

The article cites a couple of pieces addressing why Usenet died. I'm fairly
familiar with one of those as I wrote it about four years ago:
[https://old.reddit.com/r/dredmorbius/comments/3c3xyu/why_use...](https://old.reddit.com/r/dredmorbius/comments/3c3xyu/why_usenet_died/)

My thinking's evolved somewhat.

First, as noted, Usenet was _small_ by today's standards, with Brian Reid and
others' reports putting total active users at 140k (posting) from 880k with
access, as of 1988, and just shy a million in 1995. Total worldwide Internet
usage in 1996 was about 16 millions (through growing rapidly).

Those would be failed-social-media-site numbers today.

Usenet, like Facebook, formed on and around academic communities, and
specifically _highly selective_ institutions. This created several barriers to
entry / points of control, which were both highly discriminatory _and_ highly
effective at helping dissuade some of the worst forms of misbehaviour. For a
while.

The type of organisation of a discussion ... matters a lot. Usenet's fixed
groups kind of worked and kind of didn't, and we've seen a few additional
models come up since. Ad hoc structures (which Usenet didn't support at all),
personal "salons" (think a typical blog -- Charlie Stross's comes to mind,
also some social media hosts, Yonatan Zunger at G+ for those who were there).
Location, time-centred, event/project based, and others. Clay Shirkey's
concept of fluid organisations (something that can be dated back at least to
Alvin Toffler's _Future Shock_ , 1970, and "ad-hocracies") captures some of
this.

The liability and business-model problems (both upside and risk) are really
huge, and cannot be overstated. I suspect a number of social media / user-
generated-content site/service closures, including quite probably Google+ and
Yahoo Groups, have much to do with this.

Factors-promoting-growth and factors-promoting-continued-survival differ
hugely. The elements which create a viable and attractive social network are
almost entirely _nontechnical_. The elements which are required for a social
network to _continue_ once it's attained (or exceeded) critical mass are
_highly technical_ (though also call on a complex mix of other factors,
business, social, legal, and more). Critically: the lessons and methods that
_get_ you successful won't _keep_ you successful.

Founding cohort is a huge factor for initial success and growth.

Starting a new social network with the express goal of becoming the next
Usenet, or Facebook-killer, or whatever, is almost certainly doomed to
failure. Even more than starting _any_ social network is. Probably better is
to address the needs of a specific, paying, interested, and motivated
community, from which there may be a future growth path.

Tim Ferris's downsides of fame article posted a few days back makes some
really good points about bad actors and scale -- you only need a few dimwits
at a million to a billion followers / fans before negative encounters start
becoming really common. Human brains simply aren't built for mass social
network interactions, whether as one of the many or one of the few.

Any concept in which nominal success criteria are principally predicated on
scale means winner-take-all dynamics, and that there can be at most only one
winner. Maybe a winner and an also-ran or two. Given numerous factors
including several mentioned above, the winner will likely be determined based
on starting conditions and a lot of raw luck. Possibly exchangable for
ruthlessness.

We've existed in a technically-mediated world in which the winners have tended
to be US or Wester-based private corporations. The next decade or several may
see changes to that. US hegemony of the Internet has been strongly criticised.
Several of the possible alternative hegemons don't strike me as notable
improvements.

Given inherent monopolisation of technical communications, questions of closed
vs. open protocols, and of private vs. public ownership and control, should be
asked.

Changing open standards is extraordinarily difficult. I'm inclined to say
impossible. More typically, they're supersceded. Sometimes by other open
standards, increasingly of late, not. The reasons for all of this would make
for some extraoridinarily interesting academic research across numerous
fields.

Agreeing on how to do things is the most underrated technological innovation
of the past 200 years.

Usenet's client-independence is often stated as a benefit. I've argued that
myself. Given variations in message formats and posting behaviours encouraged
by highly different client mechanics, I'm not so sure of that. The Web is the
worst possible applications development environment, but it does impose, not
infrequently by force of law, a consistent UI/UX and format. Supporting _both_
a useful level of behavioural consistency _and_ a diversity of access tools
would be a good but challenging goal.

In my earlier Usenet piece I talked about the obvious advantages of
decentralisation. I've been using several decentralised networks of late
(Mastodon and Diaspora principally). I'm not so certain the advantages are
entirely obvious any more. I think the questions "what problems is
decentralisation supposed to solve, and what new problems is it creating?"
need to be asked.

I'd _like_ to believe decentralisation is a positive. I'm not sure I can.

And I was wrong about Ellen Pao and Reddit. She was doing well under an
extraordinarily challenging environment, in which communicating basic facts
was all but impossible. My apologies for my earlier comments.

~~~
enumjorge
> I'm not so certain the advantages are entirely obvious any more.

What was it about Mastodon and Diaspora that caused you to reconsider the
benefits of decentralized networks? Genuinely curious as I haven’t used either
very much.

~~~
dredmorbius
It's mostly a sense that advocates of radical decentralisation seem to be
operating a bit more on hopium than a solid rational basis, and that the
actual goals and mechanisms aren't clearly or coherently articulated and
reasoned.

Both Mastodon and Diaspora are _mostly_ working out quite well, and have done
far better than numerous other platforms or services. Mastodon has active
development and generally has been implementing new (and for the most part
good) features at an impressive clip.

Diaspora not so much. Which is a significant concern of itself. Failure to
sustain development is a concern. Diaspora has on the order of a million users
(w/in an order of magnitude), and ... wants for love.

More generally, my sense has been that both platforms have some magical
thinking about scaling and what dynamics will or won't appear, which may
eventually collide with reality. Mastodon's had somewhat more experience with
this to my knowledge, notably with an extreme and intolerant political group
adopting the platform (and being promptly defederated by most of the rest of
it).

But I've seen pretty regrettable behaviour by others, including numerous
(mostly small) instance admins.

The Wil Wheaton incident, in which the actor was harassed and bullied by a
small but hyperactive set, was quite regrettable. Lessons _were_ learned from
that.

Ownership, control, and continuity of larger instances has been iffy. I don't
think "everyone rolling their own instance" will happen for quite some time.
Which means that some level of multi-user tenancy, at scale, will have to be a
norm for the forseable future. That's another issue, crossing numerous
concerns.

------
daotoad
The concept of evaporative cooling (from other comments, not the OP) is really
interesting.

If you buy the principle, then a way to encourage quality posts and discourage
poor posts would be to:

1\. Limit the number of posts a person can make. 2\. Reward posts that get
responses with the ability to make more posts.

Obviously you'd want to add some filigree to these principles to allow members
of a conversational thread to post with abandon once they've already joined.

------
rafaelvasco
USENET was before my time (was born in 1987 but only started using computers
seriously in 1999) so I really don't know how it was. But, out of curiosity ,
I've payed a USENET provider for some months to try it. Downloads pretty fast
most of the time, and you can find some pretty obscure shit, or things that
aren't released yet in torrent. But ultimately it's not worth it.

~~~
sequoia
To add upon or when Ulkesh said: whereas today "USENET = pirated stuff" in the
olden days "USENET = Discussion."

~~~
rafaelvasco
I'm aware of that. Never said USENET is and always was about pirated stuff.
Was just giving my impressions on modern USENET.

~~~
sequoia
Ah OK. Your comments about download speeds on a post about recreating
_communities_ like old-time USENET used to have created the impression that
perhaps you were missing the point. I can see you were not! Cheers.

~~~
rafaelvasco
All good :)

------
nickdothutton
Discrimination is the key, discrimination, hierarchy, an elite, but an elite
drawn from the mass. I wrote a little on this within the context of LinkedIn a
while ago myself: [https://blog.eutopian.io/building-a-better-
linkedin](https://blog.eutopian.io/building-a-better-linkedin)

------
shadowgovt
I wonder what the technical hurdles would be to building a USENET client in a
browser these days.

If not directly implementable, a USENET-to-HTTP proxy running in the cloud (to
address the issue the author identifies of "didn't need to be installed")
could obviously be done (and has been done, or near to it, a couple times).

~~~
sequoia
My understanding is that the client isn't the technical challenge, it's the
(federated) servers, and it's more of a business challenge. In particular,
"who pays for them." Usenet servers used to be something ISPs maintained &
your ISP subscription would include (usually) a certain number of hours of
internet access per month, an email account, access to USENET and perhaps a
couple other things.

As it fell out of favor in the mainstream ISPs stopped supporting it/paying
for it & it became a niche service to pay for separately, if I understand
correctly, and the only people willing to pay (by and large) are people
sharing pirated software, media, etc.

~~~
Symbiote
For a while, I used a commercial NNTP service which was free for text-only
newsgroup access. I think I stopped once I started university, as there were
better distractions.

With a quick look on a partial NNTP server (requires registration), the only
groups I used to look at that are still active is the old/retro computer one.
Most of the posts are people still using these computers day-to-day, and
finding problems with Javascript-heavy websites or outdated encryption.

[https://dotsrc.org/usenet](https://dotsrc.org/usenet)

------
himinlomax
I remember that in the late 90s, there was some effort at implementing
distributed voting on Usenet with an out of band protocol. The newsreader I
used implemented it iirc.

This could be implemented in a decentralized way cryptographically. Subscribe
to people whose vote you trust by accepting their cert, you can also have a
web of trust.

------
metalgearsolid
I think brining usenet back is problem solving in reverse. Usenet will not
bring back the joys of early internet, but attempting to revive an old
technology through the collaboration of other curious and passionate people
certainly will.

------
peterwwillis
> _For more on how I plan to incorporate shared ownership into the community
> app I’m building,_

Soooo the whole idea of returning to Usenet is part of your product pitch.

Can we get a giant asterisk on posts that are basically just advertisements?

------
skrowl
I'm old enough to remember when every dial up and early ADSL ISP included
access to their own first-party usenet server. Now I'm paying 3x the cost for
100x the bandwidth, but no usenet server.

------
fortran77
I wonder if the flamewar I started back in 1988, when I suggested that "Lost
in Space" was better than "Star Trek", is still going on. I should check out
rec.arts.tv.startrek and see.

------
rednerrus
Twitter used to be great before everyone and their opinion is great.

People make communities. It's the people that are great and it's the people
that suck. The key is how do you filter people who suck out.

------
anonymousiam
Usenet did not die for the reasons stated in the article. It died because all
of the major ISPs succumbed to pressure from the media companies and stopped
providing news feeds.

------
a3n
Usenet died because it cost infrastructure owners to make space and bandwidth
available for it, over and above the cost of the infrastructure itself.

------
buboard
what was the total population of users on usenet before 2000? any community
turns to a mob above a certain level and rapidly becomes useless. If you wish
to revive usenet style community, build something that is only technically
capable people get to use and aim to gather approximately the same number of
users. some of the new decentralized media are probably heading for this point
.

------
smileypete
Would be nice to have an NNTP interface to read HN

Free agent still seems to work on Win8 :-)

------
olah_1
Obligatory link to Aether as the modern, decentralized Usenet. I highly
suggest everyone looking at this post download the app and join some tech
rooms. Just repost links and help build the community up, quite literally "for
science".

[https://getaether.net/](https://getaether.net/)

~~~
iwalton3
For anyone on Linux that would rather not install Snap, Aether is a standard
electron app. You can unpack the snap and run it as a regular application
using unsquashfs.

It also looks like there is a blacklist for Aether
([https://static.getaether.net/Badlist/Latest/badlist.json](https://static.getaether.net/Badlist/Latest/badlist.json)).
If you're concerned about using this application because someone might post
illegal content, this could be used to prevent that from being a problem. (I'm
not a lawyer though. There may still be legal risk in running software like
this.)

------
trasz
All I want is NNTP access to HN, tbh.

~~~
mothsonasloth
Have a look at ActivityPub

------
kchoudhu
Posted on Substack. Perfect.

------
arbitrage
good lord how old are we. just let USENET die and stay dead, the world moved
on. we should too.

------
yori
Has Usenet really died? I still see many active newsgroups with posts
appearing daily.

~~~
rjsw
I still use it every day too.

~~~
kreddor
I was a usenet user back in the day, but I don't actually know how I would
access it now. Is there any other way than using a commercial provider? My ISP
certainly doesn't provide access and haven't for I don't know how long.

~~~
rjsw
I use the free server at Eternal September [1] It only carries the text
groups, no binaries (so no pOrn).

[1] [https://www.eternal-september.org/](https://www.eternal-september.org/)

------
somesortofsystm
(Disclaimer: 30 years ago, I got on the Internet as a junior operator. My
first task, after setting up email for myself, was to build the company's new
USENET feed. This was the start of a very fast, loud, bumpy rocket ride... and
now here I am, a grumpy old man, wishing we still had USENET... /disclaimer)

All we need, is for the OS distribution vendors to include a way to mount a
global, public filesystem - without involving any third party beyond a DNS
request.

Imagine if Linux and MacOS users could point their machines, immediately upon
install, to a global filesystem - and start publishing to it themselves,
directly from their own machine - without involving third parties, or servers,
or whatever.

Alas, the OS guys won't do this, because they've decided to make money from
ads and tracking peoples habits, so have stopped being decent OS vendors,
these days.

But I keep thinking to myself, surely some kid is out there gluing IPFS and
Debian together in a way that just makes sense. It really does make sense.

I guess, it'll happen soon enough. And when it does, so many big fish are
going to find themselves hungry.

(Perhaps thats also why it hasn't been done yet.)

~~~
dboreham
Here you are: [https://github.com/ipfs/go-
ipfs/blob/master/docs/fuse.md](https://github.com/ipfs/go-
ipfs/blob/master/docs/fuse.md)

------
sneak
"dealing with bad actors", as the author puts it, is censorship by another
name.

Anything truly a public space is going to be filled with things you don't like
seeing. That's the messy part of real freedom for a whole crowd of people.

I recently wrote about 2k words on this exact topic:

From
[https://sneak.berlin/20200211/instagram/](https://sneak.berlin/20200211/instagram/)
:

> _For a moment, put aside the fact that you may or may not want to read any
> of that, or spend time thinking about any of that. Any time that doesn’t
> happen, considering how many people are on the internet and the theoretical
> ideal of any-to-any communication, then some communications are being
> censored (or you’re posting about the weather /your kids). The why and the
> how of that censorship should interest you, even if you like or benefit from
> it most of the time, such as not seeing constant spam in your DMs._

> _Who is permitted to create accounts to speak? What money, rights, privacy,
> or information must they give up to do so? Who doesn’t have access to the
> prerequisites for an account and is excluded from the public square? How
> many different accounts are people permitted? Can people create new accounts
> anonymously? How much or how often are they permitted to post? On which
> topics? How many people are they permitted to message? You can’t follow
> every single account on Twitter, for example. You can’t DM a million people
> in one day._

~~~
krapp
>"dealing with bad actors", as the author puts it, is censorship by another
name.

First, one must accept that bad actors exist, and that all forms of moderation
are not merely attempts at political or cultural oppression.

Second, one must accept that all public spaces, both online and offline,
enforce some degree of restriction on how one can legitimately interact with
that space. I cannot, for example, walk nude in any public place, or shout
obscenities at people with a megaphone without suffering both social and legal
repercussions. Those repercussions are the result of society, even in the
context of a "public" space, attempting to deal with a bad actor.

Online, one has the further restrictions imposed by the architecture of the
software itself, beyond whatever rules are enforced by the nature and
moderation of the platform. Hacker News won't let me make death threats or dox
people, and the software won't let me upload pornographic images.

So, yes, dealing with bad actors is censorship. By your definition, merely
requiring participants to obey the law is censorship. But "censorship" at that
point becomes so abstract and general a concept that it ceases to become a
threat to anyone but anarchists and bad actors, and becomes self-evidently
necessary to have any kind of a civil society or constructive dialogue to
everyone else.

Also, it seems weird to see an attempt at a full-throated defense of
maximalist freedom of speech from someone who claims to require an NDA with a
non disparagement clause for basic social interaction[0].

[0][https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22282579](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22282579)

~~~
sneak
> _I cannot, for example, walk nude in any public place_

To use your example: do you think this is reasonable or just? Do you think
it’s a sane thing to use force to enforce such a thing?

> _Also, it seems weird to see an attempt at a full-throated defense of
> maximalist freedom of speech from someone who claims to require an NDA with
> a non disparagement clause for basic social interaction_

If that’s what you read from that post or that comment, I have done a terrible
job of communicating. You seem to have misread a discussion of social media’s
corporate censorship into “full-throated defense of maximalist freedom of
speech”, which it is absolutely not. If you re-read it carefully you will not
find that conclusion supporter anywhere in the text—I specifically avoided it
because I do not hold those views.

Then, again, when you parsed the circumstances under which I formally ask
people to keep my private information private: it is drastically far removed
from “basic social interaction”.

You seem pretty bent on fiercely mischaracterizing the things I have said or
do.

If you’re not actively trolling and really have sincerely read these beliefs
into the words that I wrote, perhaps a third bit of my recent writing may be
relevant to you: [https://sneak.berlin/20191201/american-
communication/](https://sneak.berlin/20191201/american-communication/)

I can only tell you that your beliefs of my views, articles, and life are
inaccurate and not supported by the data available.

In the event you are actively trolling, well done. I slept on your comment
before replying, because few things in the world make me type more fiercely
than people making demonstrably false statements of fact about things I do or
believe.

