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Fidonet Rules (2014)
21–30 of 53 posts
Re: Fidonet Rules (2014)
#22I had a Fido node in the late 90s — early 2000s.
One thing I miss is the fact that it was possible to have civil conversations on very controversial subjects.
Re: Fidonet Rules (2014)
#23Re: Fidonet Rules (2014)
#24Re: Fidonet Rules (2014)
#25I always feel simplistic rules like these or like wikipedia's "don't be a dick" work well for small communities but never scale.
The ambiguity is really code for "follow implicit unstated behavioral community norms". When a community is small enough and everyone knows each other, a consensus can develop over what is appropriate behaviour. Yes people will push boundries, and there will be disagreements over what is good, but there is enough of a shared consensus on what being "good" means, you can just say "behave" and it sort of works.
The moment the community gets big and elements of it are strangers to one another, there is no shared meaning over what good behaviour is, even roughly, or for that matter shared context for which to evaluate the behavior in. Telling people to just play nice stops working.
Re: Fidonet Rules (2014)
#26Earlier quoted context omitted.
About the number of bytes a signature was supposed to be....
80 bytes was the limit in Italy. At that time in Italy we did not have free local phone calls, every call would be billed based on its duration. Now imagine being a Fidonet sysop who on a volunteer basis was running a computer at home 24/7, often having a second phone line dedicated to the computer (at the time even more expensive) to make sure that your users would not clog your home landline making you unreachable…
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Re: Fidonet Rules (2014)
#27I had a Fido node in the late 90s — early 2000s. One thing I miss is the fact that it was possible to have civil conversations on very controversial subjects.
I think part of the civility was because people knew they could get banned from the various BBS's that were their access to fidonet in the first place. When you were limited to local access points, due to the costs of long distance calls, there was more incentive to not piss off your hosts.
Re: Fidonet Rules (2014)
#28The "don't be easily annoyed" rule is increasingly needed. An acquaintance was recently attacked for saying "hey guys" on a Discord. Then when he pointed out the madness of it, he got banned.
Re: Fidonet Rules (2014)
#29In the 90s we had so much discussions about netiquette on usenet. It seems naive now.
But we didn't have mods then which I think makes a difference.
My mileage varies.
In my FidoNet nodes and the ones I visited there was explicit moderation. We were just called sysops.
For Usenet, in all sci. & comp. there were heavy moderation, and of course little to no moderation in alt. at least what I saw.
Re: Fidonet Rules (2014)
#30Eh, it’s easy to put elegant and abstract rules in place, but it’s another beast to scale that rule consistently over all users of your platform. The ambiguity is just a cop out.
Your statement begs the question, what rules would you put forth for online communities in the same succinct way that also scaled?