A bit off topic, but with regards to CSAM: I don't understand the motives of people who share it online for free¹. Distributing child pornography risks serious consequences, and I don't see what the compensation is that makes people willing to take that risk for no monetary profit. Maybe if we understood that motivation, we could make it less attractive to do; preventing the motivation for the activity might be easier than preventing the activity.

¹ Which is among, of course, the many other things I don't understand about them.

Offhand I'd say there's at least 3 reasons. Notoriety - either pseudonymous or otherwise, bait - like a state actor, and as an attack or exploit against a site operator. This is assuming some definition of public where a casual user not searching for or desiring it can discover it.

So basically the same reasons as any other undesirable or "illegal" content being found publicly.

> I don't understand the motives of people who share it online for free

From what I have read, it's to share and / or (worse) collaborate. A distant example that I recall was a couple in US that sold their 12 year old child in marriage to an adult (the legal marriageable age, with parental consent, in MA and NH is 12 years old).

> I wonder how it will deal with the inevitable spam and csam.

I'm thinking a modern Usenet would need something like ad blocker lists - volunteer run filter(s) that you choose to subscribe to.

> I'm thinking a modern Usenet would need something like ad blocker lists - volunteer run filter(s) that you choose to subscribe to.

This would be most useful if they're maintained per-category, by the people who frequent those categories. So then each filter list has "moderators" who can add stuff to it, the people who frequent a category usually subscribe to its most popular filter list, but nobody is required to.

Then because it's community-moderated and non-centralized you don't get the same problems with you do with email spam filtering where people will try to get their competitors' non-spam senders added to the global spam filter list.

> community-moderated

So’s Reddit, though. I’ve become skeptical of the sort of people who volunteer to moderate.

Incentive is tough. You end up with a percentage of toxic moderators in people who are looking to fill a social need in their lives, burning themselves out "volunteering", or people looking for power or status and internet points. It's one of the cases where a steem like cryptocurrency could work to correct for the toxic incentives, but nobody's figured out how to make it work yet.

I’m of the (unpopular?) opinion that users ruined the internet, and not megacorps.

For example is google crappy now because they just don’t care or is it really all the “content marketing” that did it?

I suspect any forum that gains significant enough traction to attract the bad actors will turn to shit.

I think even in the cases where users hurt the experience, we tend to blame the higher org for not resolving the conflict. "There are people bullying on the platform" -> "Why doesn't Google get rid of the bullying behaviors?!" instead of "Why don't people stop bullying?"

I think we also have a tendency to take it to the next level, which is often government. If people are scamming me through Gmail, we can tend to not think it's the fault of the people scamming or of Gmail but of the government for not forcing Gmail to stop the scamming or the person from doing scamming directly.

So I appreciate you bringing the attention back down to the ground level. While I disagree in that it would be only the users, I believe they (we) contribute to the problems as well as Google and the government and many other entities.

Yeah I don’t mean to give megacorps a free pass either. I just think it’s in our nature to collectively ruin most things that start out great… and like you say, blame everyone else.

Yea I hear ya. The more I've observed it in my own life, the more I notice that a lot of the blame I give others is blame that I have been privately giving myself.

Blaming my family for an Xmas event where I may have been exposed to covid? Mostly just blaming myself for choosing to go against my own desire. So on and so forth for soooo many situations.

Aether kainda did that by requiring proof-of-work for posting. And having mod elections amd other stuff.

https://getaether.net/

> So’s Reddit, though. I’ve become skeptical of the sort of people who volunteer to moderate.

This depends heavily on the sub.

And in this case you have an even better alternative to bad moderators. If they're bad on Reddit you can start your own sub but then you have to convince everyone there to move. With filter lists, you can start your own filter list for the same community and any subset of members can use it without having to fork the community itself. If you do a better job, yours will be more popular.

You can also potentially have filter lists by category. One is for true spam, i.e. commercial solicitation by for-profit entities and scammers. The other is for trolls and shitposters. You might think a moderator is overly aggressive in classifying things as trolls but still want the spam filtering, and then you can.

Agreed. Never giving power to anyone who wants power is usually the right choice.

I'd rather use a karma based moderation system, which works on the premise that the majority of people isn't made of trolls, spammers, scammers and the like.

reddit is cabal-moderated, or moderated in the same way as prison gangs moderate their communities

Me too!

Maybe people could just make and sign posts in an appropriate group that you can subscribe to/diff/edit as you please.

That is exactly how Usenet works right now sans the restriction to sign posts. But several folks do indeed sign their posts.

Something like a killfile. I'm old.

Green Card Lottery 1994 May Be The Last One! THE DEADLINE HAS BEEN ANNOUNCED. The Green Card Lottery is a completely legal program giving away a certain annual allotment of Green Cards to persons born in certain countries. The lottery program was scheduled to continue on a permanent basis. However, recently, Senator Alan J Simpson introduced a bill into the U. S. Congress which could end any future lotteries. THE 1994 LOTTERY IS SCHEDULED TO TAKE PLACE SOON, BUT IT MAY BE THE VERY LAST ONE.

And to think, now the spammers run the Internet. How things have changed...

Spammers always ran the internet. Where were you in 1998?

I was on the Internet that was not literally run by Google and Facebook.

At the time I was very young and the whole thing was a scam. I couldn't believe that there actually is a green card lottery. /Tangent