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this post was submitted on 15 Jul 2023
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Way back on Olde Usenet in the 1990s, there was a whole voting process for creating new forums ("newsgroups"), where you had to get supporters to say they would actually use your new forum if you created it. Creating the new forum
soc.women.lesbian-and-bi
required a whole democratic voting process, and it passed!Alternately, you could create your new forum in the
alt
space, where you just had to have an argument inalt.config
about creating the new forum.Either way, the theory was that real news servers would only carry your forum if you won a vote and/or argument about it. The point of this was, supposedly, that cluttering-up the list of forums with a bunch that nobody was using would be a bad idea, so it would be valuable to show that people wanted a forum before creating it.
In practice, this depended on the ability & interest of news server admins to follow the democratic and/or anarchic processes for the creation of new groups.
I remember when rec.arts.disney split. There was the voting process whether to split as well as a vote to how it would split, if I remember correctly. I hadn't thought about that in years.
Alt was the free for all. I learned a lot on alt.atheism, including how threads devolve into chaos and when to walk away.
Thanks fubo, I feel super old now.
Hah! Better to learn from
alt.callahans
thanalt.religion.scientology
...Who could forget alt.buddha.short.fat.guy and alt.swedish.chef.bork.bork.bork?