I have a lot of sympathy with this. I use some topic specific old school web forums and they feel better all round than the discord channels/forums.

I suspect it's an age/attitude thing. The implicit "My forum my rules" autocracy shows its upsides on a well curated space: trolling and spam dealt with rapidly.

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DocTomoe 4 hours ago | parent | next [-]

The generation before that (yours truly) still remembers the usenet glory days, and the liberal use of the kill file [1].

[1] https://www.catb.org/jargon/html/K/kill-file.html

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ggm 2 hours ago | parent | next [-]

I think I was on more than I added. I kept seeing these posts which said "plonk" and then.. nothing.

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Terr_ 4 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

While I recognize the name of the domain, I'm getting some weird TLS cert warnings.

	▲	naturalmovement 3 hours ago \| parent [-]
		It's a cleartext http site. No TLS. The link is bad.

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JamesTRexx 4 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

Browser warning: www.catb.org uses an invalid security certificate.

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lyu07282 an hour ago | parent | prev [-]

it was just a few years before my time, I sometimes read through old threads on usenet it feels like internet archeology. If you still remember it, what do you think about how it compares with today's discussion culture?

Killfiles are interesting, but nowadays it seems almost impossible to block everyone crazy on X/Twitter, perhaps more feasible back then

a few months ago for example from my usenet archeology: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47160709

	▲	ggm an hour ago \| parent [-]
		It was slower. In a beneficial way. There was a low enough cohort you could talk to people of some significance or notoriety and get a response. The barrier between email and news was dilute, osmotic pressure effects meant things leaked. A lot of specialist interest lists on BITNET or the European news network (Jacob Palme in Sweden ran something I used to read on a dec-10) stayed in their own island, so the middle east camel breeding BITNET mailing list which ran out of the hospital network on IBM hardware didn't bridge but comp.lang.c went to a lot of places. BDFL is not quite the tone but the "great renaming" was imposed not consensus. Likewise Brad Templeton and others first forays into commercial service came as a bit of a surprise. Honeydanber (Peter Honeyman and somebody else) made !addressing go away and we loved it but they persisted in corners. Decnet also meant user::path forms so there was a lot of background processing masking things. people got upset about surprising things. Kremvax made some people very angry. Mark V Shaney was funny but punking the net.singles people was less funny but when we found out everyone was a construct of Rob Pike's imagination it became funny again. BIFF WAS REAL. Many things like "real programmers don't eat quiche" pre-dated Usenet but got mothered in. We did paper samizdat spoof tech papers in snailmail long after Usenet made them a bit redundant.

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naturalmovement 4 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

It notably lacked up/downvoting which is a cancer foisted upon open discussion.

Discussions ran chronologically as they would in real life.

Imagine having a remote control you could point at people to increase and decrease their speaking volume. That's what voting is.

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Little_Kitty 31 minutes ago | parent | next [-]

A problem on forums was people quoting large comments, adding their response of "this" and then an additional signature. Digg and later Reddit moving that junk out of sight and gradually educating people not to do so was a big win.

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devilbunny 2 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

One thing that Slashdot moderation got right is that you can’t be more than +5 or less than -1. Groupthink is much less forceful with those limitations.

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jusssi 2 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

There's an important distinction: raising / lowering the volume of someone in general, or just a particular thing they just said.

The good old "open discussion" at forums, as I remember it, used to manifest verbal lynch mobs, that would often target specific people instead of what they said.

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ggm 4 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

Remote mute control was contentious in early MBone apps. Lots of good discussion about why they were useful and when.

Cisco webex went out the door with one and it's wonderfully "undemocratic" and equally useful. Just stop. Done.

Volume, hadn't thought about it like that.

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

That sounds horribly toxic and corrosive for a dinner party.

It sounds pretty useful for when you're chatting while waiting for the bus and there's someone on drugs there screaming obscenities.

Unfortunately the Internet is both.

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notabotiswear 4 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

The irony in me pressing the upvote button on this post…

	▲	socalgal2 3 hours ago \| parent \| next [-]
		Yea, I think HN should remove the them. Or at least not display them.
	▲	ErroneousBosh 13 minutes ago \| parent \| prev [-]
		> The irony in me pressing the upvote button on this post… this ;-)