Nothing has changed since Jerry Pournelle wrote 40 years ago when discussing online forums:

>I noticed something: most of the irritation came from a handful of people, sometimes only one or two. If I could only ignore them, the computer conferences were still valuable. Alas, it's not always easy to do.

This is what killed Usenet,[1] which 40 years ago offered much of the virtues of Reddit in decentralized form. The network's design has several flaws, most importantly no way for any central authority to completely delete posts (admins in moderated groups can only approve posts), since back in the late 1970s Usenet's designers expected that everyone with the werewithal to participate online would meet a minimum standard of behavior. Usenet has always had a spam problem, but as usage of the network declined as the rest of the Internet grew, spam's relative proportion of the overall traffic grew.

That said, there are server- and client-side anti-spam tools of varying effectiveness. A related but bigger problem for Usenet is people with actual mental illness (kstrauser mentioned one); think "50 year olds with undiagnosed autism". Usenet is such a niche network nowadays that there has to be meaningful motivation to participate, and if the motivation is not a sincere interest in the subject it's, in my experience, going to be people with very troubled personal lives which their online behavior reflects. Again, as overall traffic declined, their relative contribution and visibility grew. This, not spam, is what has mostly killed Usenet.

[1] I am talking about traditional non-binary Usenet here

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AndrewKemendo 3 hours ago | parent | next [-]

This is consistently true across all human organizations larger than a handful of people. Its a limitation of human communication and alignment

I saw that happen to the ultramarathon subReddit which I founded and I’m the lead moderator. And when I was running a radio station it was consistently the same people who would call in. I see it even in some of the smaller group chats that I’m in

You cannot have a stable community without these types of issues coming up beyond a few or so dozen people

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BigTTYGothGF 3 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

Was that before or after he got kicked off arpanet?

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ylee 2 hours ago | parent [-]

I address that in the comments at <https://www.filfre.net/2022/05/a-web-around-the-world-part-1...>

	▲	BigTTYGothGF 41 minutes ago \| parent [-]
		I'm not particularly convinced, a mention of the arpanet is a mention of the arpanet, and keeping quiet means keeping quiet. I can believe that Pournelle was being the kind of person about whom one might write "most of the irritation came from a handful of people, sometimes only one or two" and that was the real reason he got kicked off, but that's a long way away from being censored for politics.

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octoberfranklin 2 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

> a handful of people, sometimes only one or two. If I could only ignore them, the computer conferences were still valuable. Alas, it's not always easy to do.

> This is what killed Usenet,

You've got to be kidding!

The fact that Usenet was a protocol, with no favored UI (not even a web UI) meant that you could implement "only ignore them" in a totally reliable way. Indeed, this feature was so commonplace that it even had a name: a "killfile".

	▲	ianburrell 36 minutes ago \| parent \| next [-]
		Killfiles were local to each user which is good since each person could control what they saw. It was bad because new users who didn't know about killfiles would see the bad actors. It also meant that could have disjoint conversation so it felt like each thread was its own thing. You would have to keep telling people to not respond to the trolls. The ideal is to have a global filter by moderators for the bad actors, and user killfile to tune that.
	▲	ylee 2 hours ago \| parent \| prev \| next [-]
		Usenet killfiles are not "totally reliable". Nym shifting has always been a thing, even before Google Groups-based commercial mass spamming using constantly changing From: lines industrialized the problem. Killfiles also do nothing for people quoting the person you are trying to ignore, unless you use a thread-based killfile, which of course means you won't see a lot of non-killfiled people's comments. At the end of the day, there is no satisfactory solution to the problem of warped and damaged online personalities other than actually preventing them from being online, which of course has its own difficulties and consequences.
	▲	Marazan an hour ago \| parent \| prev [-]
		Plonk