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
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
Every online social problem was first experienced by Usenet. Every social protocol contains an informal bugridden incomplete implementation of half of Usenet.
>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.
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.
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.
> 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),
> 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".
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.
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.
I used to think that ESR had slid slowly into the lunatic fringe, but it sounds like he was a crank from the start. He pursued fame but seems to prefer notoriety to compromise. I think there’s a lesson here, but I’m not sure what it is.
Humility maybe? No matter how right you think you are, beware: you might be ESR.
Yeah if you want to talk about sliding slowly into lunacy, it'd be a once-respected computer scientist who now haunts online discussions looking for anything which could be obliquely linked to one of his personal betes noires and flooded with semi-irrelevant copy-paste.
I'm not particularly convinced, a mention of the arpanet is a mention of the arpanet, and keeping quiet means keeping quiet.
I can believe that Pournelle was being the kind of person about whom one might write "most of the irritation came from a handful of people, sometimes only one or two" and that was the real reason he got kicked off, but that's a long way away from being censored for politics.
It's odd that Bradford DeLong copied my original file of email that I put together without giving any attribution or provenance where it came from, and stripped the introduction I wrote that contextualized it, then omitted the first email from Chris Stacy to 11 different people including Pournelle, which established the actual context.
DeLong is a UC Berkeley economics professor, former Deputy Assistant Secretary of the Treasury for Economic Policy under Clinton, and prominent blogger who should know better than to strip attribution from the compiled primary sources he's plagiarizing and posting to his blog.
Here is the original file he copied without credit (without his unreadable css):
- Removes my authorial framing without attribution
- Omits the January 1984 email which provides crucial administrative context
- Strips formatting that helps establish authenticity
- Presents it as his own curation on his blog
The missing 1984 email is particularly important because it shows the guest account policies were already being tightened before the Pournelle incident, making the eventual account termination part of a broader pattern rather than a purely personal vendetta.
The January 1984 email he omitted was sent to 11 recipients including Pournelle himself, which shows he was directly informed of the TACACS policies over a year before the incident.
Regarding ylee's post and the filfre.net discussion: I was there, I personally know the primary actors, and I'm the one who compiled the original document that DeLong plagiarized. The interpretation in stepped_pyramids' comment and Yeechang Lee's defense of Pournelle in the filfre.net comments are both wrong.
It wasn't about "mentioning ARPANET in Byte" or politics. It was about behavior.
GUMBY (David Henkel-Wallace), an HN regular and old friend who founded Cygnus Support (the pioneering open source company that developed GCC, acquired by Red Hat in 1999), and the youngest hacker to have his own office at the MIT AI Lab, was in the original 1985 thread:
>>I wonder if this is the first instance of politically motivated mobbing behavior to take place over a digital communications medium?
>It was not politically motivated (I am in that thread from 1985). Pournelle was a pain in the neck when drunk. And a blowhard (which is hardly a crime, but doesn't make people sympathetic when you call them assholes and then tell them to do things for you).
>As for the proxmiring: he was one of the common offenders; he loved to talk archly about how he was part of the insider elite, while claiming that that was proof of his democratic ideals.
>gumby on Sept 10, 2017 | root | parent | next [–]
>I love that excerpt since it was classic Pournelle: included a nice extra bit of detail that showed he was "in the know" yet was not actually true (RMS was never a grad student). He used to boast he was part of Reagan's "Kitchen Cabinet" of space advisors, and talked about their EOB meetings -- but i knew folks on the NSC technical advisory committee and it was nothing like he described.
>I never let on that the person he "knew" online and the person he knew offline were the same me.
The irony of quoting Pournelle complaining about "a handful of people" causing "most of the irritation" on online forums is rich - Pournelle WAS that handful of people. He was widely known in SF fandom as a belligerent drunk at conventions, and he brought that behavior online.
Pournelle literally asked to be kicked off: "If you have some authority to order me off the net, do so. If not, leave me alone." They did. He got exactly what he demanded.
RMS personally wrote custom software for Pournelle and patiently tutored him. Pournelle's thanks? Telling John McCarthy that MIT was "run by a bunch of communists."
Pournelle violated the MIT AI Lab Tourist Policy on multiple counts: commercial use for his BYTE column, promoting his books on SF-LOVERS, and anti-social behavior. The policy explicitly stated: "Any use of the MIT ITS machines for personal gain, profit making enterprise, or political purposes is not a legitimate use of the Laboratories' computer resources."
His response to getting called out was threatening to sic his "Pentagon friends," "reporter friends," and "the House Armed Services Committee" on grad students running a free service he was abusing.
The poetic justice: JGA suggested the account termination message should read "Think of it as evolution in action" - Pournelle's own Social Darwinist catchphrase from Oath of Fealty.
KMP's assessment stands: "The man has learned nothing from his presence on MC and sets a bad example of what people might potentially accomplish there. I'd rather recycle his account for some bright 12-yr-old."
The real damage from DeLong's sloppy plagiarism (I won't link but you can google for proof): his stripped-down version has now propagated to places like Kiwi Farms, where trolls cite DeLong's copy as evidence that Pournelle was "the first person banned more or less for wrong think on DARPAnet." The exact opposite of reality. This is what happens when you strip context and attribution from compiled primary sources - bad-faith actors weaponize the gaps.
> skiing enthusiast banned by court order in 1999 from posting on the Usenet discussion group "rec.skiing.alpine", after engaging in a flame war with other online posters. The heated exchanges lasted for months, eventually escalating into death threats, until a police detective from Seattle posted a request for all involved to calm down. All involved did except Abraham...
I'm sorry, this was probably annoying to all involved, but also so hilarious. Not least of which picturing a detective, who joined the force thinking he was going to solve murders and maybe even get a lead on D.B. Cooper sighing as he posted on a message board.
I can't stop laughing at the first entry and this simple joke:
> he gained international notoriety for his claims that [...] mass and time are equivalent. (With regard to the second claim, it was suggested on the "sci.astro.amateur" newsgroup that his demise be observed with a gram of silence.)
ABIAN was always my friends and my favourite, from our time on Usenet! His all caps .sig with "equivalence of MASS and TIME" is something I will always treasure.
These unit equivalences have to be carefully interpreted. Like when things are multipled, are they in the same direction? Torque has the same units as work: force x distance, i.e. energy. But the force is perpendicular to the distance; it's completely different, and not a simple scalar value: torque is a vector with an orientation in space. Moving something against friction over 10cm, and using a 10cm bar to apply leverage, are entirely different.
Happy to see Erik Naggum on this list - its the one I really remember the posts, mostly in a very "particular style" which was very entertaining to me (reading it a few years later).
I kinda miss that style of poster and understand it cannot come back. But if the world is big and diverse then I prefer that that kind of people can exist.
I doubt it is a thing anymore, but if you were in a NOC and said, "...there is no cabal." you could expect at least some portion of the people present to turn around and hail, "Long Live The Cabal!" It was a usenet admin shibboleth that I still laugh at every time I hear it.
I'm going to disagree with the summary of Serdar Argic. My belief is that the Turkish government financed a grad student at University of Minnesota, Ahmet Cosar, to do the spamming. It is as well known that Uunet, and early ISP, had a "pink contract" with Cosar that allowed him to spam. Cosar lost his student visa, had to return to Turkey.
Ah, The Usenet Oracle. I fondly remember late night drunken college Usenet Oracle sessions back in the early 90s, competing to see who could make it to the Best Of digests. It often ended up with us realizing eventually that nobody else was emailing the Oracle, so we were just getting each others questions.
Globally 0.29% of people suffer from schizophrenia (lifetime risk of 1%) so it shouldn't have been surprising Usenet (or, really, any forum system without moderation or some similar kind of control) would experience their presence.
Why wasn't Henry Spencer listed as a Usenet personality (the good kind)?
I remember being called out by name in an Archimedes Plutonium rant around 1993. I also had a post referenced in the comp.lang.c FAQ for a few years. That's the closest I've come to celebrity. The internet before the web brings back memories.
I better not dwell to long or I'll have flashbacks t coding X/Motif UI's.
Googled and I found it. It seems I inflated my own importance in the remembering. My post is part of an article on undefined behavior on the comp.lang.c FAQ's maintainer. https://www.eskimo.com/~scs/readings/undef.950321.html
There is a gem of a sci.math thread where Archimedes Plutonium claims to have proved the Riemann Hypothesis and Terrance Tao (before he was quite as famous, but still!) replies to him pointing out his errors.
Also TIL Archimedes Plutonium was actually his legal name.
In case you feel like visiting usenet as it looked 40+ years ago, I run https://olduse.net/ - which Joey Hess originally did as an art project - where you can connect a news reader (Thunderbird, Gnus, slrn, nn, tin, Pan, or even Lynx or ELinks, for instance) and read usenet delayed 40-46 years.
I expected to see him in the list too, but after looking it up turns out he made his posts on web forums. I remember reading the compilations in the early days of the web and being fascinated by them.
Wow, what a nostalgia trip. We had our fair share in the comp.sys.amiga.* groups.
I feel bad about one in particular. Don't get me wrong: he was incredibly annoying and liked to jump into nearly every single thread and turn it into some persecution complex thing. I was unkind to him, as were many others.
Looking back, it seems obvious to me that he had some mental issues and was battling demons the rest of us didn't see. I wish younger me had the wisdom to just killfile him and pretend he didn't exist. Whatever his problems, I'm sure I didn't make the world any nicer by yelling at him.
Sorry, man. I'd have handled that differently now.
Scott Nudds was a guy who trolled comp.lang.c and a few other programming newsgroups. He was noted for his phrases "Unix and C are dying, this is a good thing." and "C pushers will do anything to defend their sick religion. I, on the other hand, prefer honesty." For a while, the usual reference to "making demons fly out of your nose" (a humorously valid potential response by the compiler when it encounters undefined behavior) was often replaced with "making Scott Nudds fly out of your nose".
Wherever you are now, Scott Nudds, you are remembered. A hero and vanguard to the Rust Evangelism Strike Force—because C really is dying now, and that's probably a good thing.
SsZERO is another, whom I've mentioned before, but his appeal was more limited:
It's not valid for a compiler to make demons fly out of your nose, since compilers are constrained by the capabilities of your hardware and the laws of physics.
Well, if a compiler were to do so it would not be in violation of the standard. Whether or not such a thing is physically possible is an implementation detail outside the scope of the standard.
The C standard isn't the only thing compilers have to comply with.
HTTP doesn't specify what happens if the request method is XYZZY. An HTTP server that confirms to the HTTP specification (but not the laws of physics) could make demons fly out of your nose when receiving a request with a method of XYZZY. But nobody complains about that.
One of the reasons why Rust is taking over userland is that it's getting more and more difficult to find people willing to maintain a C code base—especially an old one—while there's no shortage of kids willing and eager to hack in Rust.
C will end up in exactly the same place as COBOL: there will be applications that depend on code written in it for decades to come, but they will be maintained by very well-paid grognards simply because those are the only people who know how, and are willing (for a steep price), to maintain them.
Maybe. I think C will continue to have relevance in certain niches like embedded development, and that efforts like Fil-C will quietly carry the torch for a long time. C will also continue to have an important role in bootstrapping.
I generally I don't like the "Rust is killing C" meme because a.) I don't believe it b.) C doesn't need to die for Rust to succeed and c.) it leads to language wars and hard feelings. Rust doesn't really do what C does; it's not a lingua franca among architectures. They compete in some niches and not others.
> MI5Victim (Mike Corley, a.k.a. Boleslaw Tadeusz Szocik) – paranoid user who goes through periods of binge posting, claiming that MI5
They are all paranoids. The first three are interpretive paranoids. Sarfatti too. Nancy Lieder too, she might also be erotomaniac (another modality of paranoid personality), but I'd need to go further into this rabbit hole to be sure.
The criminal ones correspond to quarreling or revendicative paranoid personality. Naggum too.
As far as I know there is no link between, say, talk.bizarre and weird Twitter, but it's a sign that the same basic impulses are universal. I'm sure that in 1776, a few dedicated oddballs were creating snarky weird in-jokes on broadsides that nobody read except them.
There are rumours that Kurt Cobain posted on Usenet under a pseudonym. Interesting if true. I found Usenet much easier to handle than today's internet. That said I did read some print outs from mid nineties Usenet a few years ago, and I was shocked to be reminded how rude some people were. So nothing new there.
> James Nicoll – science-fiction reviewer and retired game-store owner. As a Usenet personality, Nicoll is known for writing a widely quoted epigram on the English language, as well as for his contributions of concepts like the Nicoll-Dyson Laser and the "brain eater" to Usenet groups like "rec.arts.sf.written" and "rec.arts.sf.fandom"; and for his accounts of suffering a high number of accidents (known collectively as "Nicoll Events") recounted in these groups.
A strange thing about boomer-era SF fandom is that they seem to think that popular fans are just as important people as, say, SF writers or actual scientists. This especially extended to SF conventions where you could become famous just as a guy who went to a lot of conventions.
(SF conventions have a somewhat dysfunctional setup where as far as I can tell, the people who attend them spend the entire weekend fighting over who gets to host the next one. Anime conventions adopted a similar but simpler and better format which is actually capable of attracting normal people and young women.)
> In addition to his influence as a first reader for the Science Fiction Book Club, a book reviewer for Bookspan, Publishers Weekly and Romantic Times, and a juror for the James Tiptree, Jr. Award,[4] Nicoll often offers ideas and concepts to other writers, primarily through the medium of Usenet.
> Nicoll relates a number of life- and/or limb-threatening accidents that have happened to him, which he has told and retold on various science fiction fandom–related newsgroups. Over the years these stories have also been collected into Cally Soukup's List of Nicoll events.[23]
> Inspired by Nicoll's collection of accidents, as well as his tendency to take in any stray cat that comes knocking, fantasy author Jo Walton wrote him a poem in 2002.[24]
I don't think he is beating the allegations of a guy who just has a Wikipedia article because his friends wrote him one.
I was looking for this and finally found it in the comments.
Derek Smart [1] is the indie developer behind the ambitious (and buggy) space sim Battlecruiser 3000AD [2]. He is known for his legendary Usenet presence in the 90s, and engaged in massive, aggressive flamewars with anyone who criticized his game or physics engine. He adopted the "combative game dev" archetype long before social media existed.
Now that he has been mentioned, there's a small chance he will drop by.
It was extra sad watching the transition from when he was a perennial HN poster known only to a niche within a niche to 4chan discovering him and turning him into a meme because they loved his racist rants and started “jokingly” feeding his delusions in comments to his YouTube vlogs.
Whenever I see praise for 4chan on HN as a last remnant of the “good” internet I think of that (and the girl I went to HS with who they cyber stalked while a minor almost to the point of suicide even after she deleted her entire online presence).
>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
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