Doc O'Leary , <
drol...@2017usenet1.subsume.com> writes:
> Russ Allbery <
ea...@eyrie.org> wrote:
>> Standing in court yelling MATH WILL ALWAYS WIN is very emotionally
>> satisfying, but weirdly it doesn't make the court judgment go away.
>> Maybe the lawyers won't be able to ignore the realities of math
>> forever, but they do in fact get to ignore the realities of math long
>> enough to tell the men with guns to go take your money.
> That’s a nice straw man scenario, but it bears no relation to the argument
> I was making. Laws are but one means to an end, and bad laws do *not* do
> what they’re supposed to be doing (and fuel the conspiracy theories that
> their “unintended consequences” were actually intended the whole time).
You don't seem to understand my point. This whole thread started with
talking about news administration and with you being upset that people
aren't carrying binaries. The point that I and several other people are
making is that carrying binaries creates legal hassles. Now you're saying
the laws are bad.
The laws may or may not be bad, but my point is that it doesn't matter.
The people enforcing the laws do not give a single shit what your opinion,
or my opinion, of the laws are. All of these arguments about whether the
laws work or not are therefore entirely beside the point. I think use of
at least some currently illegal drugs should be legalized and a lot of
drug laws are very bad and counterproductive; that doesn't mean I'm going
to start selling drugs while drugs are illegal.
The laws are a constraint on how people run their servers (this is sort of
the definition of laws). If you think the laws should change so that
carrying binaries wouldn't pose legal risk, go get them changed and then
let us know. Until then, we have to start with the laws the way that they
are right now, whether we like them or not, which makes carrying binaries
rather risky unless you have a lot of expensive infrastructure in place to
deal with the highly predictable consequences.
You can instead that Usenet server operators should engage in coordinated
civil disobedience because the laws are bad, but, well, good luck with
that. I'm not interested, at least.
> Regardless, my point remains that people wanted a “one stop shop” for
> their group chat messages, which were increasingly becoming non-text.
> Binaries being segregated like they are is both inconvenient and made
> them easy to drop completely.
Sure. I agree with that. What I'm pointing out is *why* they were
segregated and why to this day you're going to have an extremely hard time
convincing anyone who doesn't have a lot of resources and a legal and
anti-abuse team to unsegregate them, or carry them at all.
(There are a bunch of other problems with Usenet being that one stop shop,
too, but we'll stick with that one for now.)
I also disagree that this is what killed Usenet in large part because the
phenomenon you describe about wanting non-text messages is newer than when
Usenet started running into trouble. I've not been around Usenet as long
as some of the folks here, but I've been using Usenet since 1993, and I
can tell you from personal experience that although copyright and legality
issues around binaries did show up early, Usenet had a mostly working way
of dealing with that and was still going very strong with widely-used text
discussion groups until the spamming (and off-topic trolling and other
types of unwanted messages that are even harder to moderate) took off.
That was the challenge that was happening about the time that other social
media platforms started taking off, and that's when usage of Usenet
started dropping and the signal to noise ratio started dropping even
faster.
That spam was directly the cause of Usenet's decline is just my opinion
and there are a few other viable theories. But most of them are some
version of Usenet being outcompeted by other protocols that people found
easier to use and less annoying for whatever reason, whether that be
better moderation (my theory), better *text* message formatting, better
client software, better topic organization, shorter messages, more
convenient access, cost, etc. Or of course maybe a combination of all of
those things.
But I'm dubious that it was *primarily* about non-text content because of
the timing. Usenet's problems started back in the late 1990s and very
early 2000s, long before the iPhone, which is when non-text chat started
taking off for the average person. There certainly was some demand for
photographs around the time that Facebook started, and Usenet has always
been bad at that (even apart from the separate binary groups, Usenet
*software* has always been bad), so maybe it was a factor, but I think it
was too early for it to be the main factor.
*Now*, *today*, I agree with you that this is a huge missing feature if
one wanted Usenet to compete with, say, Tiktok, although there is also a
huge list of other features that Usenet is missing, one of which is (for
all that people love to complain about the algorithms) adaptive moderation
so that people can very quickly filter out shit they don't want to see.
>> What killed Usenet was that it had no solution for spam that actually
>> worked for the average person, only complicated and weird filtering
>> experiments that never quite worked right.
> There isn’t a single platform without spam problems, so it is ludicrous to
> suggest that people abandoned Usenet for some spam-free social network.
The large commercial social media services have whole teams of people,
often thousands of people, who are actually paid (admittedly often very
poorly) to get rid of spam and abuse. Usenet had a handful of volunteers
and a janky cancel system and therefore had a spam problem that became
orders of magnitude worse than the user experience on other social media
services. People will tolerate a small amount of visible spam. Usenet
did not have a small amount of spam problem.
> Even so, there were tools that could have been brought to bear to
> greatly reduce the problem (Hello, UDP!), and I can only speculate on
> why the abuse wasn’t policed (insert your favorite conspiracy theory
> here).
Well, I was actually here then. UDP was used, and it didn't work. It
didn't greatly reduce the problem. The Usenet protocol makes that type of
enforcement nearly impossible, the amount of work required is
considerable, some sites that were sources of significant percentages of
the wanted articles were also sources of significant amounts of spam and
there was no consensus to cut them off, and what was able to be done was
completely unsustainable with a group of volunteers with no legal
protections and constant ongoing harassment. Due to the way Usenet works,
there was no governance system *capable* of making decisions; it was
essentially a free-for-all, which didn't work.
The same mechanism that was used for UDPs was also then used for denial of
service attacks, making it hard to run a service with those mechanisms
enabled, and no one managed to get an authenticated protocol really
working, in part due to the constant disagreement