[echelon]

Usenet and IRC (with its hundreds of servers) were a wild west.

Some forums let you pay to regain entry, others would downvote but not outright ban (like Slashdot).

Banning was practically impossible given dynamic IP addresses and dial-up.

The internet was much smaller, its users more technical, and its software much more bug-filled. It was entirely possible that banning someone would lead to them exploiting your server and taking it offline. I witnessed that happen several times.

People focused on mostly getting along. Nobody was sensitive about the bullshit we whine about today.

It's also interesting that the zeitgeist at the time favored conservatives, so liberals were the then-staunch supporters of free speech. (Remember the Church of Satan?) That's completely reversed now.

The internet of today is so incredibly different to the internet of the 90's and early 2000's. Despite all we've gained, we've actually lost a lot too.

[vidarh]

Usenet was a wild west outside of the big 7 which was full of moderated groups and policies, but there definitely Is No Cabel [1] keeping an eye on things. Even many alt.* groups had people trying with various degrees of success to keep things on topic and moderated.

The Fediverse is the same way: You can have the wild west, but much of it is kept separate with active defederation so you may need to find smaller instances, run your own or simply have a second account. That doesn't mean it's not there.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/There_Is_No_Cabal

[mcv]

Also, many servers didn't carry alt.* at all (or very selectively) because it was such a wild west.

[mcv]

I remember when the first spam message showed up on usenet. People weren't happy, complained with the admin of the spammer's system, and the spammer lost his account. That's why spammers started to create their own spam systems and everybody else started to block those systems.

The internet was open and unmoderated when nobody was abusing it. Once people start abusing it, it will be moderated. It's unavoidable.

> It's also interesting that the zeitgeist at the time favored conservatives

I don't think that's true. The 1990s saw the rise of conservative talk radio and of Fox News, but they weren't as dominant as they became later, and the 1990s were a pretty liberal time in much of the western world.

> liberals were the then-staunch supporters of free speech.

Still are. But even then, they didn't tolerate intolerance. It's just that at the time, intolerance was universally seen as bad, and not central to a rising ideology as it is now.

[xigoi]

There's a difference between moderating spam and moderating wrongthink.

[asadotzler]

nah. moderation is building the environment you want, and it can take all kinds of forms.