[ih] Preparing for the splinternet

[Dan York]

John,

On Mar 14, 2022, at 11:16 AM, John Levine via Internet-history <internet-history at elists.isoc.org<mailto:internet-history at elists.isoc.org>> wrote:

According to Dan York via Internet-history <york at isoc.org<mailto:york at isoc.org>>:
I think NNTP had similar issues with the UX of news readers… but I also think there were larger issues there with
companies seeking to use news as a means to keep people inside their new walled gardens.. and also to provide moderated
experiences. (But that could be a whole other email thread.)

I still run a moderated newsgroup which gets significant traffic.

Fascinating! I haven’t interacted with an actual NNTP newsgroup in… so many years I cannot even think of when. Probably at least 15+ or more.

The problem with usenet wasn't the UI, which for the most part was the same as for
mail programs (Thunderbird still does both.)  It was that like any freeish push medium,
it was overrun with spam.  By the time we got the spam under control, most of the users
had moved on to other places.

Ugh. Yes… VERY true! I remember that now! Yes, it was BAD. When I was writing “moderated experiences” I was thinking more of people seeking environments with fewer trolls, but of course spam was a huge issue. I had that toward the end of my personal use of XMPP servers. One of my accounts was on a public jabber server and it basically devolved to just being a ginormous pit of spam. I had to stop connecting to it because the account just overwhelmed my XMPP client with spam messages.

Thanks,
Dan