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Comment by dsr_ | Hacker News Reader

At this point, the Usenet servers which took massive amounts of bandwidth and disk space take tiny amounts of bandwidth and disk space (assuming you don't allow binary posts).

Maybe it's time for Usenet to come back.

- Truly federated

- Topic focus instead of people-focus

- Killfiles!

- Proper threading

- Standards-based servers and clients

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I really like NNTP, but spam was becoming a huge problem in the Usenet and its nature makes it harder to assert the identity of a poster.

I mean, if people want to give out helpful information about gland enlargement alongside links to where supplements can be purchased for the astonishingly low price of $12 a pill, who are we to try to stop them? Provide an unfiltered free speech platform and the stronger ideas will win, right?

Just provide more effective tools allowing users to tune their own feeds.

With a profit or ideological motive, I can spam you, and shout over all meaningful communication much faster than you can block me.

Yeah, and the idea of a spam filter won.

Spam filters can be opt-in. Spam filters can be federated. Spam filters can be local. It simply isn't true that decentralized censorship resistant systems fundamentally require users to be inundated with spam.

I wish that were the case.

Usenet over UUCP worked just fine, with UUCP serving up email too on the dial-up batch syncs.

> Killfiles!

Ah yes, censorship rears its ghastly head again. Or, what a quaint approach to spam.

The charitable explanation is that you don't know what a killfile is. It is a personally created and maintained list of subject lines and/or poster addresses that you don't want to see. They can be limited to specific groups or be universal; they can be used to remove entire threads or just the messages that match.

In other words, it's a personal filter on incoming information. It's Joo Janta Peril-Sensitive Sunglasses. If it is censorship, it is a censor who works for you, obeys your commands, and never imposes your opinions on anyone else.

And it's not particularly good for spam, nor does anyone think that is its purpose. A killfile works against persistent trolls and idiots.

As I recall, killfiles couldn't keep up with the glut of spam that happened.

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