Re: People Without Meaningful Lives Seek Power Over Others

On Tue, 21 Jan 2025 09:27:10 -0300, Shadow <Sh@dow.br> wrote:

On Tue, 21 Jan 2025 01:06:34 GMT, cyclintom <cyclintom@yahoo.com>
wrote:
>

Do we need to make the point that you hide your identity

>
This is Usenet. Usenet was DESIGNED to be anonymous. In fact
people are advised to NEVER post anything that might identify them.
It was the reason why Google spent billions buying the
dejanews archives and then hid them. An attempt to kill Usenet. It
didn't work.
If you really believe in freedom, NEVER ask anyone on Usenet
to identify themselves.
[]'s

That's not the exactly what happened.  When the Internet was
contrived, it was essentially an academic research network.  Many
systems didn't have password and some prominent users (Richard
Stallman) refused to use passwords on his publicly accessible systems.
That was fine as long as academia ruled the Internet, but fell apart
as companies and corporation started connecting to the Internet.
Management of these companies insisted that nothing company related
would appear on the Internet which included the personal opinions of
the user.  Also, no business or financial transactions were allowed.
As the Internet grew, enforcing that became increasingly difficult.
The only way around this was for users to obscure their identities so
management couldn't determine who was writing bad things about their
company management or products.  That soon morphed into the right to
"privacy" which really meant that right to post almost anything about
someone on the Internet without fear of retaliation.  There were
attempts to prosecute individuals for libel, but that failed badly.

Google didn't buy Deja News because they wanted to suppress free
speech.  They bought it because Usenet was growing far too fast for
the founders to be able to store everything (especially binaries) and
because there was no easy way to monetize Usenet News.  By 2001, Deja
News was out of money and was forced to shutdown.  Google then offered
to rescue Deja News by buying the company and inheriting the archive.
<https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Google_Groups#Google_Groups>
Google had no idea what to do with Deja News.  After Google merged
Deja News and Google Groups, it sat essentially dormant as Google
considered various ways of making money from the transaction, but
found nothing.  Eventually, web forums, blogs, social media and
specialty sites replaced Google Groups.  Usenet is still around, but
the bulk of the users have moved to other services. 


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Jeff Liebermann                 jeffl@cruzio.com
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