Comment by ggm
16 hours ago
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.
I've sometimes suspected it's an investment thing. A Discord server or subreddit is free, can be setup or abandoned at any time, and (on Reddit) can be taken over by the site or another team whenever you move on.
So, there's a not much of a reason to care how badly you're running the place. You didn't put any time or effort into its setup, and you're not losing money if the community dies out.
Meanwhile a standalone forum costs money to host, and it feels bad to pay $X per month for a ghost town. So, there's at least some level of interest in keeping it running smoothly and fixing issues, since otherwise you're wasting your time and money.
Alternatively, having to pay might just mean the average forum owner is an adult with real world experience rather than a kid or teen or internet shut in that's running the community for laugh/sees it as a quick way to get power over people.
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
I think I was on more than I added. I kept seeing these posts which said "plonk" and then.. nothing.
While I recognize the name of the domain, I'm getting some weird TLS cert warnings.
It's a cleartext http site.
No TLS. The link is bad.
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Browser warning: www.catb.org uses an invalid security certificate.
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
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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> nowadays it seems almost impossible to block everyone crazy on X/Twitter, perhaps more feasible back then
Seems to block everyone crazy on Twitter-that-was.
A few thoughts.
First, many people back then did not have permanently-online systems. You loaded the new stuff, went off-line, read, answer maybe, and uploaded your answers.
That gave you some time for meaningful answers (and - if you went the flamewar route - be smarter about flaming. Some got an almost baroque way of hiding flames in meaningfully-sounding sentences, which was, at least, funny).
I loved the aspect of doing the filtering on my end - not by an admin who decided what or what not I was allowed to read based on their own political leanings. Everyone had a freedom of speech, and I had the freedom to listen.
Can kill files be implemented today? Sure they could - we already have a pre-filtering by the algorithm curating what we see - I get very few hobby horsing stuff in my feed, because that's just not what interests me. This is analogous to the olden days, where the group, and the entry barrier acted as a pre-filter.
In my part of the usenet, real names were considered 'good manners'. That changed how people talked to each others. Of course, no-one could check if you were really called Klaas Hinkelman - but xXxStoneFakker666xXx was promptly laughed away - or landed in the kill file. plonk.
Another aspect that I really liked - and kept until today, was quoting inline, picking out individual questions of what could be a long article, and going into detail, like this:
And there was no upvote / downvote system, no karma, nothing like that. This removed the incentive to be 'popular', it was enough to be interesting, or just 'more correct'. It was perfectly ok to share a link to your private homepage, or take information there. Because no-one 'owned' an usenet group, there was no walled garden.
It is my strong belief that what killed the internet was not the September that never ended™, but vote gamification.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
The irony in me pressing the upvote button on this post…
Yea, I think HN should remove the them. Or at least not display them.
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> The irony in me pressing the upvote button on this post…
this
;-)
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.
It is the website owner's decision to allow people on drugs screaming obscenities on their platform. They are allowed to kick those people out, and you're allowed to leave if you don't like the people in that community. Good moderation is a requirement for healthy communities.