Except Reddit moderators deal with these spam issues all the time.
Hacker News is run by herculean efforts by the moderation team here, and I appreciate it. I'm ignorant of what their tools are, but I don't think that scales either. Its good for our community, but Hacker News will never be Reddit or Twitter scale.
Reddit's model is that moderators basically complain to the Admins that tools are insufficient, then admins mostly ignore those complaints. Moderators write bots that automatically surf traffic and try to automate... then the Admins come back and increase the price of API-access by 1000%, and then change the API and overall become hostile to this behavior. This cannot work either.
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At least in Usenet days, we could run our own programs in an open source model for these moderation issues.
I don't think Usenet would work. We need a way to rewind time (Usenet: once you post or once something passes moderation, it is forever more sent to everyone else's inbox). USENET was POP model, to put into email terms... while Reddit is IMAP/JMAP model, where the true state of the information is centralized to the server.
So yes, I agree with you that USENET will fail today. But the nuances of why it will fail are important to understand.
In particular: Reddit was never very good about these moderation issues. But with enough work and grit, the community came together anyway. That's good enough. I expect that USENET's moderation model is sufficient, albeit decades old. Its all the other USENET crap that won't work today (being a "POP"-like message distribution platform without any "takebacks", so no editing posts, no deleting porn that got past the spam filter, etc. etc.)
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Or maybe... USENET works with regards to API access. The *ARCHIVE* (ie: Google Groups, or Deja News if you're old enough to remember that) is where takebacks / edits can live instead.
So maybe Usenet can work, but with changes to our workflow to be more akin to 2023-level of features. By separating concerns over USENET (ie: how messages are distributed among a decentralized list of servers), and "The Archive" (which needs to be run by a trusted set of administrators), and a system where moderators will have access to "The Archive" for their own moderation purposes, we can rebuild Reddit through USENET??
Hmmm... it could work. Though I'm curious if it has much benefits over Mastodon or other solutions available today.
The reason Usenet can't work today is not for the reasons you surmise.
I used Usenet before the Eternal September.
The reason it worked back then, is because to a certain extent, it was a relatively homogeneous group of users, meaning, people of comparable education, interests, etc.
I'm not really interested in sharing a newsfeed with a kitchen cabinets spammer or a Russian troll or some MAGA trumpet endlessly gazing upon Hillary's emails, etc.
Also, the legal landscape is different today, we're a long way from a pre-DCMA world. Usenet servers act as common carriers but they are not legally common carriers (in my opinion) which means if I am right, the experiment will end as soon as someone decides to litigate against a server operator for passing on material that someone felt offended by. Not even copyright violations, just something they were offended by. For example, it is illegal to insult Ergodan (really) and while that law isn't enforceable here, it was elsewhere until recently in places like Germany which still had laws on the books saying it wasn't legal to insult foreign heads of state, etc. So it's just a big litigious mess now. You may have noticed the other year how the right-wing wanted to sue/shut-down the tech companies for being too woke and suppressing their free speech rights, etc.
Usenet was a lovely time and I miss it, but that ship sailed long ago and isn't coming back.
> Usenet servers act as common carriers but they are not legally common carriers (in my opinion) which means if I am right, the experiment will end as soon as someone decides to litigate against a server operator for passing on material that someone felt offended by. Not even copyright violations, just something they were offended by. For example, it is illegal to insult Ergodan (really) and while that law isn't enforceable here, it was elsewhere until recently in places like Germany which still had laws on the books saying it wasn't legal to insult foreign heads of state, etc. So it's just a big litigious mess now.
Reddit was a defendant in a lawsuit[1] of a similar vein that the USSC declined to hear.
Re: homogenous user base and MAGA trumpets... in 1998 or so, when I did an informal analysis of USENET centralized moderation vs Slashdot distributed moderation and number-of-posts/day counts across both platforms, alt.fan.rush-limbaugh was one of the highest trafficked USENET groups. The proto-MAGA crowd was there.
USENET was not perhaps as homogeneous as you remember?
> USENET was not perhaps as homogeneous as you remember?
My Usenet was fairly homogenous, because I only subscribed to a handful of groups. You simply couldn't read the traffic on 100,000 groups! But the full list of groups was extremely diverse.
The list of groups also depended on which server you were using as your feed. Many servers carried groups dealing with some product the operator sold; those groups weren't always relayed by other servers. In fact I guess that's still the case.
We can't just assume that hackers around the world have 80GB NVidia GPUs laying around to run high-end, usable LLMs. And we certainly can't expect people to pay Amazon Web Services for a rented GPU, those things cost significant amounts of money.
Sticking to basic automation tools we have for spam filtering and automated reading of messages and the like, lets start with Reddit-level tools of just banning, blocking, users. And a global effort that helps kill spam accounts and sockpuppets.
It's not a bad start, but it's missing "trolling/shitposting".
(I'm hardly advocating that people start relying on openai for moderation, rather it would be great if people started figuring out how to do this locally with the tools we have. Their bias against chess players is pretty despicable)
A lot of the tech/approaches are already used elsewhere. Some ideas
1. Require university or employer emails to register (Blind uses this). Still post via alias but have a verified root email tied to a person IRL, would really cut down on the trolling and spam and nonsense.. NEETs might be out of luck but, well, their domain is the imageboard and that's not exactly what you want on usenet most of the time..
2. Require some hashcash style calculation to prove the value of a post via computation. Use an algorithm which is ASIC resistant - maybe Ethereum's old PoW?
3. as you mentioned AI - Moderation endpoints, it would be interesting to see if that can be created from LLaMA or such (OpenAI has this available but no reason to become dependent on them). People have mostly been looking at them for generation but as a classifier they also may fit the bill
Hacker News is run by herculean efforts by the moderation team here, and I appreciate it. I'm ignorant of what their tools are, but I don't think that scales either. Its good for our community, but Hacker News will never be Reddit or Twitter scale.
Reddit's model is that moderators basically complain to the Admins that tools are insufficient, then admins mostly ignore those complaints. Moderators write bots that automatically surf traffic and try to automate... then the Admins come back and increase the price of API-access by 1000%, and then change the API and overall become hostile to this behavior. This cannot work either.
----------
At least in Usenet days, we could run our own programs in an open source model for these moderation issues.
I don't think Usenet would work. We need a way to rewind time (Usenet: once you post or once something passes moderation, it is forever more sent to everyone else's inbox). USENET was POP model, to put into email terms... while Reddit is IMAP/JMAP model, where the true state of the information is centralized to the server.
So yes, I agree with you that USENET will fail today. But the nuances of why it will fail are important to understand.
In particular: Reddit was never very good about these moderation issues. But with enough work and grit, the community came together anyway. That's good enough. I expect that USENET's moderation model is sufficient, albeit decades old. Its all the other USENET crap that won't work today (being a "POP"-like message distribution platform without any "takebacks", so no editing posts, no deleting porn that got past the spam filter, etc. etc.)
----------
Or maybe... USENET works with regards to API access. The *ARCHIVE* (ie: Google Groups, or Deja News if you're old enough to remember that) is where takebacks / edits can live instead.
So maybe Usenet can work, but with changes to our workflow to be more akin to 2023-level of features. By separating concerns over USENET (ie: how messages are distributed among a decentralized list of servers), and "The Archive" (which needs to be run by a trusted set of administrators), and a system where moderators will have access to "The Archive" for their own moderation purposes, we can rebuild Reddit through USENET??
Hmmm... it could work. Though I'm curious if it has much benefits over Mastodon or other solutions available today.