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Usenet has a few hard problems, no? Mostly related to moderation. You want to be able to edit or delete content, either your own, or, if you are a moderator, other content which turned out to be illegal later (which already implies content moderation before allowing content to be published). Spam is another big problem.

To avoid impersonation, you'd have to sign everything, which I guess is possible, but experience shows crypto done properly is a huge pain. We already see how unsatisfactory this works with email.

Plus, does usenet scale as well as, say, reddit? Sometimes heated threads are more like comment streams with probably dozens of comments per second.

How can these be solved with a few improvements?



> You want to be able to edit or delete content, either your own, or, if you are a moderator, other content which turned out to be illegal later (which already implies content moderation before allowing content to be published).

Or you accept the fact that what you write is a permanent record. (Local admins can delete messages from their servers if there is a problem with the content.)

That being said, there are Control messages (RFC 5536 § 3.2.3), and one of the things that they can do is cancel an article (RFC 5537 § 5.3). You'd probably want to authenticate the cancel messages of course:

* http://fi.archive.ubuntu.com/ftp.isc.org/pub/pgpcontrol/READ...

* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Control_message

Worth noting that you can't force servers to honour the cancel messages and delete the article on their local storage.


A parallel copy of Usenet is used for piracy, with a posting volume measured in double-digit gigabits per second. It can probably handle Reddit.


That's regarding the size of the entries, not the frequency though. Many small comments in a short time frame will have a huge overhead.

Also, there is a reason why binary content was first frowned upon, then became essentially a paid feature. It's expensive.


Impersonation and spam are things you find on other ways of running a forum.

On Usenet you can easily stop following a group or person.


Isn't spoofing an email sender address much easier than taking over an account on a web-based forum? I think forums are very robust against that, while email and usenet are not.


Plonk




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