I was fine with the flame wars, crapfloods, etc, because at least it was human (except for incredibly primitive bots). The spammers were even humans, and might even talk to people briefly before spamming again. It felt very different. Dealing with assholes is normal and possible, dealing with faceless entities and bots is like punching a wall.

Generally though, I agree that Usenet was difficult after Eternal September unless you stayed on top of your killfile.

Mailing lists were pretty manageable, and the phpBB era was fantastic if you found some boards you liked.

I remember the bad parts, and they were less bad. Flame-war practitioners, racists, New Atheist axe-grinders, and mentally ill cranks were not exactly engaging in productive discussion, but they were still recognizable as authentic human beings with a life outside that particular obsession. Usenet and web forums allowed users to customize their self-presentation with avatars and sigs, and people often used the same nick across communities so you could see their range of interests in music or coding or whatever.

Compare that to e.g. Reddit today where successive redesigns reduced features that made each subreddit feel like a close-knit community of regulars, instead trying to get people addicted to endless-scroll engagement where everyone is a stranger. Or Twitter where, if you browse through the Nitter interface on a desktop browser, you can readily see that many strident political profiles are bots with a profile photo from “This Person Does not Exist” or African/Indian Subcontinent troll-farm employees.

> Old usenet was full of vicious flame wars.

*plonk* (It's why kill files where created.)

This so much!

I recently found an old email thread by accident. I recoiled in horror: the vitriol was unbelievable, people name calling each other in the worst possible way. The same people are much more mature these days. The new people in the same community likewise. Times have changed: for the better.

I think this is more about us all being on platforms that value engagement and simply don't care if that "engagement" is people fighting with each other. The Internet always had whackjobs... in fact on a per capita basis I'd bet that in the early days we're praising as "we all got along" the whackjob ratio was higher than it is today and it has since regressed to the norm... but the systems structurally tended to discourage the nastiness. There was still plenty of it, but on Usenet, you could add the guy who enraged you to the point of blinding rage to your ignore file... and you could add the two guys who refuse to ignore each other to your own ignore file. In the Weblog space you could just, you know, not read that other blog that infuriates you. On custom forums the community was small and tended to evict people.

It was not paradise. But it was more workable, when the platforms weren't designed by PhDs to seek out and exploit your outrage for their ad clicks.

Gamergate was definitely an inflection point, though my opinion on it has changed throughout the years. I think it was the first internet squabble where throwing around accusations of "isms" became a common tactic. And in defense of what? "Gaming journalism" is as bad as it's ever been. There's a real "access media" problem in the industry as well as a laser focus on social issues at the expense of almost everything else. Mostly though, it's just a bunch of hype (wo)men for large games publishers. I wish we could get the kind of cutting, acerbic game criticism that Pitchfork delivered for music in the early 2000s - the medium would be better for it.

The leaked Epstein files have revealed that the GamerGate "outrage" was largely astroturfed[1]. It was one of the first large-scale experiments run and observed by people like Steve Bannon, Jeffery Epstein and Peter Thiel on how "flood the zone" with outrage and contradictory information, allowing people to be manipulated for political gain.

[1]: https://clownworld.news/epstein-gamergate-chan-culture

You were never on 4chan before that I guess?

Yes, what we remember is interesting, especially while reflecting on posts such as OPs. The Internet that I grew up with didn't have bots, neighbourhood gossipers, weaponised propaganda... we spurned people trying to sell stuff. My teenage Internet predated widespread use of email, so predated spam. Maybe my rose-coloured glasses remember a smaller number of real people and a demographic that was closer to my own.

>I remember a lot of bad natured Usenet flame wars.

In that swearing or bad faith arguments were involved, sure.

In their nature, breath, and impact outside the web, no.

"Flame wars" back in the 90s were entertainment for the people involved.

And yet those look so quaint (in scope, certainly) nowadays.

A lot of Facebook is people with their real names posting vitriolic bile in full view of their entire real life family and friends.

I don't think Real Name policies are the solve. It still doesn't matter when you interact with 1,000 random real names in the comments whom you'll never have to reconcile with in real life. The latter is the important part. The medium itself reduces people to content and encourages context collapse.

I don't know, in the mid to late 90s I was a child on BBS, and a lot of those were semi-anonymous. Perhaps it was just scale, for that. A couple hundred to a few thousand people at most seemed enough, but also mods did work. I guess there was a certain amount of effort to get going, and maybe that was also a gate. Even the speeds, perhaps, acted as a filter.

> Something like Reddit, but with everyone's real names and contact information attached

This is what some Europeans governments are effectively trying to achieve, although hamfistedly (as governments typically do).

We definitely need a replacement for Twitter/X for mainstream journalists, politicians, and other leaders, to interact in.

I mean, isn't that just NextDoor?