[ylee]

Nothing has changed since Jerry Pournelle wrote 40 years ago when discussing online forums:

>I noticed something: most of the irritation came from a handful of people, sometimes only one or two. If I could only ignore them, the computer conferences were still valuable. Alas, it's not always easy to do.

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.

That said, there are server- and client-side anti-spam tools of varying effectiveness. A related but bigger problem for Usenet is people with actual mental illness (kstrauser mentioned one); think "50 year olds with undiagnosed autism". Usenet is such a niche network nowadays that there has to be meaningful motivation to participate, and if the motivation is not a sincere interest in the subject it's, in my experience, going to be people with very troubled personal lives which their online behavior reflects. Again, as overall traffic declined, their relative contribution and visibility grew. This, not spam, is what has mostly killed Usenet.

[1] I am talking about traditional non-binary Usenet here

[AndrewKemendo]

This is consistently true across all human organizations larger than a handful of people. Its a limitation of human communication and alignment

I saw that happen to the ultramarathon subReddit which I founded and I’m the lead moderator. And when I was running a radio station it was consistently the same people who would call in. I see it even in some of the smaller group chats that I’m in

You cannot have a stable community without these types of issues coming up beyond a few or so dozen people

[direwolf20]

Every online social problem was first experienced by Usenet. Every social protocol contains an informal bugridden incomplete implementation of half of Usenet.

[allenu]

>I noticed something: most of the irritation came from a handful of people, sometimes only one or two. If I could only ignore them, the computer conferences were still valuable. Alas, it's not always easy to do.

This is one of those funny things about internet forums and social media: it favors people who have the time and inclination to post a lot, and obviously in some cases you get cranks occupying a space and flaming regulars. People who don't have energy or time to fight back eventually give up on debating these people and may end up leaving a space, which leaves just the cranks or the crank-adjacent.

I often think about how even with social media, you're free to follow whoever you want, but over time you'll find some people you follow post a whole lot more than others. They have time and inclination to post a lot and as a result, you end up hearing their opinions more than others, so they kind of have a subtle power. Obviously you can unfollow them if you like, but it makes you think about how online spaces can easily be dominated by people who can and want to be online all the time.

[RGamma]

I wonder if LLM analysis could help with moderation automation if well implemented. It can still be human-in-the-loop and you need to apply it tastefully (!!!), i.e. not letting just the most hardcore dogmatists discuss in some extremist group, but those are another issue entirely in some sense. Also, beware malicious users wasting tokens.

[direwolf20]

What if a platform showed me equal amounts of content from all of my followeds?

[cainxinth]

>I noticed something: most of the irritation came from a handful of people…

See also: Pareto Principle

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pareto_principle

Most people don’t cause problems, but the minority that do cause the majority of problems.

[nephihaha]

It depends what you consider a problem. Deliberate trolling is probably uncommon, but annoying people regurgitating what they've been told by mainstream media was, and is, all too common.

[bigfatkitten]

> 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),

On the whole this was a feature, not a bug.

[octoberfranklin]

> a handful of people, sometimes only one or two. If I could only ignore them, the computer conferences were still valuable. Alas, it's not always easy to do.

> This is what killed Usenet,

You've got to be kidding!

The fact that Usenet was a protocol, with no favored UI (not even a web UI) meant that you could implement "only ignore them" in a totally reliable way. Indeed, this feature was so commonplace that it even had a name: a "killfile".

[ianburrell]

Killfiles were local to each user which is good since each person could control what they saw. It was bad because new users who didn't know about killfiles would see the bad actors. It also meant that could have disjoint conversation so it felt like each thread was its own thing. You would have to keep telling people to not respond to the trolls.

The ideal is to have a global filter by moderators for the bad actors, and user killfile to tune that.

[ylee]

Usenet killfiles are not "totally reliable". Nym shifting has always been a thing, even before Google Groups-based commercial mass spamming using constantly changing From: lines industrialized the problem. Killfiles also do nothing for people quoting the person you are trying to ignore, unless you use a thread-based killfile, which of course means you won't see a lot of non-killfiled people's comments.

At the end of the day, there is no satisfactory solution to the problem of warped and damaged online personalities other than actually preventing them from being online, which of course has its own difficulties and consequences.

[Marazan]

Plonk

[BigTTYGothGF]

Was that before or after he got kicked off arpanet?

[ylee]

I address that in the comments at <https://www.filfre.net/2022/05/a-web-around-the-world-part-1...>