When Brussles then decides, 'there's nothing we can do, it's an EU thing' ... and a moustache-twirl.

The only thing that can stop this is to completely dismantle the EU. Which means, unfortunately, voting for people any good person should rightfully despise.

Of course BIFF [1] was real - and he kept respawning.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/BIFF_(Usenet)

First, many people back then did not have permanently-online systems. You loaded the new stuff, went off-line, read, answer maybe, and uploaded your answers.

That gave you some time for meaningful answers (and - if you went the flamewar route - be smarter about flaming. Some got an almost baroque way of hiding flames in meaningfully-sounding sentences, which was, at least, funny).

I loved the aspect of doing the filtering on my end - not by an admin who decided what or what not I was allowed to read based on their own political leanings. Everyone had a freedom of speech, and I had the freedom to listen.

Can kill files be implemented today? Sure they could - we already have a pre-filtering by the algorithm curating what we see - I get very few hobby horsing stuff in my feed, because that's just not what interests me. This is analogous to the olden days, where the group, and the entry barrier acted as a pre-filter.

In my part of the usenet, real names were considered 'good manners'. That changed how people talked to each others. Of course, no-one could check if you were really called Klaas Hinkelman - but xXxStoneFakker666xXx was promptly laughed away - or landed in the kill file. plonk.

Another aspect that I really liked - and kept until today, was quoting inline, picking out individual questions of what could be a long article, and going into detail, like this:

    > [question or observation about an aspect]

    [answer to said question or observation]

It is my strong belief that what killed the internet was not the September that never ended™, but vote gamification.

[1] https://www.catb.org/jargon/html/K/kill-file.html

.self seems to be geared towards a 'accessible from the everyday net' kind of approach.

Note that I did not single out an individual coutnry. All governments always stride towards autocracy.

This is just the new normal.

what did you do to trigger a verification process?

At some time, the market has been satisfied.

Ah, another domain for the blacklist.

Having lived on this planet for a while now, I am under the impression that anything non-adults do always is a problem, no matter what it is.

Kids did read more when stories were more about friendship, horses and/or adventure and sci-fi rather than pre-approved content-filtered social studies messaging? Surprise.

The obvious solution would be to force kids to read more from the approved reading list, courtesy by the school board⸮ That'll make them enjoy reading again⸮

(I am not saying technology is innocent in this development. I'm saying: there are several factors, and screen time is by far not the only one.

And to many Americans this is even worse: If you are not best™ or worst™ ... you are unremarkable, 'E pluribus unum'.

Or you buy your tea from other first-world countries, such as Japan.

Local variants exist. But supermarkets are convenient and cheap.