tom jennings on Nostr: I was thinking of monetization in that, every (&$%)*%^_) fkn thing on the net has ...

I was thinking of monetization in that, every (&$%)*%^_) fkn thing on the net has been monetized, ads, data theft, all of it, and that brought a lot of opportunities to do nefarious and annoying things like spam.

I do remember spammers and cranks from the day; it seems to be what happens when the number of humans N exceeds a smallish number.

But the characterizations of undesireable posters will or may change if there's simply no money to be had from doing so.

Usenet was of that early era that [believed that] it did not need social design. We now know everything does. In 1990 it was all or mostly nerds, what, 1000X fewer users? A million times?

But today forums, for example, mostly have solved these things, for example; and a forum/BBS could form the source root to a particular newsgroup, and could form the control and social center of that group. Forums are old and well-tuned, we know what kind of controls works (and most of them are smallish cohorts). What happens when or if they expand to a group? There is FidoNet echo experience here, but not from me, where many echo conferences (== newsgroup) spawned from a particular BBS.

FidoNet was also known as Fight-O-Net for good reason. There's no magic solutions there, just a pool of experience to see how things unfolded and dealt with.

RetroFun.PL (npub1t0z…fz20) River 🏳️‍🌈🏳️‍⚧️ (npub1dl7…vggz)