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A comment on Reddit downgrades technology community after censorship. Parent comment

Re:Reddit downgrades technology community after censorship by arbitrage on Monday April 21, 2014 @10:38AM (#7621227)
The death of USENET was uncontrollable spam, and that it was coopted into a binary media distribution network. For a decentralized discussion forum, the overhead was absolutely massive, and nobody wanted to pay for that and receive no direct revenue.

Websites, while still spammable, are able to control it a bit better, and if you can't figure out any other way to monetize your forum, you can always slap some ads on it.

This stuff doesn't exist in a vacuum. Someone has to pay the bills, unfortunately.

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Re:Reddit downgrades technology community after censorship by username223 on Monday April 21, 2014 @11:33AM (#7621551)
You could avoid most of the binaries by not distributing some alt.* groups, and use existing email filters for the spam. As for making a buck, ISPs could just tack on a fee for running NNTP servers. Alas, we have shitty web forums wrapped in ads instead.
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Re:Reddit downgrades technology community after censorship by dredmorbius on Monday April 21, 2014 @11:27AM (#7621517)
Spam, pain of running a Usenet feed (for ISPs), and copyright liability, among others.
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