Hypothetically, a group of sysadmins could have decided that personal trust among server administrators was the necessary ingredient missing from Usenet, and created a separate hierarchy of groups that they only propagated among themselves. The first tenet of fight club being that you don't send fight club messages on to any server you don't recognize as being in fight club. The qualification for knowing about it and joining it were basically the same: someone already in was willing to take responsibility for you. The hypothetical benefit was a high signal/noise ratio, and the major drawback being a very, very limited population.
Over in the non-hypothetical world of lobste.rs, someone had the same idea about membership in a forum very much like hackernews -- the social graph being explicit, and public, and used by the moderators in certain cases to not only prune aberrant leaves but also ask probing questions of their invitor. (Also, moderator decisions/actions all go into a public log.)
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Date: 2023-06-19 09:18 am (UTC)Over in the non-hypothetical world of lobste.rs, someone had the same idea about membership in a forum very much like hackernews -- the social graph being explicit, and public, and used by the moderators in certain cases to not only prune aberrant leaves but also ask probing questions of their invitor. (Also, moderator decisions/actions all go into a public log.)