Charles Arthur’s new predictions (updated 31st Dec)

Charles Arthur has just published a new article outlining his predictions for the tech scene in 2005. One thing I noticed was the prediction that

“Comment spam” on blogs will threaten to strangle discussion there, as it has on the Usenet newsgroups.

(Update 31st Dec: CA has just blogged about this here, again linking to the predictions in the Independent. There are also some comments.)

I’m sort of hopeful that this won’t happen in precisely the way it did on Usenet, because blogs don’t have the politics which affected Usenet. A blog belongs to the person, or people, who put it up. As a blog owner, I am entitled to delete comments from my blog as I please. This may be because they are spam, or they are inappropriate, or obscene, or I just don’t like the person, or whatever. With some blogging applications (like Geeklog, Drupal, Slash and Scoop) you can require people to register before they can comment.

This is very far from the case on Usenet. The criterion by which it is decided that posts on Usenet may be cancelled is the “Breidbart Index”. You arrive at this by taking the number of newsgroups each copy is posted to, square-rooting each, and adding the square roots up. Thus, a group of twenty posts, each sent to one group, will hit the required 20 mark, while a single post sent to 20 groups will only hit 4.472, which takes into account the fact that multiple posts take up far more net bandwidth than cross-posting. Certain types of posts were deemed “cancel-on-sight”, notably the infamous get-rich-quick pyramid scheme. There were considerable objections, although a lot of this came from people who were miffed that their posts had been cancelled. There was also massive abuse of the cancel mechanism, notably on two occasions in 1996 when posts were cancelled in large numbers on racial or other special interest grounds. This wasn’t the work of racists, but of people trying to demonstrate the “objectionability” of cancelling other people’s posts.

One awful result of the Usenet spam problem was the destruction of the newsgroup alt.sexual.abuse.recovery (ASAR). Much of the spam was advertising for pornography using very explicit terms, which was posted to any group beginning with “alt.sex” – notably, not “alt.sex.” which would have taken ASAR out of the frame. This led to a mass exodus from the group who were unable to stand seeing this sort of filth. I was able to construct cancel messages for the sex ads which reached me in Aberystwyth, when they reached me, but when I mentioned this in the spam-cancel establishment newsgroup, I recieved criticism for “rogue cancelling”, which they feared would endanger the entire spam-cancel system. In the end, ASAR moved to a new moderated newsgroup, but I suspect much of its readership can now be found on a moderated web forum somewhere; like blogs, such forums are much less easy to spam, and much easier to police.