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> It's sad, but that's the state of affairs on the web as we have it today.

Hasn't this been the meta since ever since?

Imagining you'd know all about that with camarades. It was my first exposure to web streaming as a teen way back in the day. Initially, it didn't strike me as a porn platform, but it didn't take long before it felt that way.

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132-column lineprinter nudes were in circulation well before the web. (and "typewriter art" predates even the IBM 1403)

At one point there was a movie shot at SAIL with rather open minded approaches to computer-human interaction. In the early 1970's (as in the twenties?), "hangups" were for inhibited squares. (If they'd been running unix instead of waits, they'd probably have invoked nohup(1) for the shoot.)

Going back yet another century prior, we find the Victorian equivalent to OnlyFans: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23791112

Yes, that is one of the reasons. Also, helping a number of other platforms to combat all kinds of forms of abuse. Unfortunately, as you correctly surmise, I have some relevant experience which some people find useful to tap into.

Camarades went 'downhill' about 6 months in when it went mainstream and more and more people that had other ideas of where we should go with it joined. Then they brought their buddies and it was 'game over', we had to decide what to do about it. This roughly coincided with the ad market collapse and drove the decision to put the porn behind a paywall to finance the rest of it. Which worked well for more than a decade.

NetMeeting was filled with all sorts of Perverts in the late 90s.

NetMeeting... there’s a word I haven’t seen in decades.

Tell us more!

At the beginning there were exponentially fewer people and syndicates, so there was much less total volume of abuse.

Virtually all the ccurrent modes of online abuse were present in at least some form on Usenet and dialup networks by the late 1980s / early 1990s.

Content piracy to a much lesser degree as bitrates were so slow and expensive (though texts were fair game), but stalking, harassment, propaganda, bigotry, fraud, spam, etc., yes.

Keyword search of worldwide public content and metadata was not readily available, so the ability to stalk and harass both people and topics was vastly reduced compared to now.

(FidoNet existed, but it was not easy to perform a full-content search of it, compared to eg. mail-archive.com now.)

Not trivial, but possible. Kibo and Serdar Argic managed, at least.

Kibo only grepped the newsgroups he subscribed to, and didn’t have a full UseNet pipe running all groups through grep (unless I misremember the history there).

The problem isn’t full-text search of a forum you’ve already signed up for.

Re: Kibo groups coverage:

Legend has it that if you include "Kibo" in your post to any of Usenet's more than 5,000 discussion groups, the all-seeing Kibo will respond to you.... [James "Kibo"] Parry spends about two hours per day as Kibo - tending a filter that collects any mention of "kibo" in any newsgroup.

https://web.archive.org/web/19961128094925/https://www.wired...

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