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Comment by subsection1h | Hacker News Reader

> despite the romantization, i somehow doubt that Usenet was all roses before the "Eternal September"

Usenet was the best discussion platform I've ever used. People who posted questions to comp.lang.c without first reading K&R were commonly killfiled. People who posted questions to the comp.infosystems.www.authoring newsgroups without first reading relevant W3C specs were commonly killfiled. It was awesome. Can anyone direct me to a discussion platform created during the past 25 years where people are blocked or banned for failing to RTFM? I'm not aware of any.

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Note killfiles were per-user (they could be shared, but this was optional and required specific clients), so those blocked people were still visible for non-regulars.

The result was that newsgroups were very different for insiders vs outsiders: insiders saw nice clean message feed, outsiders saw tons of low-content messages with no replies and rare nugget of interesting info.

This was one of the big reasons why Usenet died for me: too much spam and useless messages, as there is no group-wide authority (and no, cancel bots never seemed to work)

Today, if you want heavily moderated group, there is plenty - they are simply scattered on the web. Many of them are phpbb-style forums, some discords and slacks (ugh...).

These are criticisms that are leveraged against stack overflow all the time. I'm more lenient on SO's stance because it at least wants (or claims to) to be a repository for truth, rather then filtering out questions because of "lol noob"

I am sure places like this have their right to exist, and they would probably be a great place to consume… without actively participating. By nature of being strict and exclusionary they will essentially tend towards becoming a relatively small exclusive club perhaps slightly bordering on being an echo chamber. Whether you consider that a bad thing or good, I am not making a judgement call here.

Also the cycle/churn of software is so quick nowadays that manuals are often written as a second or third thought for majority of the projects. So I can not really blame folks for just directly probing for tribal knowledge.

So, in other words, people were banned about as aggressively as they are on Reddit, by a cabal about as small as on Reddit, but they didn't even know they were banned and this is somehow considered a positive thing.

Maybe it's because I'm not at the top % of developers but it feels like this would go over the top for the issues of most developers. I'd guess very few people need to go into uncharted territory nowadays unless using some tiny tool with no documentation to begin with. It's always a big warning light when I notice I'm going deep into anything as it usually means I'm using it for an unintended purpose.

Most of my issues, especially before LLMs have been regarding misunderstanding documentation, knowing I'm somehow misunderstanding it and just needing someone to rephrase it since I'm burnt out going in circles yet have to finish X before the end of the day so I can't let it marinate in my head.

My impression is that communities trying hard to enforce doing your research prior to asking often end up skill issueing plebians. In that line of thinking it might be cool to see a "question difficulty" option on sites like SO. I've never really had a question where I couldn't roughly gauge how complicated it is and if trying to answer questions it'd be cool to be able to roughly filter like you'd do in leetcode.

Well, they were kind of snippy with me on the FreeBSD forum some years ago when they felt like I hadn't done enough on my end, so there's that

> It was awesome.

TBH this doesn't sound awesome, it sounds exactly the hotbed that spawns community drama, passive aggressive behavior and other human stuff you still see to this day :-P.

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