Ask HN: Is it time to resurrect a Usenet clone?

Well have I got an LLM-based solution for you, my friend.

We have global identities-- IPv4/6 address. v6 moreso than v4.

I'm aware of the problems with CGNAT and v4, but [TEMPORARILY, as a cooldown!] banning IPs does work. With as many people as there are on the internet now, it's surpassed the ability of a handful of moderators anywhere to deal with. AI is too expensive and the first solutions are just going to involve everyone piping every comment, post and submission through OpenAI for free training anyway. At some level OpenAI will be perversely incentivized to hire spammers to drive business for themselves by pushing sites past free-tier usage.

Collateral damage may well be the solution to curtailing abuse in the future. For IPv4 for the most part, only individual users' IPs should be affected unless they're part of a botnet, but when nobody can use any site because trolls have gotten entire telcos' IPv4 space banned, at some point the trolls are going to have to accept what their impact is and change their behavior because other trolls are impacting their own ability to enjoy anything. Socialize the abuse and crowdsource punishment (not normally my thing, but we've tried everything else). If you shit where you eat, expect shit in your next bite. When someone brags about pointless mischief, rather than being cheered on as some kind of rebel, they will get a lesson in socialization. They will be outed as the reason why nobody in their country can access 4chan anymore and be dealt with.

This doesn't work while we exempt M247's address space because "normal" users insist on using the same infrastructure as trolls and cybercriminals, exempt all of Tor because there might be a gay user in Iran who can't keep their mouth shut, or refuse to block the IP of a problem user in the Philippines because it's shared by everyone in Malaysia. Accommodating exceptional people (no sarcasm, in the kindest terms) has made things exceptionally insufferable for everyone else.

This will drive fragmentation. It is a good thing. If one person can get all of Malaysia banned from Reddit 2.0 or whatever, after everyone is denied for long enough it will drive creation of smaller, local communities instead of massive, centralized ones. This is what we want, right? The most dedicated troll would have to do actual work to find, infiltrate and harass every single offshoot community that develops as a result. The cost of trolling is now borne by the troll, not the responders. It also increases the cost and effort involved in surveillance. Right now, if you want to track anyone, start with a FAANG product and work outward.

Within a generation, we became afraid of punishing anybody for any reason, so small wonder the lunatics are running the asylum. The internet fucking sucks these days. It feels like a mental hospital-- sterile, boring, with crazies everywhere screaming all the time threatening to kill everyone or themselves. Basically downtown Atlanta after hours, just with less piss flowing everywhere. If we want the old internet back, play by old internet rules. IP addresses are just numbers, ASNs are not people and the women are all men. Don't accept traffic from problem sources. Ignore the complaints unless they're from people helping to pay your hosting fees.

> We have global identities-- IPv4/6 address. v6 moreso than v4.

Nope. My identity, as a concept, doesn't change if I'm at Burger King, Starbucks, at home, or at work, or if I'm using a cell phone, or my Sister's computer.

Emails are the closest thing we have to a proper global identity. But it wasn't enough in practice. Reddit gives us a "Reddit" identity across a huge number of subcommunities.

Tumblr, MySpace, Xanga, Discord, Twitter, Facebook... the primary "killer app" that all of these give us is this identity.

Emails are insufficient, because a spammer can create any email address they want, and there's no way for us to share which email addresses are spam with other "allies" on the internet.

Why not just independent forum sites like 1998-2008. I was a member of 10 or so very specific forums where I could get expert advice very quickly. That is in the rare event that my problem hadn't already been discussed in great detail with highly detailed walk throughs.

Then each of those forums had a marketplace where you could buy pretty much anything relevant to that interest at great values with scams being pretty much non-existent and any disputes that did arise carried out and mediated in public.

And all the forums had off topic as well where politics and other things were confined.

Oh and advertising was limited to a few banner ads at the top of pages and various plugs in people's signatures.

Lastly, I could get all the relevant updates from the sites I was interested in with a nice orderly rss feed customized to my liking.

Post count was a big driver for a while.