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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

>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 one of those funny things about internet forums and social media: it favors people who have the time and inclination to post a lot, and obviously in some cases you get cranks occupying a space and flaming regulars. People who don't have energy or time to fight back eventually give up on debating these people and may end up leaving a space, which leaves just the cranks or the crank-adjacent.

I often think about how even with social media, you're free to follow whoever you want, but over time you'll find some people you follow post a whole lot more than others. They have time and inclination to post a lot and as a result, you end up hearing their opinions more than others, so they kind of have a subtle power. Obviously you can unfollow them if you like, but it makes you think about how online spaces can easily be dominated by people who can and want to be online all the time.

What if a platform showed me equal amounts of content from all of my followeds?

There's fraidyc.at which is quirky but does exactly that for multiple platforms and is based on RSS (i think)

Like an RSS feed reader or messenger client? I would definitely prefer that.

See my sibling comment about fraidc.at

Every online social problem was first experienced by Usenet. Every social protocol contains an informal bugridden incomplete implementation of half of Usenet.

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

Was that before or after he got kicked off arpanet?

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

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.

> 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".

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.

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.

Plonk

I can't stop laughing at the first entry and this simple joke:

> he gained international notoriety for his claims that [...] mass and time are equivalent. (With regard to the second claim, it was suggested on the "sci.astro.amateur" newsgroup that his demise be observed with a gram of silence.)

ABIAN was always my friends and my favourite, from our time on Usenet! His all caps .sig with "equivalence of MASS and TIME" is something I will always treasure.

with some not–so–subtle changes, maybe he was onto something: angular momentum has the same units as energy.

Angular momentum has energy x time units.

These unit equivalences have to be carefully interpreted. Like when things are multipled, are they in the same direction? Torque has the same units as work: force x distance, i.e. energy. But the force is perpendicular to the distance; it's completely different, and not a simple scalar value: torque is a vector with an orientation in space. Moving something against friction over 10cm, and using a 10cm bar to apply leverage, are entirely different.

> skiing enthusiast banned by court order in 1999 from posting on the Usenet discussion group "rec.skiing.alpine", after engaging in a flame war with other online posters. The heated exchanges lasted for months, eventually escalating into death threats, until a police detective from Seattle posted a request for all involved to calm down. All involved did except Abraham...

I'm sorry, this was probably annoying to all involved, but also so hilarious. Not least of which picturing a detective, who joined the force thinking he was going to solve murders and maybe even get a lead on D.B. Cooper sighing as he posted on a message board.

https://groups.google.com/g/rec.skiing.alpine/c/frIx-J1XpnI

Reading one of the original threads involving Scott is...really something. Boy, the early internet was very weird.

Also, that dude is completely nuts.

I regret wasting ten minutes on reading all of that...

Happy to see Erik Naggum on this list - its the one I really remember the posts, mostly in a very "particular style" which was very entertaining to me (reading it a few years later).

I kinda miss that style of poster and understand it cannot come back. But if the world is big and diverse then I prefer that that kind of people can exist.

I'm going to disagree with the summary of Serdar Argic. My belief is that the Turkish government financed a grad student at University of Minnesota, Ahmet Cosar, to do the spamming. It is as well known that Uunet, and early ISP, had a "pink contract" with Cosar that allowed him to spam. Cosar lost his student visa, had to return to Turkey.

Ah, The Usenet Oracle. I fondly remember late night drunken college Usenet Oracle sessions back in the early 90s, competing to see who could make it to the Best Of digests. It often ended up with us realizing eventually that nobody else was emailing the Oracle, so we were just getting each others questions.

Globally 0.29% of people suffer from schizophrenia (lifetime risk of 1%) so it shouldn't have been surprising Usenet (or, really, any forum system without moderation or some similar kind of control) would experience their presence.

Why wasn't Henry Spencer listed as a Usenet personality (the good kind)?

https://www.who.int/news-room/fact-sheets/detail/schizophren...

Schizophrenia affects approximately 23 million people or 1 in 345 people (0.29%) worldwide.

That's a lot of people.

I'm starting to think Archimedes Plutonium was wrong about his Plutonium Atom Totality conjecture.

I remember being called out by name in an Archimedes Plutonium rant around 1993. I also had a post referenced in the comp.lang.c FAQ for a few years. That's the closest I've come to celebrity. The internet before the web brings back memories.

I better not dwell to long or I'll have flashbacks t coding X/Motif UI's.

>comp.lang.c

Chapter and verse, please.

Dan

There is a gem of a sci.math thread where Archimedes Plutonium claims to have proved the Riemann Hypothesis and Terrance Tao (before he was quite as famous, but still!) replies to him pointing out his errors.

Also TIL Archimedes Plutonium was actually his legal name.

I have the dubious distinction of being in the Net.Legends.FAQ. I'm glad I didn't rise to the level of ending up in this Wikipedia article.

Wow, what a nostalgia trip. We had our fair share in the comp.sys.amiga.* groups.

I feel bad about one in particular. Don't get me wrong: he was incredibly annoying and liked to jump into nearly every single thread and turn it into some persecution complex thing. I was unkind to him, as were many others.

Looking back, it seems obvious to me that he had some mental issues and was battling demons the rest of us didn't see. I wish younger me had the wisdom to just killfile him and pretend he didn't exist. Whatever his problems, I'm sure I didn't make the world any nicer by yelling at him.

Sorry, man. I'd have handled that differently now.

Most of these are negative in some way, except for the "Other personalities" section.

There's a lesson here somewhere.

Kibo seems pretty harmless, I found an archive of his and had a good laugh. That must've been in the 00's.

B1FF sounds like he would have been right at home on weird Twitter

As far as I know there is no link between, say, talk.bizarre and weird Twitter, but it's a sign that the same basic impulses are universal. I'm sure that in 1776, a few dedicated oddballs were creating snarky weird in-jokes on broadsides that nobody read except them.

Didn't John Titor also post his warnings on Usenet?

[dead]

I am very convinced that a number of early X-Files plots (or sub-plots) were inspired by threads on Usenet.

Is that guy in comp.theory still saying he's solved the halting problem and been suppressed by big computer science for 25 years?

maybe he’ll stop, maybe he won’t. There’s no way to know

I doubt it is a thing anymore, but if you were in a NOC and said, "...there is no cabal." you could expect at least some portion of the people present to turn around and hail, "Long Live The Cabal!" It was a usenet admin shibboleth that I still laugh at every time I hear it.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/There_Is_No_Cabal

Narrator: there was, in fact, a cabal

That's just what the cabal wants you to think.

The list lacks Derek Smart, so it's not a real list.

I was looking for this and finally found it in the comments.

Derek Smart [1] is the indie developer behind the ambitious (and buggy) space sim Battlecruiser 3000AD [2]. He is known for his legendary Usenet presence in the 90s, and engaged in massive, aggressive flamewars with anyone who criticized his game or physics engine. He adopted the "combative game dev" archetype long before social media existed.

Now that he has been mentioned, there's a small chance he will drop by.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Derek_Smart

[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Battlecruiser_3000AD

Not Usenet, but early www.

https://www.timecube.net

No mention of Scott Nudds?

Scott Nudds was a guy who trolled comp.lang.c and a few other programming newsgroups. He was noted for his phrases "Unix and C are dying, this is a good thing." and "C pushers will do anything to defend their sick religion. I, on the other hand, prefer honesty." For a while, the usual reference to "making demons fly out of your nose" (a humorously valid potential response by the compiler when it encounters undefined behavior) was often replaced with "making Scott Nudds fly out of your nose".

Wherever you are now, Scott Nudds, you are remembered. A hero and vanguard to the Rust Evangelism Strike Force—because C really is dying now, and that's probably a good thing.

SsZERO is another, whom I've mentioned before, but his appeal was more limited:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42218587

We can talk about C's demise after the last COBOL application is retired.

It's not valid for a compiler to make demons fly out of your nose, since compilers are constrained by the capabilities of your hardware and the laws of physics.

It's a C compiler, and it's allowed to anything if it sees UB.

Well, if a compiler were to do so it would not be in violation of the standard. Whether or not such a thing is physically possible is an implementation detail outside the scope of the standard.

I mean, there are certainly similarly odd and known HN personalities. They are different though, they have adapted to survive active moderation.

RIP Terry Devis.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/TempleOS

Managed to find his HN user id and read what he wrote.

I don't recommend anyone doing that. Just sadness.

It was extra sad watching the transition from when he was a perennial HN poster known only to a niche within a niche to 4chan discovering him and turning him into a meme because they loved his racist rants and started “jokingly” feeding his delusions in comments to his YouTube vlogs.

Whenever I see praise for 4chan on HN as a last remnant of the “good” internet I think of that (and the girl I went to HS with who they cyber stalked while a minor almost to the point of suicide even after she deleted her entire online presence).