On 3/11/07, Gwern Branwen gwern0@gmail.com wrote:
No. USENET was/is a lot worse. Spam is permanently a fact of life there (wasn't the first ever piece of spam a Usenet message?),
jj@cup.portal.com
As was the first commercial spam (Canter and Siegel; I had the displeasure of being the #2 tech person at their secondary ISP).
they invented the trolls and are trolled by Scientology to a more significant degree than Wikipedia (when was the lest time you heard of User:Anon.penet.fi being sued by the Church of Scientology on the wiki?) And they have real cabals on Usenet,
Hah.
not to mention the whole idea of canceling posts, cross-threading, etc. Say what you will about Wikipedia, but it's a much more pleasant, less volatile and less transient place to work. The two are different fundamentally, anyway.
True.