Re: Young people peering

Marco Moock <mm+usenet-es@dorfdsl.de> writes:

On 20.04.2024 um 17:42 Uhr The Bjornsdottirs - Lightning wrote:

When I come across Usenet admins, they cannot clearly say that they
will ban and filter anyone they come across committing harassment,
nor that they will institute a code of conduct which is actively
antifascist, because the values of the network are not actively
antifascist and in fact tend towards calling antifascists whiners.

This is something every newsmaster can decide himself.

Sort of.  The NNTP and netnews protocols have exceptionally poor support
for moderation compared to just about any other message board software,
since essentially everything else was designed after NNTP and netnews and
learned from its shortcomings.

You can insert an extremely heavy moderation step in front of all traffic
(but only for private groups or if you can reach an agreement with your
transitive peers), but the protocol is completely insecure, and while
there are patchwork solutions to that, you have to implement them
yourself.  Or you have to rely on filtering, which is a very poor
moderation strategy that requires endless arms races with people trying to
bypass it.

And all of the more advanced tools available in newer protocols simply
aren't there (for better or worse; Usenet people usually don't like most
of these, but people running other types of message board systems use them
heavily): migrating messages to different threads, closing threads, user
authentication and all the things that come with that such as poster bans
or pre-moderation for new users but not established users, etc.  About the
only thing you can do is delete the message off your server after the
fact, and the tools for doing that are very primitive.  You can simulate
some of this by writing a whole pile of custom software that sits in the
pre-moderation path, but now you've signed on for the project of writing a
moderation system from scratch.  The protocol and existing software base
are doing essentially nothing for you.

A lot of people prefer the Usenet model for various reasons, and that's
fine, that's something people can argue about.  But Usenet's moderation
and filtering facilities are staggeringly primitive, and if those are a
priority for you, Usenet is a bad technology choice and you should use
something else.

--
Russ Allbery (eagle@eyrie.org)             <https://www.eyrie.org/~eagle/>

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