Your summary is incorrect, and insulting. That is not how it happened. The old academic usenet was more than content to discuss sensitive topics. The problem with post-September usenet was spam.
Small groups were ok. As soon as a group had any reasonable traffic, the spammers moved it. Since the spammers didn't care about conversation, they didn't need to maintain stable identify and evaded killfiles. They could quickly drowning out the topic with 10x ads. Not wanting this is not about being uncomfortable - it was about swimming in 90% garbage ads.
> Your summary is incorrect, and insulting. That is not how it happened. The old academic usenet was more than content to discuss sensitive topics.
I see no insult towards you, or anyone else in particular. In fact, to the opposite, others here are saying Usenet died due to lack of content moderation - aka other people enforcing their will on others.
> The problem with post-September usenet was spam.
Now I know you're just guessing. The 'September that never ended' was when AoL peered with internet gateways to bring everyone on the AoL network to the internet, along with knowing little about computers or anything. "Me too" was around then, as a derogatory comment of what an AOLer would say. Even Weird Al in "All about the Pentiums" had a line to put them down like Old Yeller.
Usenet really died in 2007 winter-2008 Spring, when all major ISPs killed their subscriber Usenet servers. They never officially stated why, but grumbles that made it out in the systems engineering folk were that it was alt.binaries were eating up loads of bandwidth, and much of it was 100% piracy.
Spam was a thing, but most of us used good NNCP clients that removed a good 90+% of spam. And having lived through when Usenet was ubiquitous, I fully reject your hypothesis.
And you might want to consider taking conversations here more impersonally. Feeling "insulted" over a comment that was directed to nobody in particular isn't healthy.
> Usenet really died in 2007 winter-2008 Spring, when all major ISPs killed their subscriber Usenet servers. They never officially stated why
It was because the attorney general of New York (Andrew Cuomo) made a deal with major ISPs to restrict access to child pornography[1]. ISPs decided to drop their usenet service in response.
Towards the late 2000s, alt.binaries was irrelevant to consumer ISPs etc, as it was not available. It was trivial for any systems engineer to exclude alt.binaries.* from their news server, and most did.
Usenet went from students posting at a modest number of elite schools, .mil sites, and a relative handful of tech companies--often under their real name--to the Eternal September and beyond. Like many problems with the Internet over the years which occurred because systems that grew up on the assumption of mostly trustworthy actors.
What if someone followed you around and just kept saying "You're a cunt. You're a cunt. You're a cunt." over and over?
Any time you're not on private property. "You're a cunt".
Is that free speech?
I mean, I'm allowed to be on public property. I'm allowed to say whatever I want. Exercising those two rights means I'm allowed to follow you around and call you a cunt.
You'd probably try to say "No, that's harassment". Aye, but now you've agreed there should be limits on speech.
When people say that there should be no restrictions on speech, it's usually about content, not manner. No free speech absolutist would think it's acceptable to tell someone "you're a wonderful person" through a 600 dB speaker (if it was possible to construct such a device). If I scream at you so loudly that it liquefies your organs, I don't think that the fact the sound happened to form words makes the act any less harmful. Why should it be any different with harassment?
If they have that kind of time, and no life I would find that rather amusing...
I am sure they would tire of it long before I would get offended by it. and I can assure you I would could, and have responded far more decisive and penetrating insults...
If there's one thing we've learned from the last two-decades-odd of the Internet being ubiquitous, it's that one cannot, in fact, outlast the harassers. They organize and they take shifts. They can keep the harassment going as long as it takes. They can keep it up until you are dead. And they can do it at scale.
That's why cutting off their ability to do it through various channels is so important.
Not sure how the "Freedom from consequences" bit enters the conversation here.
"Free Speech" that has consequences from the government isn't free speech. The "Freedom from consequences" has to do with private entities reacting to your speech. For example, asking you to leave the premises or getting banned.
Is it possible to separate free speech from free consequences? I'm not sure it can be. From your house, to government, to nature, doesn't every person/place have their own set of compromises/laws/rules for every set of conditions? Are you saying there should be no laws or no moderation, anywhere, at all? I don't think you mean to. Also, should 'online' be distinct/exempt from all other human endeavours, where rules don't apply? Anywhere there is a line between individuals and governments regarding free speech, and indeed law, then neither free speech, or law, exist truly. But it is difficult to give an example of a country where this is not so.
I am reminded of the other hot potato 'privacy'. The 'Solid Project' has an interesting way of dealing with that, which may also have a positive effect on how free speech evolves.
> Are you saying there should be no laws or no moderation, anywhere, at all?
I wanted to address this first. Nowhere did I mean to imply that I think there shouldn't be limits on speech or no moderation. There should certainly be some speech that is illegal (Calls to violence, harassment, etc), and web platforms absolutely have a right to moderate.
But, I think everyone can agree that the right to free speech granted by the First Amendment does mean that you can criticize the government, for example. If someone tries to claim "Yes, you have the right to criticize the government, but the government can arrest you for it! Freedom of speech does not mean freedom from consequences!", then I would have to ask that person what they think "Freedom of speech" means, and what a "right" means, because to me, a "right" means either "You are allowed to do the thing and the government must not interfere or retaliate" (ie, free speech) or "You must be allowed access to the thing, and the government must provide it for you if you can't provide it yourself" (ie, a lawyer when you are on trial).
The notion of "You have the right to something, but the government will punish you for it" is just completely non-sensical.
But...all this only applies to government. Private entities are another matter entirely. They have the right to remove content and users however they want. Your freedom of speech does not trump their right to decide what gets displayed on their platform.
Private entities can also react however they want. If you go on a racist tirade on Twitter, your employer has a right to fire you, because having an extreme racist in the workplace is just asking for trouble.
Billy Joel's rule: "You are free to speak your mind, but not on my time."
That is, sure, you can speak to whoever wants to listen. You can't make anyone want to listen, though - including, you can't make a forum want to listen. It wants to talk about gardening, and you want to talk about the latest Covid conspiracy theories? Great, knock yourself out, talk about your conspiracy theories - but not on the gardening forum.
See, I support free speech. I support their freedom to talk about gardening without having to wade through a bunch of conspiracy theory posts. "Post anything anywhere" reduces actual communication - willing speakers finding willing listeners - because the listeners give up rather than wade through a bunch of garbage that they don't care about. I support their freedom to talk about gardening without getting drowned out.
But here the question is who is doing the controlling
Usenet is a open protocol, not a forum that someone owns. So if you support moderation on open protocol then you support most likely systemic, or worse government censorship. Not someone controlling their own property
With Usenet there was plenty of tools (just like with email today) to block spam, content, users etc at the client level if an individual did not want to see certain speech.
With time those tools would have improved just like they have with email
> So if you support moderation on open protocol then you support most likely systemic, or worse government censorship.
Feel free to stop telling me what I support. You're lousy at it.
If a protocol is open, that doesn't mean that my servers are. I'm moderating my servers, not the protocol or the traffic carried using the protocol. (In the same way, you don't control who drives by your house, but you control who's allowed in the door.)
I don't want systemic censorship of speech (including by ISPs). I don't want government censorship of speech. But I support the right of servers to say "I'm not carrying that". And I support the right of a community to have a space that is public to that community, and yet to keep stuff that they don't want out of it. And I support the right of those who don't agree to go form their own community, and to decide for themselves what the rules are for their community. And all of this can happen on open protocols without systemic or government censorship.
Specifically on usenet, you could have, say, alt.hobby.gardening, and have it get overrun by spam, and have alt.hobby.gardening_moderated start up with moderation to keep the spam out. And if you don't like it, and want to post your conspiracy rants, go post them on alt.hobby.gardening with all the spam that nobody reads. Knock yourself out. Or go start alt.hobby.gardening_conspiracy, or whatever. But let the gardening nuts have their space without your rants.
I support free speech except in some circumstances where curtailing it makes almost everyone's lives better.
Where I support it to the most extreme: criticizing the government.
Where I want it most throttled: my own living room, so I can have some peace and quiet.
I think most functioning adults have a similar spectrum of allow / deny and aren't absolutists on the topic.
And, I mean... I don't think we need to look deep into the history of the Internet to see that becoming the dominant pattern. USENET failed. Email without spamblockers failed. Every forum either eventually adopts moderation policies or goes underground where barely any casual user hears of its existence.
The user interprets lack of censorship as damaged and routes away from it.
It is often NOT the users of the platforms that want censorship, it is users of another platform, targeting something they do not like on the internet, and then going after underlying structures be it ISP's, DDOS services, Domain Registrars, Hosting providers, Credit Card Processors, etc etc etc
We have plenty of examples of this on the internet, where it is not the users of the sites that want something censored, but 3rd party actors using systemic pressure on critical infrastructure to effect the censorship
You have this utopia where someone puts up a gardening forum and the users or even the owner of the forums says "We do not allow talk about Politics here"...
Where in reality someone sets up a political forum, someone posts something, then someone on Twitter, Facebook, Insta, etc gets offended and starts a campaign to have CloudFlare, or AWS ban them.
Yep. It's a pretty clever approach, and I for one am in hindsight surprised that it took this long for people to realize that the system is a network and is therefore vulnerable to network dependency attacks.
This is not necessarily a bad thing. Nazis, for example, deserve no platform and if companies decide to revoke service when they discover they're serving Nazis that's their prerogative. It can be abused, especially given that the largest players in the space are going to trend sensitive to controversy... But the internet has become embedded deeply enough in our lives that people can no longer enjoy the pretty fantasy of the neutral service provider; IBM got away with it in World War 2 and that's generally pointed to as a moral failing these days.
If people are calling for enforced neutrality, they're really calling for government regulation (who else would enforce the neutrality?) which is its own can of worms.
Then you have the problem of labeling everyone that disagrees with you a "nazi" for example just because they favor strong border laws, and immigration controls, or oppose social justice and ESG "capitalism" or other such things
Or the true crime of having a difference of opinion with a trans person...
>>This is not necessarily a bad thing.
yes it is a bad thing, it will always be a bad thing, even if doing to to actual nazi's not the new age defination of "nazi's" which seemly is anyone that happened to vote for Trump, or holds conservative political positions.
>>If people are calling for enforced neutrality, they're really calling for government regulation
yes and no, depends on what we are talking about
Are we talking about an already heavily regulated industry like banking. This yes 100% I am calling for enforced neutrality. JP Morgan Chase, nor MasterCard should be able to refuse business to someone for the protected political speech.
Services like AWS, or CloudFlare.... No I would not call for supported regulation but then we come full circle back to loss of cultural support for Free Expression
There was a time were the ACLU would defend the KKK's right to speak, We should return to those days, where the axiom was "I disagree with you but I will defends your right to say it"
If we at the point was the population is pushing for AWS to de-platform competitors of Twitter because of disagreements over politics we are not far removed from government censorship
The reality is you would likely support both, as you clear abhor actual free speech
This is also why Elon's purchase of Twitter was so critical and 100% support his efforts.
> The reality is you would likely support both, as you clear abhor actual free speech
Broadly speaking, I'm a fan of the marketplace of ideas. That marketplace includes boycotts, callouts, and choices by private individuals to provide or revoke a platform for someone else to speak in their space. Freedom of the press has never implied that everyone gets a free press.
> which seemly is anyone that happened to vote for Trump, or holds conservative political positions.
Hacker News isn't really a great venue for that kind of discussion. But there's a reason the pushback on him and his supporters has been so strong relative to previous politicians. He and his supporters actually do represent something fundamentally caustic to the American body politic. https://www.bu.edu/articles/2022/are-trump-republicans-fasci...
>>That marketplace includes boycotts, callouts, and choices by private individuals to provide
Which means I am sure you support the ongoing boycotts happening to BudLight and Target? Or are boycotts only for one side?
> Freedom of the press has never implied that everyone gets a free press.
The problem here is when the government subsides the people that makes the press, regulates the people that makes the press, and limits the who and produce presses it ceases to be a free market, and becomes a regulated market
One can make the case, that since the internet was started by the government (dod) and regulated for decades by the government (Dept of Commerce Via ICANN), and tons of subsidies ISP;s have gotten and continue to get, locations where the internet is a government service, and tons of other factors that the idea that the internet is a purely free market is clearly a false narrative
One often used for convince when it meets peoples political goals, and then the second that freedom is not aligned with their goals anymore.
Further when it comes to consumer boycotts, you have to actually be a consumer, 99% of the people that have effective policy changes at CloudFlare and AWS have never spent a single dime at either of those services.
Today cancel culture is something more than just a boycott, it is something new not seen before in human civilization, and it is a huge threat to not only freedom of expression but freedom in general
> Which means I am sure you support the ongoing boycotts happening to BudLight and Target? Or are boycotts only for one side?
Of course I do. Nobody should feel compelled to buy a beer they don't want to buy.
> 99% of the people that have effective policy changes at CloudFlare and AWS have never spent a single dime at either of those services.
I think I need a citation for that. I used to work for a cloud company and there is a lot of back room negotiation that people don't realize happens. My default suspicion is that product advocates and product managers received real clear signal from people with money to spend that they were going to spend it elsewhere.
> Today cancel culture is something more than just a boycott, it is something new not seen before in human civilization
No, shunning is actually very old. It is the way communities small and large dealt with unacceptable behavior in their midst. Nobody is compelled to associate with somebody they don't want to.
What did change is that for a brief period of time, the existence of the internet, it's relative obscurity, and the pseudonymity it provided convinced a generation that they had subverted the old cultural norms. What we are witnessing is a reification of those cultural norms to the new technology. The USENET day is dead. The techno utopia was tried and found very wanting. Old patterns are reestablishing themselves, though with more voices at the table because ultimately, you can't actually stop the signal.
The former president was kicked off of somebody's microblogging service and responded by creating his own. That's how it's supposed to work.
They are free to buy a living room and criticize away. My living room, I am allowed to determine whom to allow and whom not to allow in. And I would like to find online spaces where the loser spam (both commercial and ideological) are kept out, so I can find the speech I am interested in. Why is this desire felt as oppressive by so many?
Before you wrap yourself too tightly in the 1st Amendment to the Constitution of the U. S., perhaps it would be helpful if you defined what “free speech” means to you. Because repeatedly typing “no true Scotsman…” doesn’t do much to move the conversation along, and definitions obviously differ.
For example, I feel that you can say what you like, just not in my living room. Free speech does not guarantee an audience.
That is the often cited copout that has no meaning.
"I feel that you can say what you like, just not in my living room" is a pointless axiom that provides nothing of value to the conversation.
The debate becomes infinitely more complex when you step 1 inch outside of the "living room" context and start talking about Public and Private companies operating platforms on a global scale all under a infinitely complex set of regulations, subsidies, and other factors
" I feel that you can say what you like, just not in my living room" seems to me then you want to translate that into "Reddit, twitter, etc can choose what people say in their living room", the problem is they do not have a living room, and attempting to make that analog is ridiculous
What you are calling free speech is boring to the audience. Usenet died because the endless unfiltered spam and shit posting was boring compared to slashdot and then reddit and then here.
