Living 20 minutes into the future. Eccentric weirdo. Virtual Adept. Time traveler. Thelemite. Technomage. Hacker on main. APT 3319. Not human. 30% software and implants. H+ - 0.4 on the Berram-7 scale. Furry adjacent. Pan/poly. Burnout.

I try to post as sincerely as possible.

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Joined 2 years ago
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Cake day: June 10th, 2023

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  • Here’s the thing: We had this before. This is nothing new. This is not a crisis or even worthy of note. This might reflect the cycle repeating again at best, but ultimately it’s a tempest in a teapot.

    BBSes were, for the most part, isolated but sometimes federated communities. They had their own moderation policies, their own rules of conduct, and their own local communities. Sometimes, if they were part of a BBS network those communities were in contact with each other. Those BBS networks had their own policies, moderators, and so forth. It was usual for users of a given BBS to also be users of other BBSes; those users fit into the community of each other system pretty normally.

    Usenet was distributed across hundreds, if not thousands of servers across the Net; still is, if you read it. Each newsgroup had its own community, rules of conduct, FAQ (usually), and sometimes its own moderation team (the .moderated variants were well known). Rules were enforced, communities were unique to the newsgroup, and norms were followed. Again, it was not unusual for a given user to participate in multiple newsgroups and the communities thereof.

    E-mail lists were not that different.

















  • They also have to keep their editors happy. One of an editor’s jobs is to push back on the folks who write articles, and occasionally rewrite parts of them. And the editors have folks above them in the food chain pulling the strings. News companies aren’t monoliths, they’re spiderwebs of people pushing and pulling on other people because there are obligations all over the place.

    To put it another way, “You can’t say that or you’re fired. You’ll never work in this city again.” And, because there aren’t many celebrity journalists, it’s a very real risk.