So if there are 100 people whose messages you willingly watch, how do you discover new people? (Maybe you do so organically when they mention them?)
And if you _do_ allow yourself to taste from the firehose of unfiltered messages, a single personal list of users/messages wouldn't scale and you have the classic spam problem. Do you share your rules with others (and form an aggregation like https://www.dnsbl.info/)?
> Thanks for posting this. Everything old is new again.
Right? It was such a good time :-) You're welcome.
> why usenet couldn't be a viable social media platform
I wonder if identity plays a role here. Centralizing points (likes, retweets, etc) drives people to work on getting attention with their posts, to drive engagement, but also invites troublemakers and controversy.
How was poster identity handled in Usenet/NNTP? From what I remember, it was just a "From:" header and spoofing was easy. Or was there more to it? (Maybe because most posters wrote to their local server which require auth, you could see which server the message originated from and decide if the sender's address matched the server address...? It's been so long.)
If not, then Twitter, Mastodon, etc. all seem to have a somewhat strong notion of identity.
> Always look at the date when you read a hardware article. Some of the content in this article is most likely out of date, as it was written on September 19, 2011.
Not only do they have a date on the article (and many posts in recent years simply don't), but they draw your attention to it because it's long ago.
It's such a small but important detail. Instantly increases my trust for the company.