A Twitter thread on trolls brought up mention of trolls on Usenet. The reason they were so hard to deal with, even then, has some lessons for today; besides, the history is interesting. (Aside: this is, I think, the first longish thing I’ve ever written about any of the early design decisions for Usenet. I should note that this is entirely my writing, and memory can play many tricks across nearly 40 years.)
A complete tutorial on Usenet would take far too long; let it suffice for now to say that in the beginning, it was a peer-to-peer network of multiuser time-sharing systems, primarily interconnected by dial-up 300 bps and 1200 bps modems. (Yes, I really meant THREE HUNDRED BITS PER SECOND. And some day, I’ll have the energy to describe our home-built autodialers—I think that the statute of limitations has expired…) Messages were distributed via a flooding algorithm. Because these time-sharing systems were relatively big and expensive and because there were essentially no consumer-oriented dial-up services then (even modems and dumb terminals were very expensive), if you were on Usenet it was via your school or employer. If there was abuse, pressure could be applied that way—but it wasn’t always easy to tell where a message had originated—and that’s where this blog post really begins: why didn’t Usenet authenticate requests?
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