Fidonet Rules (2014)

https://wiki.c2.com/?FidonetRules

by kimi • 3 years ago

84 48 3 years ago

wiki.c2.com

dang2• 3 years ago

Related. Others?

Fidonet in 2023 - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36097617 - May 2023 (8 comments)

The History of Usenet and FidoNet - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23678687 - June 2020 (32 comments)

History of Fidonet (1993) - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21669570 - Nov 2019 (75 comments)

Ask HN: Remember FidoNet? - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12216932 - Aug 2016 (3 comments)

Edit: this is also pretty good:

https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&que...

myth_drannon• 3 years ago

The big dummy's guide to Fidonet(1992) - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37531198

dang2• 3 years ago

That's a great submission but the convention of linking to previous threads is to only include the ones with meaningful comments.

But I've added it to the list of candidates to invite a repost for, and if you want to email hn@ycombinator.com and remind us after enough time has gone by (say a few months, to let the hivemind caches clear), we'll be happy to do that. Invited reposts go in the second-chance pool (https://news.ycombinator.com/pool, explained at https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26998308), so they get a random placement on HN's front page.

sedatk6• 3 years ago

Eh, 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.

lmm3• 3 years ago

On the contrary, I'd say a self-evidently subjective policy like this one has a better chance of being enforced fairly than a legalistic code that usually ends up being twisted by whoever's in power to go after their political opponents.

mongol2• 3 years ago

I agree. Less is more. Better chances of users actually being aware what the rules are too, since I think only few users to actually read long code of conduct documents.

KingOfCoders2• 3 years ago

I see this with my CTO coaching clients, I see quite a lot of values and policy documents. Often they have very long value documents no one reads or knows. Better have 5 bullet points everyone knows by heart.

sedatk6• 3 years ago

That’s a false dichotomy. You can have your subjective vision along with a legalistic code, so the abuse in practice could be tested against the vision itself. Think of it like having a constitution and laws at the same time.

WaitWaitWha3• 3 years ago

Your statement begs the question, what rules would you put forth for online communities in the same succinct way that also scaled?

sedatk6• 3 years ago

You can’t have succint and unambiguous at the same time. You need to be as specific and elaborate as possible to avoid ambiguity.

bloomingeek• 3 years ago

<Don't be excessively annoying.> We do understand humans are involved,right?

<Don't be easily annoyed.> This is the only chance for success. You can only forgive if you can manage the hurt. You won't be annoyed if you've already made up your mind not to be. (excepting children and loud noises, of course.)

Cthulhu_• 3 years ago

Emphasis on the "excessively"; my comment here is annoying for being pedantic perhaps, but it's manageable. Excessive annoyance crosses a threshold to being a troll.

AnimalMuppet• 3 years ago

The problem is with your second paragraph is that these days, being annoyed can be used as a weapon. So we're back at "humans are involved".

But I think, even more fundamental than people being annoying and being annoyed, some people are acting in bad faith. Some people are there, essentially, as agents - of a nation, or a political party, or a viewpoint. They are there to declaim, not to have a conversation. This is incredibly destructive to communities.

For a small community, I could see a moderator having the ability to ban users from the site, but also the ability to ban users from a thread. "On this topic, you're not acting in good faith, so you're done for this thread." It wouldn't scale to HN, of course - dang is busy enough as it is. (Of course, this presumes the moderator is acting in good faith. But if they aren't, the site turns into an echo chamber for the position the moderator supports, and the reasonable people go somewhere else.)

KingOfCoders2• 3 years ago

In the 90s we had so much discussions about netiquette on usenet. It seems naive now.

mhd2• 3 years ago

I remember a lot of arguments about how a signature should look…

kimi3• 3 years ago

About the number of bytes a signature was supposed to be....

llarsson• 3 years ago

You could have just had your Geek Code in there to be efficient.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Geek_Code for the people who didn't get to experience it

Angostura2• 3 years ago

Ans if you did it wrong, you would be mercilessly roasted on alt.fan.warlord

zik• 3 years ago

But we didn't have mods then which I think makes a difference.

WaitWaitWha3• 3 years ago

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.

chx• 3 years ago

Yours truly have translated RFC 1855 to Hungarian some three decades ago.

kimi3• 3 years ago

The reason why I posted this, was that I find it kind-of interesting for the "culture wars" that plague public discourse - especially in the US, but with a global fall-out - where a number of topics are mis-used as either political maces (don't annoy others) or/and to claim a victim status (don't be easily annoyed), therefore making them radioactive for everybody else who does not want to engage in the game.

LAC-Tech• 3 years ago

Good rules, I've been guilty of breaking both but I find things are a lot more pleasant if I don't.

People violating these rules on social media are big neon warning lights. Mute, and move on with your life. There are so many intelligent and pleasant people out there in cyberspace.

quickthrower2• 3 years ago

Click the JohnPassaniti link. That is funny, loved it!

eterevsky• 3 years ago

I 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.

brk• 3 years ago

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.

bawolff2• 3 years ago

I 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.

mongol2• 3 years ago

But does the situation improve with a longer code of conduct though? I doubt it. What matters when the community gets larger is efforts of moderation.

bawolff2• 3 years ago

I think with a big community, consistent moderation matters more, as people won't respect it if it is precieved as biased or unfair. A longer code of conduct can help with that, but it won't do it by itself.

boxed2• 3 years ago

The "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.

FridayNightTV2• 3 years ago

The "don't be easily annoyed" rule is increasingly needed.

Interestingly....

I recall a post on here where a bloke got very indignant about the innocent use of the term 'Chinaman'; something this Englishman (sharing an office with two Frenchmen, an Irishman and a Dane) found rather odd, especially considering the complainant was not Chinese themselves.

I think this was my introduction to the idea of the 'modern' internet user being far too easily offended (on somebody else's behalf to boot!), coupled with a modern desire to engage in culture wars and internet virtue signalling. This has certainly not lead to rational and healthy discourse.

Marazan• 3 years ago

So what you're saying is that he didn't take being corrected well and was easily annoyed.

Literally costs him nothing to adopt the culture of the Discord he wants to participate in yet still he was so easily annoyed he got banned.

boxed2• 3 years ago

Some points:

1. he wasn't "corrected", he was attacked

2. even if he was "corrected" that makes no sense since the dictionary literally agrees with him

He was attacked for being a male that knew he was male. That was the attack. Quite absurd.

NoZZz• 3 years ago

2:292/614.0 :wave:

Fidonet Rules (2014)

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