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The spam problem started in 1993 w/ Robert McElwaine spamming all of the groups relentlessly with crackpot content from WUSTL. WUSTL did nothing for a long time because he sued them (and won) when they stopped him putting ads in the campus paper.

I developed a zero day email amplification attack and launched it on a Friday; it worked better than expected and filled the disk on their VAX and the whole campus was down until the next Tuesday.

They couldn’t prove I did it but the central computing facility found a pretence, deleted my account and gave me an empty suntape that allegedly held my files. I still had accounts at the physics and EE departments so it was not a big loss.

McElwaine was out.

The recorded history of USENET spam started in April 1994 with the law firm of Canter and Siegel and their Green Card Lottery scam. I was involved in that too and did not get in trouble for that one but anti-spam activism got me a date with the JA, trips to the Dominican Republic and Brazil, other misadventures and a lot more spam.

Are you talking about Washington University in Saint Louis?

Did not expect to hear wustl in this thread.

Yep.

Sorry, just finally went back to research this lore. Are you sure you're right? It seems he went to University of Wisconsin-Eau Claire https://www.popmartian.com/popnut/mcelwaine/7th-coming/obit....

You know, you're right. I got that detail wrong. Must have been confused by the "W" and midwest.

> completely delete posts

This could be done by sending special "cancel" messages; it was then up to individual Usenet servers to figure out whether to honor these cancel requests, through unspecified criteria. The feature was somewhat hidden away in some Usenet clients to discourage pointless abuse, but it was there.

> A related but bigger problem for Usenet is people of the type this post discusses, those with actual mental illness; think "50 year olds with undiagnosed autism".

IME, these people were mostly entertaining as opposed to genuinely problematic. With killfiles being in common use and 'plonking' being discussed routinely as the standard way of dealing with annoyances, users were meaningfully incented to always be on their best behavior as judged by other forum denizens.

>This could be done by sending special "cancel" messages; it was then up to individual Usenet servers to figure out whether to honor these cancel requests, through unspecified criteria. The feature was somewhat hidden away in some Usenet clients to discourage pointless abuse, but it was there.

In practice the cancel/supersede messages were and are never universally honored.

> The network's design has several flaws, most importantly no way for any central authority to completely delete posts

Notice that HN mods can completely delete posts, but never do so (or at least, not without the target’s permission). Flag, yes, delete, no.

I think it’s a cool distinction, and hopefully future social networks will take a cue from it. Being able to see what’s going on (showdead) felt like an important diff from Reddit, and avoided much of the “un-edit Reddit” wars. (There are sites dedicated to tracking deletions by moderators.)

>I think it’s a cool distinction, and hopefully future social networks will take a cue from it. Being able to see what’s going on (showdead) felt like an important diff from Reddit, and avoided much of the “un-edit Reddit” wars.

I did not know this and am glad to hear it. Yes, I've wished for a long time that Reddit would make all mod actions visible in diff form. Not being able to tell without opening a post/comment while logged out whether it has been hidden by a mod without any notification is maddening.

Yeah, if you go to your profile and turn on “showdead”, you’ll see a lot more stuff. There are some mod actions that aren’t explicitly visible — they can boot comments to the bottom, for example, despite upvote count. But it’s a good compromise.

And I don’t think it would be a good idea for every action to be public. Maybe. It’s one of those things that requires some thought. There are a surprising number of “behind the scenes” actions, and all of them being public would just ignite a lot of “why would you do such a thing” type debate, which is both a distraction and usually mistaken.

Sometimes it’s not mistaken, though, so your idea isn’t without merit.

As someone who was on Usenet regularly until the mid 2000's, I don't think it was the trolls that killed Usenet. They were easy enough to ignore. The younger generations simply never found it, as the WWW forums were much easier to find and grew more popular. For the two dozen or so groups I visited regularly, over time they became the playground of only the old guards, and conversation slowly died out.

> They were easy enough to ignore

not the skilled ones [0], who though rare are, unlike the usenet days, now able to command their own private upvote brigade to amplify their powers significantly beyond the scope of whatever particular forum or network they call home. trolling has gone pro.

" The well-constructed troll is a post that induces lots of newbies and flamers to make themselves look even more clueless than they already do, while subtly conveying to the more savvy and experienced that it is in fact a deliberate troll. If you don't fall for the joke, you get to be in on it. "

[0] http://www.catb.org/jargon/html/T/troll.html

Ok FINE. They were easy enough to ignore in Usenet the 2 dozen or so groups I frequented. There were no noticeable brigades in the groups I used, and upvotes are not a thing in Usenet.

Absolutely. I loved Usenet in the mid 90s. Message boards just seemed like a cool upgrade to Usenet and I didn't have to bother with a reader. I doubt I even had a reader installed by 2002ish.

Usenet Trolls operated individually and were easy to ignore.

The article discusses virtue signaling mobs, which are much harder or even impossible to ignore, especially once they have infiltrated whole organizations.

The novelty here is that the article calls the mobs mentally ill, not the grumpy individual (who will also be persecuted by mobs these days).

> 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.

Should have been forked into a version with only *.edu allowed.

>>Should have been forked into a version with only *.edu allowed.

That's what the Internet/NSFNET and Gopher were until the mid-90s

> This is what killed Usenet,

Nah. If you've actually have used the (non-binary) Usenet, you have certainly come across plonks [1] and killfiles.

And how do I wish for a killfile for web discussion forums...

> This, not spam, is what has mostly killed Usenet.

What killed Usenet is that the shiny new WWW was more attractive for new users (and easier to use than a newsreader).

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Plonk_%28Usenet%29

>Nah. If you've actually have used the (non-binary) Usenet, you have certainly come across plonks [1] and killfiles.

As I said in my initial comment, I am well aware of killfiling (And why are you distinguishing between "plonks" and killfiles? At most, a plonk is a public announcement of putting someone in one's killfile.)—i.e., client-side anti-spam/anti-bad behavior tools—and server-side tools for similar purpose.

>What killed Usenet is that the shiny new WWW was more attractive for new users (and easier to use than a newsreader).

I don't disagree that WWW is more attractive and easier to use than Usenet; the resulting flood of individual forums of course seriously affected Usenet traffic. (In turn Twitter, Facebook, and especially Reddit have mostly killed off the individual forums.)

I nonetheless believe that misbehavior—quite possibly because of mental illness—and not spam is the major problem for Usenet today. Spam is, while still a problem, something both familiar and impersonal. But when entire newsgroups are taken up by mentally deranged individuals fighting their imagined grievances against others, participating in on-topic discussion is that much more difficult, and because said individuals often change their From: lines on the fly killfiling them is all the more difficult as well.

This is a paper I wrote on this topic and a proposed solution based on the work of Hal Finney. You might find it interesting:

https://www.stampchat.io/whitepaper.pdf

What killed Usenet, IRC, etc is new technology/platforms not "irritation from a handful of people". If that was the case, facebook, reddit, twitter, etc would have died a long time ago.