[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