this post was submitted on 13 Sep 2023
499 points (97.9% liked)
Technology
59052 readers
6622 users here now
This is a most excellent place for technology news and articles.
Our Rules
- Follow the lemmy.world rules.
- Only tech related content.
- Be excellent to each another!
- Mod approved content bots can post up to 10 articles per day.
- Threads asking for personal tech support may be deleted.
- Politics threads may be removed.
- No memes allowed as posts, OK to post as comments.
- Only approved bots from the list below, to ask if your bot can be added please contact us.
- Check for duplicates before posting, duplicates may be removed
Approved Bots
founded 1 year ago
MODERATORS
you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
view the rest of the comments
The fact that usenet has still hung on all this time as more than just a place for people to share pirated files is honestly impressive, and also is a pretty decent endorsement. Unfortunately it has a fair number of weaknesses, especially in terms of moderation tools and access these days, but ultimately a lot of what people want in a social media platform can be found on usenet. An effort to update it for modern sensibilities might actually create something pretty cool.
Lack of censorship tools is a strength.
Clearly you aren't old enough to remember why Usenet faded away in the first place. It was the first platform to drown in an endless torrent of spam and low quality posts
You're being charitable, imo. USENET was plagued by a seemingly never-ending parade of mentally ill savants who lived to post, lived to troll and lived to avoid killfiles. It made it deeply unpleasant.
I see in the AMA they're discussing moderated newsgroups, I never saw any in my day but frankly, moderation is often worse. Reddit had, I think, the most workable idea of them all, community policing and hiding content beneath a threshold. The unfortunate corporate reality of Reddit begat Lemmy and here we are now.
With Lemmy and the Fediverse, I don't see USENET as being in any way relevant, other than its continuing role as a solid resource for above-average pirates. I don't miss it even a little bit, it was utter rubbish by the end.
There was some moderated groups, the group name usually ended in .moderated.
All it meant was somebody with the moderator role on that group had to approve every post... only thing I never understood is how one became a moderator on those groups 🤷🏻♂️
Ultimately Lemmy isn't any better than Reddit because your "account" is tied to a server, so it isn't truly censorship resistant. It can easily get as bad as Reddit is with the ham fisted censorship at the whim of some misanthropic moderator.
Nostr is certainly the future once it matures a bit more and becomes more user friendly.
Most clients would allow you to filter out what (or who) you personally didn't want to see, without having to censor it. Actually not a bad system: allows both freedom of speech and some kind of "moderation". The system could of course be improved, e.g. by having some default, mod-curated server-side filters that users could opt into, but people would still be allowed to see the whole uncensored content if desired.
Exceptions could be made for illegal content (e.g. pirated stuff), where it would be deleted server-side by the admins (illegal defined to be "in the jurisdiction where the data is stored").
Freedom should not be taken for granted.
I started using Usenet in the early 90s and have continued to use it until today. Modern clients are very convenient and easy to search and filter out whatever you like. So no, if you aren't too lazy to learn your tools then it is more than sufficient without some dystopian social media tier control of the protocol.
"The truth is you love censorship, and so does everyone else. The only question is whether you’re ready to admit it."
https://gizmodo.com/why-censorship-is-part-of-everyday-life-section-230-1850095976