Usenet had a nonstop spam generator called Google Groups that shit it up for years. It wasn't just intentional spam but clueless people came in through there and bumped 20+ year old threads.
The other factor related to the decline was ISP's stopped bundling usenet service in the 2000's.
There are sill a handful of active groups but unfortunately at least a third of the remaining active lost access when the Google spam service stopped.
But continuining to ignore it into the 2000s was clearly nonsensical.
[1] https://www.cnn.com/2024/12/22/business/facebook-content-mod...
I imagine it’d be good at getting rid of a lot of modern plagues on social media as they seem to have a small, predictable and shitty vocabulary.
Their responses are curt, sure, but to them they are not outside the norm of the field.
(One reason I stick to CW - being an asshole on there is too time consuming)
I don't know if the worst example is the folks who got mad because I used to use my HT via the repeater to contact people in Canada 250+ miles away when tropospheric ducts were open
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tropospheric_propagation
or the guy from the weather service who was mad that nobody on our daily net had information about a localized storm that really scared him because he saw what could have been a tornado on his NEXRAD. I told him, "look, none of us live in that spot and the only way you're going to get more information is if more people think ham radio is a welcoming hobby"
You can be an asshole on FT8, but it's harder to do.
... --- / .. - / ... . . -- ... .-.-.-
... what I really need is a something that detects 'text in images', i mean, I don't mind if you took a photo of a sign in the real world but posting screenshots is a bad smell, only a tiny fraction are wholesome like this:
https://bsky.app/profile/up-8.bsky.social/post/3lseycg7nl22p
Not to say you shouldn't do it, but you should be aware of what you're signing up for.
Hopefully there will be follow-up studies.
>I noticed something: most of the irritation came from a handful of people, sometimes only one or two. If I could only ignore them, the computer conferences were still valuable. Alas, it's not always easy to do.
This is what killed Usenet,[1] which 40 years ago offered much of the virtues of Reddit in decentralized form. The network's design has several flaws, most importantly no way for any central authority to completely delete posts (admins in moderated groups can only approve posts), since back in the late 1970s Usenet's designers expected that everyone with the werewithal to participate online would meet a minimum standard of behavior. Usenet has always had a spam problem, but as usage of the network declined as the rest of the Internet grew, spam's relative proportion of the overall traffic grew.
That said, there are server- and client-side anti-spam tools of varying effectiveness. A related but bigger problem for Usenet is people with actual mental illness; think "50 year olds with undiagnosed autism". Usenet is such a niche network nowadays that there has to be meaningful motivation to participate, and if the motivation is not a sincere interest in the subject it's, in my experience, going to be people with very troubled personal lives which their online behavior reflects. Again, as overall traffic declined, their relative contribution and visibility grew. This, not spam, is what has mostly killed Usenet.
[1] I am talking about traditional non-binary Usenet here