[fein]

> Cancelbot wars. As spamming and the spam-killing cancelbots become more widespread, people will find their Usenet News messages canceled by someone who simply doesn't like them. Cancelbot software will spread, as people begin editing out opposing views and unfriendly ideas.

Prescient. This is automoderator on Reddit to a T.

[pjc50]

Much worse than that: cancels were unauthenticated. Anyone could cancel anything, and it was up to individual NNTP servers to decide whether to respect it or not. Usually they had some level of whitelisting to prevent total anarchy, but it was definitely a problem. NNTP was a true decentralized system, and people trying to build decentralized social media and discussion platforms really should learn from all the problems it never managed to solve.

https://circleid.com/posts/20191125_the_early_history_of_use...

See also the Russ Allbery spam rant https://www.eyrie.org/~eagle/writing/rant.html

[ok123456]

When I was about 11, I remember I asked for disk images of Logo for Apple ][ or something along those lines on Usenet.

Someone at a university cancelled the message, but then felt pangs of guilt. He emailed me an apology and then offered to send me the disks through the mail. I emailed him back my address, and he sent the disks to me through the "snail mail" as they called it back then.

[ClassyJacket]

And the human moderators.

[AnimalMuppet]

It was also the alt.scientology war.

[warning26]

Can you elaborate? This sounds like an interesting bit of early internet drama/history.

[AnimalMuppet]

Scientology holds their non-newbie teachings as, essentially, trade secrets. You only get to see them after you pay a lot of money to "advance" in their ranks. Somebody - presumably a disgruntled insider - started publishing some of their texts on alt.scientology. Scientology tried to stop them by automated (or very rapid human) cancels, with forged "from" fields. Posts on the board got "visited by the cancel bunny". Then people calling themselves "rabbit hunters" tried to figure out who was the source(s) of the cancel messages.

But it got knarlier than that. Scientology's texts were copyrighted; they had police seize the servers of people who put copies of the texts online.

Wired had a good write-up: https://www.wired.com/1995/12/alt-scientology-war/

[andai]

If you think that's wild, wait til you hear what they did in meatspace!

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Operation_Snow_White

[fritztastic]

Great info.

That photo of their building, at first glance my immediate reaction was the assumption that it was a screenshot from Minecraft. Upon closer inspection, it really is a photograph. Kind of a good metaphor for Scientology itself, looks harmless then you really look and it's quite a stark reality- less "wacky" and more "wtf".

[clsec]

Yep, a real photo. Unfortunately, I participated in the making of that sign. It was made at a sign company in Oakland, CA that is owned and operated by Scientologists.

As a matter of fact, it was this sign that started my investigation into the goings on at said company and my discovery that the owner, sales manager, production manager and H.R. person were all full fledged Scientologists. Needless to say, I quit that job. But it wasn't over.. on my exit interview they grilled me on why I was quitting/what I thought of the company. Then they spent the next 2 years trying to serve me for stealing documents that I didn't steal.

[_whiteCaps_]

Around that time, I was working tech support at an ISP and our NNTP server went down - I got a call from a customer who was worried their posts on alt.scientology had caused a DOS attack. Checked some things, oops, no, we had just run out of disk space. Got the sysadmins to clear up some space and the customer was soon back at their flame war. :-D