Nothing has changed since Jerry Pournelle wrote 40 years ago when discussing online forums:
>I noticed something: most of the irritation came from a handful of people, sometimes only one or two. If I could only ignore them, the computer conferences were still valuable. Alas, it's not always easy to do.
This is what killed Usenet,[1] which 40 years ago offered much of the virtues of Reddit in decentralized form. The network's design has several flaws, most importantly no way for any central authority to completely delete posts (admins in moderated groups can only approve posts), since back in the late 1970s Usenet's designers expected that everyone with the werewithal to participate online would meet a minimum standard of behavior. Usenet has always had a spam problem, but as usage of the network declined as the rest of the Internet grew, spam's relative proportion of the overall traffic grew.
That said, there are server- and client-side anti-spam tools of varying effectiveness. A related but bigger problem for Usenet is people with actual mental illness (kstrauser mentioned one); think "50 year olds with undiagnosed autism". Usenet is such a niche network nowadays that there has to be meaningful motivation to participate, and if the motivation is not a sincere interest in the subject it's, in my experience, going to be people with very troubled personal lives which their online behavior reflects. Again, as overall traffic declined, their relative contribution and visibility grew. This, not spam, is what has mostly killed Usenet.
[1] I am talking about traditional non-binary Usenet here
Every online social problem was first experienced by Usenet. Every social protocol contains an informal bugridden incomplete implementation of half of Usenet.
>I noticed something: most of the irritation came from a handful of people, sometimes only one or two. If I could only ignore them, the computer conferences were still valuable. Alas, it's not always easy to do.
This is one of those funny things about internet forums and social media: it favors people who have the time and inclination to post a lot, and obviously in some cases you get cranks occupying a space and flaming regulars. People who don't have energy or time to fight back eventually give up on debating these people and may end up leaving a space, which leaves just the cranks or the crank-adjacent.
I often think about how even with social media, you're free to follow whoever you want, but over time you'll find some people you follow post a whole lot more than others. They have time and inclination to post a lot and as a result, you end up hearing their opinions more than others, so they kind of have a subtle power. Obviously you can unfollow them if you like, but it makes you think about how online spaces can easily be dominated by people who can and want to be online all the time.
I wonder if LLM analysis could help with moderation automation if well implemented. It can still be human-in-the-loop and you need to apply it tastefully (!!!), i.e. not letting just the most hardcore dogmatists discuss in some extremist group, but those are another issue entirely in some sense. Also, beware malicious users wasting tokens.
This is consistently true across all human organizations larger than a handful of people. Its a limitation of human communication and alignment
I saw that happen to the ultramarathon subReddit which I founded and I’m the lead moderator. And when I was running a radio station it was consistently the same people who would call in. I see it even in some of the smaller group chats that I’m in
You cannot have a stable community without these types of issues coming up beyond a few or so dozen people
I'm not particularly convinced, a mention of the arpanet is a mention of the arpanet, and keeping quiet means keeping quiet.
I can believe that Pournelle was being the kind of person about whom one might write "most of the irritation came from a handful of people, sometimes only one or two" and that was the real reason he got kicked off, but that's a long way away from being censored for politics.
It's odd that Bradford DeLong copied my original file of email that I put together without giving any attribution or provenance where it came from, and stripped the introduction I wrote that contextualized it, then omitted the first email from Chris Stacy to 11 different people including Pournelle, which established the actual context.
DeLong is a UC Berkeley economics professor, former Deputy Assistant Secretary of the Treasury for Economic Policy under Clinton, and prominent blogger who should know better than to strip attribution from the compiled primary sources he's plagiarizing and posting to his blog.
Here is the original file he copied without credit (without his unreadable css):
- Removes my authorial framing without attribution
- Omits the January 1984 email which provides crucial administrative context
- Strips formatting that helps establish authenticity
- Presents it as his own curation on his blog
The missing 1984 email is particularly important because it shows the guest account policies were already being tightened before the Pournelle incident, making the eventual account termination part of a broader pattern rather than a purely personal vendetta.
The January 1984 email he omitted was sent to 11 recipients including Pournelle himself, which shows he was directly informed of the TACACS policies over a year before the incident.
Regarding ylee's post and the filfre.net discussion: I was there, I personally know the primary actors, and I'm the one who compiled the original document that DeLong plagiarized. The interpretation in stepped_pyramids' comment and Yeechang Lee's defense of Pournelle in the filfre.net comments are both wrong.
It wasn't about "mentioning ARPANET in Byte" or politics. It was about behavior.
GUMBY (David Henkel-Wallace), an HN regular and old friend who founded Cygnus Support (the pioneering open source company that developed GCC, acquired by Red Hat in 1999), and the youngest hacker to have his own office at the MIT AI Lab, was in the original 1985 thread:
>>I wonder if this is the first instance of politically motivated mobbing behavior to take place over a digital communications medium?
>It was not politically motivated (I am in that thread from 1985). Pournelle was a pain in the neck when drunk. And a blowhard (which is hardly a crime, but doesn't make people sympathetic when you call them assholes and then tell them to do things for you).
>As for the proxmiring: he was one of the common offenders; he loved to talk archly about how he was part of the insider elite, while claiming that that was proof of his democratic ideals.
>gumby on Sept 10, 2017 | root | parent | next [–]
>I love that excerpt since it was classic Pournelle: included a nice extra bit of detail that showed he was "in the know" yet was not actually true (RMS was never a grad student). He used to boast he was part of Reagan's "Kitchen Cabinet" of space advisors, and talked about their EOB meetings -- but i knew folks on the NSC technical advisory committee and it was nothing like he described.
>I never let on that the person he "knew" online and the person he knew offline were the same me.
The irony of quoting Pournelle complaining about "a handful of people" causing "most of the irritation" on online forums is rich - Pournelle WAS that handful of people. He was widely known in SF fandom as a belligerent drunk at conventions, and he brought that behavior online.
Pournelle literally asked to be kicked off: "If you have some authority to order me off the net, do so. If not, leave me alone." They did. He got exactly what he demanded.
RMS personally wrote custom software for Pournelle and patiently tutored him. Pournelle's thanks? Telling John McCarthy that MIT was "run by a bunch of communists."
Pournelle violated the MIT AI Lab Tourist Policy on multiple counts: commercial use for his BYTE column, promoting his books on SF-LOVERS, and anti-social behavior. The policy explicitly stated: "Any use of the MIT ITS machines for personal gain, profit making enterprise, or political purposes is not a legitimate use of the Laboratories' computer resources."
His response to getting called out was threatening to sic his "Pentagon friends," "reporter friends," and "the House Armed Services Committee" on grad students running a free service he was abusing.
The poetic justice: JGA suggested the account termination message should read "Think of it as evolution in action" - Pournelle's own Social Darwinist catchphrase from Oath of Fealty.
KMP's assessment stands: "The man has learned nothing from his presence on MC and sets a bad example of what people might potentially accomplish there. I'd rather recycle his account for some bright 12-yr-old."
The real damage from DeLong's sloppy plagiarism (I won't link but you can google for proof): his stripped-down version has now propagated to places like Kiwi Farms, where trolls cite DeLong's copy as evidence that Pournelle was "the first person banned more or less for wrong think on DARPAnet." The exact opposite of reality. This is what happens when you strip context and attribution from compiled primary sources - bad-faith actors weaponize the gaps.
> a handful of people, sometimes only one or two. If I could only ignore them, the computer conferences were still valuable. Alas, it's not always easy to do.
> This is what killed Usenet,
You've got to be kidding!
The fact that Usenet was a protocol, with no favored UI (not even a web UI) meant that you could implement "only ignore them" in a totally reliable way. Indeed, this feature was so commonplace that it even had a name: a "killfile".
Killfiles were local to each user which is good since each person could control what they saw. It was bad because new users who didn't know about killfiles would see the bad actors. It also meant that could have disjoint conversation so it felt like each thread was its own thing. You would have to keep telling people to not respond to the trolls.
The ideal is to have a global filter by moderators for the bad actors, and user killfile to tune that.
Usenet killfiles are not "totally reliable". Nym shifting has always been a thing, even before Google Groups-based commercial mass spamming using constantly changing From: lines industrialized the problem. Killfiles also do nothing for people quoting the person you are trying to ignore, unless you use a thread-based killfile, which of course means you won't see a lot of non-killfiled people's comments.
At the end of the day, there is no satisfactory solution to the problem of warped and damaged online personalities other than actually preventing them from being online, which of course has its own difficulties and consequences.
Speaking of netnews UIs and netnews "personalities"...
Eric S. Raymond (aka "Eric The Flute" or "ESR") spent the late 1980s obsessively promoting his "Teenage Mutant Ninja Netnews" (TMNN) project at science fiction conventions, calling himself the "mad mastermind of TMN-Netnews" in his usenet signature (comp.lang.misc, December 13, 1989). He would corner people and drone on endlessly about it at inappropriate times.
Two years in secret laboratories. The future "Cathedral and the Bazaar" guy. The "release early, release often" guy. The "given enough eyeballs, all bugs are shallow" guy.
None of it materialized. The project was abandoned. Wikipedia: "A rough version of the software was released and drew attention from around the network, but the project was abandoned shortly thereafter."
His online resume still lists it under "Independent Consulting" as simply "A rewrite of the USENET netnews software" - burying the embarrassing name and omitting that it was abandoned.
OMFG, in researching this post, I just ran across the tmnn7-8 source code, archived here:
Hey, after all those hours of listening to him drone on and on about it, I finally found the code. Let's pull it down and take a look.
His BRAGSHEET file announced: "after two years of development the software construct known as TEENAGE MUTANT NINJA NETNEWS has escaped from the secret laboratories of Thyrsus Enterprises and will soon assume a very public identity as News 3.0."
The BRAGSHEET promised grandiose features under "the future": "TMN-Netnews is intended to provide a starting point for experiments in advanced logical-network services... intelligent filtering agents... and hypertext." He even asked readers to email him "working C source" for a "public-key encryption system for authentication purposes."
His LICENSE file included an actual commercial plug for his consulting services. He also explicitly distanced himself from FSF: "My action is not to be construed as an endorsement of the political or economic views... of any member, agent, or ally of the Free Software Foundation other than myself."
The version.h file confirms: abandoned at "beta level 7.8".
I asked Cursor to perform a code review of ESR's magnum opus. Here's what two years in "secret laboratories" produced:
874 uses of unsafe string functions (sprintf, strcat, strcpy) with no bounds checking - buffer overflows everywhere. The actual gets() function - so dangerous it was removed from the C standard entirely - listed as available in his system.h. 42 instances of mktemp(), the function that creates predictable temp file names, enabling symlink attacks. Even in 1989, mkstemp() existed. 61 uses of system() and popen() passing unsanitized user input directly to shell - textbook command injection. Lock files stored in /tmp with hardcoded magic numbers - any local user can DoS or hijack the news system.
In D.priv/lock.c, his own comment admits: "This whole module is ugly and flaky." Then ships it anyway.
In fascist.c - yes, that's really the filename - he embedded his libertarian political philosophy directly into the access control system. FASCIST mode controls who can post. COMMUNIST mode controls who can read. The nasty_t struct holds user restrictions. The main function is literally called fascist().
His example configuration uses Lord of the Rings names: a "wizards" group with Gandalf and Radagast, while sites named "mordor" and "orthanc" are suppressed from posting to "alt.goodguys". Peak 1980s nerd projecting himself as a righteous wizard fighting Sauron.
His example of a restricted user is called "miscreant" - allowed to post to "junk" and "talk.politics" but forbidden from security groups. This is how ESR thought about users he wanted to control.
The function that looks up user groups has this comment: "This routine is a HOG!!!!!" Five exclamation points. Very professional. What does this "HOG!!!!!" do? Concatenates group names into a fixed buffer with no bounds checking. Buffer overflow.
Oh, and the FASCIST code? The original was by Eugene Spafford - one of the most respected security researchers in computing history. ESR "rewrote" it, adding the political dog-whistles, the Tolkien cosplay, and the buffer overflows.
Years ESR spent developing TMNN in "secret laboratories": 2
Number of subjective hours ESR subjected people he cornered at SF cons to bragging about TMNN: ∞
Beta level when abandoned: 7.8
Promised features that materialized (hypertext, encryption, intelligent agents): 0
Amount of money HN's own Thomas Ptacek raised for charity to stop posting racist ESR quotes: $30,000
Uses of unsafe string functions without bounds checking: 874
Instances of mktemp(), the predictable temp file function: 42
Shell command injection vulnerabilities via system()/popen(): 61
Times gets() - removed from C11 for being unfixably dangerous - appears in system.h: 1
His own assessment of his locking code: "ugly and flaky"
Exclamation points in "This routine is a HOG!!!!!": 5
Political ideologies embedded as compile-time flags: 2 (FASCIST, COMMUNIST)
Lord of the Rings characters in example config: 3 (Gandalf, Radagast, Saruman)
Evil fortresses used as example banned sites: 2 (Mordor, Orthanc)
Name for example restricted user: "miscreant"
Years between TMNN's abandonment and "The Cathedral and the Bazaar": 8
Books ESR later wrote about Unix programming best practices: 1
Buffer overflows in his own Unix code: uncounted
Times his resume mentions "Teenage Mutant Ninja": 0
Original author of the fascist.c code (respected security researcher): Eugene Spafford
Person who "rewrote" it with buffer overflows and Tolkien cosplay: ESR
Core thesis of "The Cathedral and the Bazaar": release early, release often; given enough eyeballs, all bugs are shallow
Years ESR kept his own code in "secret laboratories" before releasing: 2
Eyeballs that reviewed it before release: unclear
Bugs that remained: shallow they were not
The guy who wrote fascist.c to restrict who could post to newsgroups later spent decades arguing that any form of content moderation is tyranny.
The guy who spent two years in "secret laboratories" refusing to share his code until it was "perfect" (it wasn't) later preached "release early, release often."
The guy who promised "intelligent filtering agents" and "hypertext" and "public-key encryption" - and delivered none of it - later became famous for pontificating about how open source development works.
The guy whose own code is riddled with buffer overflows and command injection vulnerabilities wrote a book called "The Art of Unix Programming."
The Bazaar guy's own magnum opus was a Cathedral that never got built. He just kept giving talks about it.
The guy who wrote "Sex Tips For Geeks" - an entire series including "How To Be Sexy," "The Art of the Pickup," and "On Being Good In Bed" - advising his followers how to "emit fitness-to-reproduce signals" because "your bulging, tumescent hacker forebrain is just not going to turn on very many women by itself." The guy who assured geeks "Trust me, if you do these things women will fall all over themselves trying to get at you." That guy later warned men to never be alone with women at tech conferences because feminist "honeytraps" were trying to frame open source leaders with false sexual assault allegations. His infamous "Sex Tips for Geeks" essay comes off like it was written by Pepé Le Pew.
The guy who wrote "How to Become a Hacker" and misappropriated historical MIT-AI Lab hacker culture. The original AI:HUMOR;JARGON file was a living document created by the actual hackers at MIT and Stanford - people like Guy Steele. ESR hijacked it, rewrote it to reflect his political ideology, and republished it as his own "New Hacker's Dictionary." Real hackers from the MIT-AI Lab where hacker culture originated consider his revisionist politically-slanted rewriting-for-profit to be disrespectful parasitical vandalism - a tool he hijacked, corrupted, and abused to spread his ideology.
The original jargon files, free of ESR's pollution:
idlewords> "It would be great if someone with appropriate 'back in the day' credentials would take over membership of this document and powerwash the gratuitous Eric Raymond edits and insertions off of it."
DonHopkins> "Real hackers from the MIT-AI lab where it originated consider his revisionist politically slanted rewriting-for-profit of the Hacker's Dictionary to be disrespectful parasitical vandalism that doesn't represent the actual hacker culture, just a tool he hijacked, corrupted, and abused to spread his right-wing political ideology."
> "He certainly doesn't deserve to be called a hacker, let alone presume to define the meaning of the term."
> "He made up the ridiculous 'many eyes' quote himself, then misnamed it 'Linus's Law' to avoid personal responsibility and shift the blame to innocent Linus Torvalds, who never said such a stupid thing."
Theo de Raadt> "Oh right, let's hear some of that 'many eyes' crap again. My favorite part of the 'many eyes' argument is how few bugs were found by the two eyes of Eric (the originator of the statement). All the many eyes are apparently attached to a lot of hands that type lots of words about many eyes, and never actually audit code."
I used to think that ESR had slid slowly into the lunatic fringe, but it sounds like he was a crank from the start. He pursued fame but seems to prefer notoriety to compromise. I think there’s a lesson here, but I’m not sure what it is.
Humility maybe? No matter how right you think you are, beware: you might be ESR.
Yeah if you want to talk about sliding slowly into lunacy, it'd be a once-respected computer scientist who now haunts online discussions looking for anything which could be obliquely linked to one of his personal betes noires and flooded with semi-irrelevant copy-paste.
I can't stop laughing at the first entry and this simple joke:
> he gained international notoriety for his claims that [...] mass and time are equivalent. (With regard to the second claim, it was suggested on the "sci.astro.amateur" newsgroup that his demise be observed with a gram of silence.)
ABIAN was always my friends and my favourite, from our time on Usenet! His all caps .sig with "equivalence of MASS and TIME" is something I will always treasure.
These unit equivalences have to be carefully interpreted. Like when things are multipled, are they in the same direction? Torque has the same units as work: force x distance, i.e. energy. But the force is perpendicular to the distance; it's completely different, and not a simple scalar value: torque is a vector with an orientation in space. Moving something against friction over 10cm, and using a 10cm bar to apply leverage, are entirely different.
> MI5Victim (Mike Corley, a.k.a. Boleslaw Tadeusz Szocik) – paranoid user who goes through periods of binge posting, claiming that MI5
They are all paranoids. The first three are interpretive paranoids. Sarfatti too. Nancy Lieder too, she might also be erotomaniac (another modality of paranoid personality), but I'd need to go further into this rabbit hole to be sure.
The criminal ones correspond to quarreling or revendicative paranoid personality. Naggum too.
> skiing enthusiast banned by court order in 1999 from posting on the Usenet discussion group "rec.skiing.alpine", after engaging in a flame war with other online posters. The heated exchanges lasted for months, eventually escalating into death threats, until a police detective from Seattle posted a request for all involved to calm down. All involved did except Abraham...
I'm sorry, this was probably annoying to all involved, but also so hilarious. Not least of which picturing a detective, who joined the force thinking he was going to solve murders and maybe even get a lead on D.B. Cooper sighing as he posted on a message board.
Happy to see Erik Naggum on this list - its the one I really remember the posts, mostly in a very "particular style" which was very entertaining to me (reading it a few years later).
I kinda miss that style of poster and understand it cannot come back. But if the world is big and diverse then I prefer that that kind of people can exist.
I'm going to disagree with the summary of Serdar Argic. My belief is that the Turkish government financed a grad student at University of Minnesota, Ahmet Cosar, to do the spamming. It is as well known that Uunet, and early ISP, had a "pink contract" with Cosar that allowed him to spam. Cosar lost his student visa, had to return to Turkey.
Ah, The Usenet Oracle. I fondly remember late night drunken college Usenet Oracle sessions back in the early 90s, competing to see who could make it to the Best Of digests. It often ended up with us realizing eventually that nobody else was emailing the Oracle, so we were just getting each others questions.
Globally 0.29% of people suffer from schizophrenia (lifetime risk of 1%) so it shouldn't have been surprising Usenet (or, really, any forum system without moderation or some similar kind of control) would experience their presence.
Why wasn't Henry Spencer listed as a Usenet personality (the good kind)?
I remember being called out by name in an Archimedes Plutonium rant around 1993. I also had a post referenced in the comp.lang.c FAQ for a few years. That's the closest I've come to celebrity. The internet before the web brings back memories.
I better not dwell to long or I'll have flashbacks t coding X/Motif UI's.
Googled and I found it. It seems I inflated my own importance in the remembering. My post is part of an article on undefined behavior on the comp.lang.c FAQ's maintainer. https://www.eskimo.com/~scs/readings/undef.950321.html
There is a gem of a sci.math thread where Archimedes Plutonium claims to have proved the Riemann Hypothesis and Terrance Tao (before he was quite as famous, but still!) replies to him pointing out his errors.
Also TIL Archimedes Plutonium was actually his legal name.
Wow, what a nostalgia trip. We had our fair share in the comp.sys.amiga.* groups.
I feel bad about one in particular. Don't get me wrong: he was incredibly annoying and liked to jump into nearly every single thread and turn it into some persecution complex thing. I was unkind to him, as were many others.
Looking back, it seems obvious to me that he had some mental issues and was battling demons the rest of us didn't see. I wish younger me had the wisdom to just killfile him and pretend he didn't exist. Whatever his problems, I'm sure I didn't make the world any nicer by yelling at him.
Sorry, man. I'd have handled that differently now.
As far as I know there is no link between, say, talk.bizarre and weird Twitter, but it's a sign that the same basic impulses are universal. I'm sure that in 1776, a few dedicated oddballs were creating snarky weird in-jokes on broadsides that nobody read except them.
I doubt it is a thing anymore, but if you were in a NOC and said, "...there is no cabal." you could expect at least some portion of the people present to turn around and hail, "Long Live The Cabal!" It was a usenet admin shibboleth that I still laugh at every time I hear it.
I was looking for this and finally found it in the comments.
Derek Smart [1] is the indie developer behind the ambitious (and buggy) space sim Battlecruiser 3000AD [2]. He is known for his legendary Usenet presence in the 90s, and engaged in massive, aggressive flamewars with anyone who criticized his game or physics engine. He adopted the "combative game dev" archetype long before social media existed.
Now that he has been mentioned, there's a small chance he will drop by.
Scott Nudds was a guy who trolled comp.lang.c and a few other programming newsgroups. He was noted for his phrases "Unix and C are dying, this is a good thing." and "C pushers will do anything to defend their sick religion. I, on the other hand, prefer honesty." For a while, the usual reference to "making demons fly out of your nose" (a humorously valid potential response by the compiler when it encounters undefined behavior) was often replaced with "making Scott Nudds fly out of your nose".
Wherever you are now, Scott Nudds, you are remembered. A hero and vanguard to the Rust Evangelism Strike Force—because C really is dying now, and that's probably a good thing.
SsZERO is another, whom I've mentioned before, but his appeal was more limited:
It's not valid for a compiler to make demons fly out of your nose, since compilers are constrained by the capabilities of your hardware and the laws of physics.
Well, if a compiler were to do so it would not be in violation of the standard. Whether or not such a thing is physically possible is an implementation detail outside the scope of the standard.
The C standard isn't the only thing compilers have to comply with.
HTTP doesn't specify what happens if the request method is XYZZY. An HTTP server that confirms to the HTTP specification (but not the laws of physics) could make demons fly out of your nose when receiving a request with a method of XYZZY. But nobody complains about that.
It was extra sad watching the transition from when he was a perennial HN poster known only to a niche within a niche to 4chan discovering him and turning him into a meme because they loved his racist rants and started “jokingly” feeding his delusions in comments to his YouTube vlogs.
Whenever I see praise for 4chan on HN as a last remnant of the “good” internet I think of that (and the girl I went to HS with who they cyber stalked while a minor almost to the point of suicide even after she deleted her entire online presence).
Nothing has changed since Jerry Pournelle wrote 40 years ago when discussing online forums:
>I noticed something: most of the irritation came from a handful of people, sometimes only one or two. If I could only ignore them, the computer conferences were still valuable. Alas, it's not always easy to do.
This is what killed Usenet,[1] which 40 years ago offered much of the virtues of Reddit in decentralized form. The network's design has several flaws, most importantly no way for any central authority to completely delete posts (admins in moderated groups can only approve posts), since back in the late 1970s Usenet's designers expected that everyone with the werewithal to participate online would meet a minimum standard of behavior. Usenet has always had a spam problem, but as usage of the network declined as the rest of the Internet grew, spam's relative proportion of the overall traffic grew.
That said, there are server- and client-side anti-spam tools of varying effectiveness. A related but bigger problem for Usenet is people with actual mental illness (kstrauser mentioned one); think "50 year olds with undiagnosed autism". Usenet is such a niche network nowadays that there has to be meaningful motivation to participate, and if the motivation is not a sincere interest in the subject it's, in my experience, going to be people with very troubled personal lives which their online behavior reflects. Again, as overall traffic declined, their relative contribution and visibility grew. This, not spam, is what has mostly killed Usenet.
[1] I am talking about traditional non-binary Usenet here
>I noticed something: most of the irritation came from a handful of people…
See also: Pareto Principle
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pareto_principle
Most people don’t cause problems, but the minority that do cause the majority of problems.
Every online social problem was first experienced by Usenet. Every social protocol contains an informal bugridden incomplete implementation of half of Usenet.
>I noticed something: most of the irritation came from a handful of people, sometimes only one or two. If I could only ignore them, the computer conferences were still valuable. Alas, it's not always easy to do.
This is one of those funny things about internet forums and social media: it favors people who have the time and inclination to post a lot, and obviously in some cases you get cranks occupying a space and flaming regulars. People who don't have energy or time to fight back eventually give up on debating these people and may end up leaving a space, which leaves just the cranks or the crank-adjacent.
I often think about how even with social media, you're free to follow whoever you want, but over time you'll find some people you follow post a whole lot more than others. They have time and inclination to post a lot and as a result, you end up hearing their opinions more than others, so they kind of have a subtle power. Obviously you can unfollow them if you like, but it makes you think about how online spaces can easily be dominated by people who can and want to be online all the time.
I wonder if LLM analysis could help with moderation automation if well implemented. It can still be human-in-the-loop and you need to apply it tastefully (!!!), i.e. not letting just the most hardcore dogmatists discuss in some extremist group, but those are another issue entirely in some sense. Also, beware malicious users wasting tokens.
What if a platform showed me equal amounts of content from all of my followeds?
Like an RSS feed reader or messenger client? I would definitely prefer that.
See my sibling comment about fraidc.at
There's fraidyc.at which is quirky but does exactly that for multiple platforms and is based on RSS (i think)
This is consistently true across all human organizations larger than a handful of people. Its a limitation of human communication and alignment
I saw that happen to the ultramarathon subReddit which I founded and I’m the lead moderator. And when I was running a radio station it was consistently the same people who would call in. I see it even in some of the smaller group chats that I’m in
You cannot have a stable community without these types of issues coming up beyond a few or so dozen people
Was that before or after he got kicked off arpanet?
I address that in the comments at <https://www.filfre.net/2022/05/a-web-around-the-world-part-1...>
I'm not particularly convinced, a mention of the arpanet is a mention of the arpanet, and keeping quiet means keeping quiet.
I can believe that Pournelle was being the kind of person about whom one might write "most of the irritation came from a handful of people, sometimes only one or two" and that was the real reason he got kicked off, but that's a long way away from being censored for politics.
It's odd that Bradford DeLong copied my original file of email that I put together without giving any attribution or provenance where it came from, and stripped the introduction I wrote that contextualized it, then omitted the first email from Chris Stacy to 11 different people including Pournelle, which established the actual context.
DeLong is a UC Berkeley economics professor, former Deputy Assistant Secretary of the Treasury for Economic Policy under Clinton, and prominent blogger who should know better than to strip attribution from the compiled primary sources he's plagiarizing and posting to his blog.
Here is the original file he copied without credit (without his unreadable css):
https://www.donhopkins.com/home/copyleft/pourne-smut.html
DeLong's copy:
- Removes my authorial framing without attribution
- Omits the January 1984 email which provides crucial administrative context
- Strips formatting that helps establish authenticity
- Presents it as his own curation on his blog
The missing 1984 email is particularly important because it shows the guest account policies were already being tightened before the Pournelle incident, making the eventual account termination part of a broader pattern rather than a purely personal vendetta.
The January 1984 email he omitted was sent to 11 recipients including Pournelle himself, which shows he was directly informed of the TACACS policies over a year before the incident.
I wrote about the MIT AI Lab Tourist Policy here:
https://donhopkins.medium.com/mit-ai-lab-tourist-policy-f73b...
Regarding ylee's post and the filfre.net discussion: I was there, I personally know the primary actors, and I'm the one who compiled the original document that DeLong plagiarized. The interpretation in stepped_pyramids' comment and Yeechang Lee's defense of Pournelle in the filfre.net comments are both wrong.
It wasn't about "mentioning ARPANET in Byte" or politics. It was about behavior.
GUMBY (David Henkel-Wallace), an HN regular and old friend who founded Cygnus Support (the pioneering open source company that developed GCC, acquired by Red Hat in 1999), and the youngest hacker to have his own office at the MIT AI Lab, was in the original 1985 thread:
HN "Jerry Pournelle has died" discussion:
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15204772
Gumby's posts:
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15209243
>gumby on Sept 9, 2017 | root | parent | next [–]
>>I wonder if this is the first instance of politically motivated mobbing behavior to take place over a digital communications medium?
>It was not politically motivated (I am in that thread from 1985). Pournelle was a pain in the neck when drunk. And a blowhard (which is hardly a crime, but doesn't make people sympathetic when you call them assholes and then tell them to do things for you).
>As for the proxmiring: he was one of the common offenders; he loved to talk archly about how he was part of the insider elite, while claiming that that was proof of his democratic ideals.
>FWIW I did read some of his novels.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15212477
>gumby on Sept 10, 2017 | root | parent | next [–]
>I love that excerpt since it was classic Pournelle: included a nice extra bit of detail that showed he was "in the know" yet was not actually true (RMS was never a grad student). He used to boast he was part of Reagan's "Kitchen Cabinet" of space advisors, and talked about their EOB meetings -- but i knew folks on the NSC technical advisory committee and it was nothing like he described.
>I never let on that the person he "knew" online and the person he knew offline were the same me.
The irony of quoting Pournelle complaining about "a handful of people" causing "most of the irritation" on online forums is rich - Pournelle WAS that handful of people. He was widely known in SF fandom as a belligerent drunk at conventions, and he brought that behavior online.
Pournelle literally asked to be kicked off: "If you have some authority to order me off the net, do so. If not, leave me alone." They did. He got exactly what he demanded.
RMS personally wrote custom software for Pournelle and patiently tutored him. Pournelle's thanks? Telling John McCarthy that MIT was "run by a bunch of communists."
Pournelle violated the MIT AI Lab Tourist Policy on multiple counts: commercial use for his BYTE column, promoting his books on SF-LOVERS, and anti-social behavior. The policy explicitly stated: "Any use of the MIT ITS machines for personal gain, profit making enterprise, or political purposes is not a legitimate use of the Laboratories' computer resources."
His response to getting called out was threatening to sic his "Pentagon friends," "reporter friends," and "the House Armed Services Committee" on grad students running a free service he was abusing.
The poetic justice: JGA suggested the account termination message should read "Think of it as evolution in action" - Pournelle's own Social Darwinist catchphrase from Oath of Fealty.
KMP's assessment stands: "The man has learned nothing from his presence on MC and sets a bad example of what people might potentially accomplish there. I'd rather recycle his account for some bright 12-yr-old."
The real damage from DeLong's sloppy plagiarism (I won't link but you can google for proof): his stripped-down version has now propagated to places like Kiwi Farms, where trolls cite DeLong's copy as evidence that Pournelle was "the first person banned more or less for wrong think on DARPAnet." The exact opposite of reality. This is what happens when you strip context and attribution from compiled primary sources - bad-faith actors weaponize the gaps.
> a handful of people, sometimes only one or two. If I could only ignore them, the computer conferences were still valuable. Alas, it's not always easy to do.
> This is what killed Usenet,
You've got to be kidding!
The fact that Usenet was a protocol, with no favored UI (not even a web UI) meant that you could implement "only ignore them" in a totally reliable way. Indeed, this feature was so commonplace that it even had a name: a "killfile".
Killfiles were local to each user which is good since each person could control what they saw. It was bad because new users who didn't know about killfiles would see the bad actors. It also meant that could have disjoint conversation so it felt like each thread was its own thing. You would have to keep telling people to not respond to the trolls.
The ideal is to have a global filter by moderators for the bad actors, and user killfile to tune that.
Usenet killfiles are not "totally reliable". Nym shifting has always been a thing, even before Google Groups-based commercial mass spamming using constantly changing From: lines industrialized the problem. Killfiles also do nothing for people quoting the person you are trying to ignore, unless you use a thread-based killfile, which of course means you won't see a lot of non-killfiled people's comments.
At the end of the day, there is no satisfactory solution to the problem of warped and damaged online personalities other than actually preventing them from being online, which of course has its own difficulties and consequences.
Plonk
Speaking of netnews UIs and netnews "personalities"...
Eric S. Raymond (aka "Eric The Flute" or "ESR") spent the late 1980s obsessively promoting his "Teenage Mutant Ninja Netnews" (TMNN) project at science fiction conventions, calling himself the "mad mastermind of TMN-Netnews" in his usenet signature (comp.lang.misc, December 13, 1989). He would corner people and drone on endlessly about it at inappropriate times.
Two years in secret laboratories. The future "Cathedral and the Bazaar" guy. The "release early, release often" guy. The "given enough eyeballs, all bugs are shallow" guy.
None of it materialized. The project was abandoned. Wikipedia: "A rough version of the software was released and drew attention from around the network, but the project was abandoned shortly thereafter."
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/B_News
His online resume still lists it under "Independent Consulting" as simply "A rewrite of the USENET netnews software" - burying the embarrassing name and omitting that it was abandoned.
OMFG, in researching this post, I just ran across the tmnn7-8 source code, archived here:
https://web.archive.org/web/20191205160937/https://fi.archiv...
Hey, after all those hours of listening to him drone on and on about it, I finally found the code. Let's pull it down and take a look.
His BRAGSHEET file announced: "after two years of development the software construct known as TEENAGE MUTANT NINJA NETNEWS has escaped from the secret laboratories of Thyrsus Enterprises and will soon assume a very public identity as News 3.0."
The BRAGSHEET promised grandiose features under "the future": "TMN-Netnews is intended to provide a starting point for experiments in advanced logical-network services... intelligent filtering agents... and hypertext." He even asked readers to email him "working C source" for a "public-key encryption system for authentication purposes."
His LICENSE file included an actual commercial plug for his consulting services. He also explicitly distanced himself from FSF: "My action is not to be construed as an endorsement of the political or economic views... of any member, agent, or ally of the Free Software Foundation other than myself."
The version.h file confirms: abandoned at "beta level 7.8".
I asked Cursor to perform a code review of ESR's magnum opus. Here's what two years in "secret laboratories" produced:
874 uses of unsafe string functions (sprintf, strcat, strcpy) with no bounds checking - buffer overflows everywhere. The actual gets() function - so dangerous it was removed from the C standard entirely - listed as available in his system.h. 42 instances of mktemp(), the function that creates predictable temp file names, enabling symlink attacks. Even in 1989, mkstemp() existed. 61 uses of system() and popen() passing unsanitized user input directly to shell - textbook command injection. Lock files stored in /tmp with hardcoded magic numbers - any local user can DoS or hijack the news system.
In D.priv/lock.c, his own comment admits: "This whole module is ugly and flaky." Then ships it anyway.
In fascist.c - yes, that's really the filename - he embedded his libertarian political philosophy directly into the access control system. FASCIST mode controls who can post. COMMUNIST mode controls who can read. The nasty_t struct holds user restrictions. The main function is literally called fascist().
His example configuration uses Lord of the Rings names: a "wizards" group with Gandalf and Radagast, while sites named "mordor" and "orthanc" are suppressed from posting to "alt.goodguys". Peak 1980s nerd projecting himself as a righteous wizard fighting Sauron.
His example of a restricted user is called "miscreant" - allowed to post to "junk" and "talk.politics" but forbidden from security groups. This is how ESR thought about users he wanted to control.
The function that looks up user groups has this comment: "This routine is a HOG!!!!!" Five exclamation points. Very professional. What does this "HOG!!!!!" do? Concatenates group names into a fixed buffer with no bounds checking. Buffer overflow.
Oh, and the FASCIST code? The original was by Eugene Spafford - one of the most respected security researchers in computing history. ESR "rewrote" it, adding the political dog-whistles, the Tolkien cosplay, and the buffer overflows.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gene_Spafford
By The Numbers:
The guy who wrote fascist.c to restrict who could post to newsgroups later spent decades arguing that any form of content moderation is tyranny.The guy who spent two years in "secret laboratories" refusing to share his code until it was "perfect" (it wasn't) later preached "release early, release often."
The guy who promised "intelligent filtering agents" and "hypertext" and "public-key encryption" - and delivered none of it - later became famous for pontificating about how open source development works.
The guy whose own code is riddled with buffer overflows and command injection vulnerabilities wrote a book called "The Art of Unix Programming."
The Bazaar guy's own magnum opus was a Cathedral that never got built. He just kept giving talks about it.
The guy who wrote "Sex Tips For Geeks" - an entire series including "How To Be Sexy," "The Art of the Pickup," and "On Being Good In Bed" - advising his followers how to "emit fitness-to-reproduce signals" because "your bulging, tumescent hacker forebrain is just not going to turn on very many women by itself." The guy who assured geeks "Trust me, if you do these things women will fall all over themselves trying to get at you." That guy later warned men to never be alone with women at tech conferences because feminist "honeytraps" were trying to frame open source leaders with false sexual assault allegations. His infamous "Sex Tips for Geeks" essay comes off like it was written by Pepé Le Pew.
The guy who wrote "How to Become a Hacker" and misappropriated historical MIT-AI Lab hacker culture. The original AI:HUMOR;JARGON file was a living document created by the actual hackers at MIT and Stanford - people like Guy Steele. ESR hijacked it, rewrote it to reflect his political ideology, and republished it as his own "New Hacker's Dictionary." Real hackers from the MIT-AI Lab where hacker culture originated consider his revisionist politically-slanted rewriting-for-profit to be disrespectful parasitical vandalism - a tool he hijacked, corrupted, and abused to spread his ideology.
The original jargon files, free of ESR's pollution:
https://github.com/PDP-10/its/blob/master/doc/humor/jargon.6...
The Receipts:
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36923046
deepspace> "the man's disgusting political and social views tarnished everything he touched"
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36920683
idlewords> "It would be great if someone with appropriate 'back in the day' credentials would take over membership of this document and powerwash the gratuitous Eric Raymond edits and insertions off of it."
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43139165
DonHopkins> "His infamous 'Sex Tips for Geeks' essay comes off like it was written by Pepé Le Pew."
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eric_S._Raymond#Political_beli...
"I've been torturing Twitter with lurid Eric S. Raymond quotes for years. Every time I do, 20 people beg me to stop." -Thomas Ptacek
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43133598
DonHopkins> "Real hackers from the MIT-AI lab where it originated consider his revisionist politically slanted rewriting-for-profit of the Hacker's Dictionary to be disrespectful parasitical vandalism that doesn't represent the actual hacker culture, just a tool he hijacked, corrupted, and abused to spread his right-wing political ideology."
> "He certainly doesn't deserve to be called a hacker, let alone presume to define the meaning of the term."
> "He made up the ridiculous 'many eyes' quote himself, then misnamed it 'Linus's Law' to avoid personal responsibility and shift the blame to innocent Linus Torvalds, who never said such a stupid thing."
https://marc.info/?l=openbsd-tech&m=129261032213320&w=2
Theo de Raadt> "Oh right, let's hear some of that 'many eyes' crap again. My favorite part of the 'many eyes' argument is how few bugs were found by the two eyes of Eric (the originator of the statement). All the many eyes are apparently attached to a lot of hands that type lots of words about many eyes, and never actually audit code."
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43135830
tptacek> "CATB has just not held up at all; it's actively bad, and it has a weirdly outsized reputation."
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22539530
ESR was banned from the Open Source Initiative - which he co-founded - in 2020.
I've put a repo with the code and analysis up here:
https://github.com/SimHacker/tmnn7-8
Hackernews has the best gossip
I used to think that ESR had slid slowly into the lunatic fringe, but it sounds like he was a crank from the start. He pursued fame but seems to prefer notoriety to compromise. I think there’s a lesson here, but I’m not sure what it is.
Humility maybe? No matter how right you think you are, beware: you might be ESR.
Yeah if you want to talk about sliding slowly into lunacy, it'd be a once-respected computer scientist who now haunts online discussions looking for anything which could be obliquely linked to one of his personal betes noires and flooded with semi-irrelevant copy-paste.
I can't stop laughing at the first entry and this simple joke:
> he gained international notoriety for his claims that [...] mass and time are equivalent. (With regard to the second claim, it was suggested on the "sci.astro.amateur" newsgroup that his demise be observed with a gram of silence.)
ABIAN was always my friends and my favourite, from our time on Usenet! His all caps .sig with "equivalence of MASS and TIME" is something I will always treasure.
with some not–so–subtle changes, maybe he was onto something: angular momentum has the same units as energy.
Angular momentum has energy x time units.
These unit equivalences have to be carefully interpreted. Like when things are multipled, are they in the same direction? Torque has the same units as work: force x distance, i.e. energy. But the force is perpendicular to the distance; it's completely different, and not a simple scalar value: torque is a vector with an orientation in space. Moving something against friction over 10cm, and using a 10cm bar to apply leverage, are entirely different.
I meant torque, of course :)
> MI5Victim (Mike Corley, a.k.a. Boleslaw Tadeusz Szocik) – paranoid user who goes through periods of binge posting, claiming that MI5
They are all paranoids. The first three are interpretive paranoids. Sarfatti too. Nancy Lieder too, she might also be erotomaniac (another modality of paranoid personality), but I'd need to go further into this rabbit hole to be sure.
The criminal ones correspond to quarreling or revendicative paranoid personality. Naggum too.
And Baez is just a legend. Period.
> skiing enthusiast banned by court order in 1999 from posting on the Usenet discussion group "rec.skiing.alpine", after engaging in a flame war with other online posters. The heated exchanges lasted for months, eventually escalating into death threats, until a police detective from Seattle posted a request for all involved to calm down. All involved did except Abraham...
I'm sorry, this was probably annoying to all involved, but also so hilarious. Not least of which picturing a detective, who joined the force thinking he was going to solve murders and maybe even get a lead on D.B. Cooper sighing as he posted on a message board.
https://groups.google.com/g/rec.skiing.alpine/c/frIx-J1XpnI
Reading one of the original threads involving Scott is...really something. Boy, the early internet was very weird.
Also, that dude is completely nuts.
I regret wasting ten minutes on reading all of that...
I regret wasting five minutes on the Google "captcha" and then just glancing at the messages
Happy to see Erik Naggum on this list - its the one I really remember the posts, mostly in a very "particular style" which was very entertaining to me (reading it a few years later).
I kinda miss that style of poster and understand it cannot come back. But if the world is big and diverse then I prefer that that kind of people can exist.
I'm going to disagree with the summary of Serdar Argic. My belief is that the Turkish government financed a grad student at University of Minnesota, Ahmet Cosar, to do the spamming. It is as well known that Uunet, and early ISP, had a "pink contract" with Cosar that allowed him to spam. Cosar lost his student visa, had to return to Turkey.
Ah, The Usenet Oracle. I fondly remember late night drunken college Usenet Oracle sessions back in the early 90s, competing to see who could make it to the Best Of digests. It often ended up with us realizing eventually that nobody else was emailing the Oracle, so we were just getting each others questions.
Globally 0.29% of people suffer from schizophrenia (lifetime risk of 1%) so it shouldn't have been surprising Usenet (or, really, any forum system without moderation or some similar kind of control) would experience their presence.
Why wasn't Henry Spencer listed as a Usenet personality (the good kind)?
https://www.who.int/news-room/fact-sheets/detail/schizophren...
Schizophrenia affects approximately 23 million people or 1 in 345 people (0.29%) worldwide.
That's a lot of people.
How much more intelligent and alive the internet used to be by default... I kinda miss that.
I was surprised not to see Arthur T Murray in this list, as he was frequently seen in the newsgroups I used to read.
https://www.nothingisreal.com/mentifex_faq.html
Most of these are negative in some way, except for the "Other personalities" section.
There's a lesson here somewhere.
Kibo seems pretty harmless, I found an archive of his and had a good laugh. That must've been in the 00's.
I'm starting to think Archimedes Plutonium was wrong about his Plutonium Atom Totality conjecture.
I remember being called out by name in an Archimedes Plutonium rant around 1993. I also had a post referenced in the comp.lang.c FAQ for a few years. That's the closest I've come to celebrity. The internet before the web brings back memories.
I better not dwell to long or I'll have flashbacks t coding X/Motif UI's.
>comp.lang.c
Chapter and verse, please.
Dan
Googled and I found it. It seems I inflated my own importance in the remembering. My post is part of an article on undefined behavior on the comp.lang.c FAQ's maintainer. https://www.eskimo.com/~scs/readings/undef.950321.html
There is a gem of a sci.math thread where Archimedes Plutonium claims to have proved the Riemann Hypothesis and Terrance Tao (before he was quite as famous, but still!) replies to him pointing out his errors.
Also TIL Archimedes Plutonium was actually his legal name.
Wow, what a nostalgia trip. We had our fair share in the comp.sys.amiga.* groups.
I feel bad about one in particular. Don't get me wrong: he was incredibly annoying and liked to jump into nearly every single thread and turn it into some persecution complex thing. I was unkind to him, as were many others.
Looking back, it seems obvious to me that he had some mental issues and was battling demons the rest of us didn't see. I wish younger me had the wisdom to just killfile him and pretend he didn't exist. Whatever his problems, I'm sure I didn't make the world any nicer by yelling at him.
Sorry, man. I'd have handled that differently now.
I have the dubious distinction of being in the Net.Legends.FAQ. I'm glad I didn't rise to the level of ending up in this Wikipedia article.
Didn't John Titor also post his warnings on Usenet?
B1FF sounds like he would have been right at home on weird Twitter
As far as I know there is no link between, say, talk.bizarre and weird Twitter, but it's a sign that the same basic impulses are universal. I'm sure that in 1776, a few dedicated oddballs were creating snarky weird in-jokes on broadsides that nobody read except them.
I am very convinced that a number of early X-Files plots (or sub-plots) were inspired by threads on Usenet.
Is that guy in comp.theory still saying he's solved the halting problem and been suppressed by big computer science for 25 years?
maybe he’ll stop, maybe he won’t. There’s no way to know
I doubt it is a thing anymore, but if you were in a NOC and said, "...there is no cabal." you could expect at least some portion of the people present to turn around and hail, "Long Live The Cabal!" It was a usenet admin shibboleth that I still laugh at every time I hear it.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/There_Is_No_Cabal
Narrator: there was, in fact, a cabal
That's just what the cabal wants you to think.
Kibo, now that's a name I haven't heard in a long time.
The days of Usenet, uucp, and Telebit Trailblazers seem as long ago as the telegraph now.
The list lacks Derek Smart, so it's not a real list.
I was looking for this and finally found it in the comments.
Derek Smart [1] is the indie developer behind the ambitious (and buggy) space sim Battlecruiser 3000AD [2]. He is known for his legendary Usenet presence in the 90s, and engaged in massive, aggressive flamewars with anyone who criticized his game or physics engine. He adopted the "combative game dev" archetype long before social media existed.
Now that he has been mentioned, there's a small chance he will drop by.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Derek_Smart
[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Battlecruiser_3000AD
Not Usenet, but early www.
https://www.timecube.net
No mention of Scott Nudds?
Scott Nudds was a guy who trolled comp.lang.c and a few other programming newsgroups. He was noted for his phrases "Unix and C are dying, this is a good thing." and "C pushers will do anything to defend their sick religion. I, on the other hand, prefer honesty." For a while, the usual reference to "making demons fly out of your nose" (a humorously valid potential response by the compiler when it encounters undefined behavior) was often replaced with "making Scott Nudds fly out of your nose".
Wherever you are now, Scott Nudds, you are remembered. A hero and vanguard to the Rust Evangelism Strike Force—because C really is dying now, and that's probably a good thing.
SsZERO is another, whom I've mentioned before, but his appeal was more limited:
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42218587
We can talk about C's demise after the last COBOL application is retired.
It's not valid for a compiler to make demons fly out of your nose, since compilers are constrained by the capabilities of your hardware and the laws of physics.
It's a C compiler, and it's allowed to anything if it sees UB.
Well, if a compiler were to do so it would not be in violation of the standard. Whether or not such a thing is physically possible is an implementation detail outside the scope of the standard.
The C standard isn't the only thing compilers have to comply with.
HTTP doesn't specify what happens if the request method is XYZZY. An HTTP server that confirms to the HTTP specification (but not the laws of physics) could make demons fly out of your nose when receiving a request with a method of XYZZY. But nobody complains about that.
I mean, there are certainly similarly odd and known HN personalities. They are different though, they have adapted to survive active moderation.
RIP Terry Devis.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/TempleOS
Managed to find his HN user id and read what he wrote.
I don't recommend anyone doing that. Just sadness.
Related [1][2]
[1] - https://www.youtube.com/@terrydavisoldarchive5371/videos
[2] - https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCJZTn-fPu-uIA55UI47_cXg/vid...
It was extra sad watching the transition from when he was a perennial HN poster known only to a niche within a niche to 4chan discovering him and turning him into a meme because they loved his racist rants and started “jokingly” feeding his delusions in comments to his YouTube vlogs.
Whenever I see praise for 4chan on HN as a last remnant of the “good” internet I think of that (and the girl I went to HS with who they cyber stalked while a minor almost to the point of suicide even after she deleted her entire online presence).